When I married my wife Taylor in March of 2017, I was still working in a tool and die shop in Rockford, earning around $15/hr. It was not enough to live on- we had committed to live on a single income and start a family right away, so I continued cutting trees at every opportunity, in addition to doing landscaping, car repairs, and handyman work. There was a man we knew from the church who hired us to trim some branches off his tree in the back yard. I agreed to take care of a limb that went right over the service wire to the house, along with several others. Unfortunately I did not have the equipment or the knowledge to properly take down that branch and so when it came down, it broke the wire off the power pole behind the property. Despite the disastrous mistake I made on that job, that day when I received the payment of $500 was when I first realized that this line of work could really support our family.
Ten days later I found a 2001 F150 for the right price and bought it to begin growing the tree service side of my side business. It really needed a lot of work, including exhaust manifolds and various minor repairs. I could not afford to have those jobs done in a shop, so I took care of the repairs myself, right in the parking lot of the apartment building where we lived.
We worked hard on growing our income through any type of work I could find. The job I had was not enough even to pay for groceries after our normal expenses were paid, so every day after work at 3:00 pm I would do odd jobs for anyone who would hire me, just to make ends meet. Often I would earn $20-$30 in an afternoon and that would be a great help for our finances. Later in the year I decided the cover had to come off the pickup truck to make it more useful, and the bed was so rusty that I decided to build a wood bed to make tree work easier. It was really the first of its kind in the area! Since then, many people around the region have decided to build wooden beds for their trucks that were eaten up by rust.
In those days I used to frequently shop at Retool, the used tool store on State Street in Rockford. That store always had good deals on hand tools and power tools. Dave probably got tired of me sometimes, because I would pick through his socket bins for hours to find SK brand sockets or extensions, and then end up buying $15 worth of merchandise. I simply could not afford a whole set of American made tools, and didn't want to spend my money on imported low quality ones. But I did all that I could to keep the money in our pockets, because we just barely scraped by every month! Our goal was to have our child born at home, and we needed to save up several thousand dollars to pay the midwife.
In November 2017, I found myself under truly unreasonable pressure at the machine shop. The shop manager and supervisor were against me anytime there was a problem with a process or a machine. They would spend hours relentlessly questioning me and could not be satisfied with any explanation. I would respond to their questions honestly, and reiterate the course of events exactly how they took place, but nothing I could say would put the torture session to end. Their goal was not to find the real answers, nor was it to get me to agree with them. When I would describe the events at work to people I knew on the outside, they simply could not find the stories believable. To this day I can hardly find the words for what was happening at that job. All I remember clearly now is that the truth could not penetrate the minds of those people. I knew that the customers I was serving in my side business believed me, and extended trust to me, and that the management at the company I worked for did not, so I put in my two weeks' notice and never looked back.
I remember cutting the tree shown in the image above. An acquaintance was remodeling the house for resale and needed the leaning tree removed. It was one of the first trees I climbed using a harness, and the fear was simply overwhelming. At one point I remember being up high in a nearby tree where I had to climb up to install a rigging point, and as my fear struck me to the core, a song came straight to my mind, "Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder..." and then I realized that in my greatest fear, I was not alone. I've never forgotten that moment.
At that same job, which took several days, I remember having troubles with my MS271 chainsaw. It would not stay running, and I was getting so frustrated! (I found out later the problem was ethanol gas, which had caused an early failure of the carburetor diaphragms.) I went to Lincoln Rental and asked them to work on it, but the time to repair it was too long for me and the job had to be done or my finances would suffer. So I purchased my first big saw, the MS661 with a 36" bar!
Taylor was helping me with the tree work at that jobsite, but she was 8 months pregnant- at one point she was doing some rigging for me and she fell down off the curb right onto the pavement. I was so worried about her, but she was just laughing and giggling! In hindsight we realized it had to be "pregnancy brain."
Since I now had a large chainsaw, I was able to price a large willow tree removal for $1,000. That job took over a week to complete, with a 45 minute drive each way for the waste to be dumped. I spent hours of each day just driving my loads to the only place I had access to. There was a place in Rockford, people told me, where you could leave branches and wood, but I had attempted to go there twice, and each time when I asked the machine operator where I could dump, they told me I wasn't allowed to dump there. To this day I don't know why, because that location has a long standing reputation for being open to dumping by tree services of all sizes. For at least five years I never dumped there after being turned away, until one day I went with a friend and never had a problem from then on.
You can see in the picture I had my red "monster maul" which I used to split the large rounds into smaller pieces so I would be able to lift them onto the truck and trailer. That was how all my work was done with no workers or equipment.
Lawn mowing was a staple of my business back then, as I knew it should be easy to sell for the right price, and that the machine was simple to keep and maintain. At one point I was hired to mow this large field, which was totally overgrown. All I had to work with was a small 30" walk-behind Bobcat mower. So I mowed for half a day on that property! Believe me when I tell you, that job was one I still hate to think about today. I simply had to take on the work that was available to me. The picture below is of the mower I used.
We began renting equipment from Lincoln Rental around that time, which was around the middle of 2018. Normally I would cut a tree, pile up all the limbs by the curb, and remove the wood first. Then if it felt like too much material for the long dump-trips to my friend's property in Stillman Valley, I would remove the branches last with a small rental brush chipper. Customers used to ask me all the time when I was going to take away the branches. I suppose they were worried that the job wasn't going to get done, or maybe they didn't like how the property looked with the piles there.
When I used the chipper, I would place a board in the back of the pickup to keep the chips from piling up behind the cab.
I'll conclude this chapter of the story by saying, I didn't have knowledge or experience in any professional trade at the time when I struck out on my own. All I had was my determination to provide for my wife and my new baby, and a committment to myself that I would no longer allow people to mistreat me the way I was abused at the machine shop. Establishing a business is not an easy endeavor, and each person must start at their own beginning.