Yes and no, depends on the job and the work they do. If you're renting one, you're paying for far more than owning it too, so the math is different. They're also not 1 man bands like most of us are, they have a whole team to delegate tasks to, and have chosen the right guys for each job. They got guys running the cranes, guys running trucks, guys bidding work, guys planning the routes to maximize efficiency, accountants, mechanics, etc. Economy of scale helps with all of this, because the bigger they are the easier it is for everyone involved since they only do 1 task, and if they have a bottleneck they can adapt because another truck or estimator is nothing compared to the overall operation. They can fine tune and adjust things more easily because of their size. It's hard to find guys when you have a few employees because those guys have to be absolute fire, but when you got a hundred it averages out, and the week isn't blown if someone's sick or something. It's easier to attract talent when you're running like that too, because the day to day of their employee's lives is far easier than in a small crew with not as much iron, and everyone in town knows about them so guys probably call them if they need a job.
When you're huge big iron isn't that big of a deal, comparatively speaking. And when you have iron like that you're able to bid and perform other work like municipal, large commercial, and land clearing jobs that are out of reach for the smaller outfits. If you get a city contract you have tons of work, same with clearing trees for construction companies or doing utility work. Here they ran some water and sewer mains down a rural 2 lane road a few years ago, they shut down the road for a few hours and walked a long reach excavator with a grapple saw up the road, and in 4 hours all the trees they needed removed for 2 miles were gone. A job like that is gonna pay a ton, (and likely damn near paid for the excavator lol) so with a few of those kind of jobs you don't need to work it all the time. If you've got a ton of city trees to do you can work them in when you're in the neighborhood, and if residential sales have a slight lull you got work for guys to do as a filler.
If you notice the machines that they've chosen they're all pretty similar. Very heavy duty telescoping booms, rubber tires, and grapple saws. These things lead to very very quick setup and break down times, and the more they do it the quicker they get. There's a guy around here that runs his own crane hire company, he's doing 2 to 4 jobs a day usually, all with a minimum rate so he's able to bill for more than he's there for a lot of the time. But he's really good and has decades both running cranes and doing the rigging (former ironworker), and so it's worth the cost, and his reputation alone keeps him slammed with work. It's probably even more turnaround for these kind of tree companies because the work goes so fast which means a ton of sales, but that's scalable simply by hiring more estimators and trying to push technology like their websites to help the process even more. But when they get it all dialed in they are basically printing money, competition is always a thing but if there's enough work out there they can hire enough guys to get it.
Construction companies are the same, you have smaller shops and larger shops, both sometimes competing for the same work. The bigger shops are big enough to bid bigger work (there's usually always someone bigger tho), and that's because they have the larger insurance and bonding policies. It literally takes money to make money, so it's not an overnight process. I've worked for both types, i even spent my whole apprenticeship working for a contractor who was sometimes over 100 million a year, and had very well equipped fab shops for each different trade that they employed, an entire earthmoving division complete with their own excavators, dozers, etc. and a 30 ton rough terrain crane, and over 60 employees at a bare minimum with spikes upwards of 300 or more. They wouldn't even blink about hiring larger iron for different jobs, and i even did a few helicopter jobs with them (it's cool for the first pick and then quickly becomes terrifying and horrible
). When you're with an outfit that big everything is big, and the expensive tools that make the job easy and super productive aren't a luxury, but are essential to their business model, and I'm sure it's the same for these mechanized tree outfits. The work is different but the principals are the same, find the best and most productive way to do a job and then scale everything to that, it takes some serious coin but it can be done. One member in our hall did exactly that, started out with a couple guys and a truck, and 10 years later is now one of the big boys in town, bidding on everything in sight and doing great. The bigger legacy outfits used to laugh at him, but they aren't laughing now.
