PTS- you've got good advice, that is exactly the approach we took to getting started. My partner and I were both working other jobs, and pretty much all of the revenue we generated from doing tree work was reinvested into our equipment. We did this for about a year, and then decided to quit our other jobs to give us more time to do tree work. We are both going to school. And full time school, a job, and trying to start a business was too much. School and one job is much easier to balance, the only difficulty is that we can't stick all of our income right back into the business cause we rely on the tree work for income now too. But any guy who wants to start a small business in any industry has to wrestle with these issues, thats life.
We don't necessarily try to keep out prices lower than or as low as everyone else; and we do get low balled every now and then, sometimes more often than we like. We compensate for this by lots of marketing, and doing lots of estimates so that we are putting out more bids, so that yes we get low balled sometimes, but still have plenty of sales. By taking this approach we have still been able to secure a steady work flow. We've always got jobs coming in just as fast as we can chew through them, and with this approach each job we do is generating more income for us than if we were simply trying to low ball everyone else though.