In time these tree companies will be just like that too, and although the grapple saws on cranes are new, tree work done at that scale isn't. Your line clearance companies and land clearing outfits have been like this for decades, just using iron differently. I have a buddy that used to do land clearing, they get a massive hoe and just shove huge trees over, no saw at all. The bigger ones they'll rip the roots out on a side, stick a tooth in the trunk, and then just shove it over, amazing what large machines can do in the hands of a skilled operator. Then they shove them in a huge tub grinder spreading the chips everywhere or trucking them off, and then grade it out a bit. Doing residential work is a bit different because finesse is needed, but the material handling is about the same, and grapple saws aren't new to excavators. They even make rubber tired ones, so simply driving them from job to job is very doable too. With a grapple saw on a mini to midi ex and some plywood huge tree removals become no big deal once they're down, mayer has simply taken the newer bigger versions of these cranes and long reach forktrucks and turned them into a long reach feller hoe. Once again bigger iron used intelligently for the win, and material handling is the name of the game. To me with some climbing gear, a pickup, and a cnd a bucket truck and large chipper looks about like what that probably does to you, but they're all simply escalations of tree work iron.
When you're huge big iron isn't that big of a deal, comparatively speaking. And when you have iron like that you're able to bid and perform other work like municipal, large commercial, and land clearing jobs that are out of reach for the smaller outfits. If you get a city contract you have tons of work, same with clearing trees for construction companies or doing utility work. Here they ran some water and sewer mains down a rural 2 lane road a few years ago, they shut down the road for a few hours and walked a long reach excavator with a grapple saw up the road, and in 4 hours all the trees they needed removed for 2 miles were gone. A job like that is gonna pay a ton, (and likely damn near paid for the excavator lol) so with a few of those kind of jobs you don't need to work it all the time. If you've got a ton of city trees to do you can work them in when you're in the neighborhood, and if residential sales have a slight lull you got work for guys to do as a filler.
If you notice the machines that they've chosen they're all pretty similar. Very heavy duty telescoping booms, rubber tires, and grapple saws. These things lead to very very quick setup and break down times, and the more they do it the quicker they get. There's a guy around here that runs his own crane hire company, he's doing 2 to 4 jobs a day usually, all with a minimum rate so he's able to bill for more than he's there for a lot of the time. But he's really good and has decades both running cranes and doing the rigging (former ironworker), and so it's worth the cost, and his reputation alone keeps him slammed with work. It's probably even more turnaround for these kind of tree companies because the work goes so fast which means a ton of sales, but that's scalable simply by hiring more estimators and trying to push technology like their websites to help the process even more. But when they get it all dialed in they are basically printing money, competition is always a thing but if there's enough work out there they can hire enough guys to get it.
Construction companies are the same, you have smaller shops and larger shops, both sometimes competing for the same work. The bigger shops are big enough to bid bigger work (there's usually always someone bigger tho), and that's because they have the larger insurance and bonding policies. It literally takes money to make money, so it's not an overnight process. I've worked for both types, i even spent my whole apprenticeship working for a contractor who was sometimes over 100 million a year, and had very well equipped fab shops for each different trade that they employed, an entire earthmoving division complete with their own excavators, dozers, etc. and a 30 ton rough terrain crane, and over 60 employees at a bare minimum with spikes upwards of 300 or more. They wouldn't even blink about hiring larger iron for different jobs, and i even did a few helicopter jobs with them (it's cool for the first pick and then quickly becomes terrifying and horrible
). When you're with an outfit that big everything is big, and the expensive tools that make the job easy and super productive aren't a luxury, but are essential to their business model, and I'm sure it's the same for these mechanized tree outfits. The work is different but the principals are the same, find the best and most productive way to do a job and then scale everything to that, it takes some serious coin but it can be done. One member in our hall did exactly that, started out with a couple guys and a truck, and 10 years later is now one of the big boys in town, bidding on everything in sight and doing great. The bigger legacy outfits used to laugh at him, but they aren't laughing now. In time these tree companies will be just like that too, and although the grapple saws on cranes are new, tree work done at that scale isn't. Your line clearance companies and land clearing outfits have been like this for decades, just using iron differently. I have a buddy that used to do land clearing, they get a massive hoe and just shove huge trees over, no saw at all. The bigger ones they'll rip the roots out on a side, stick a tooth in the trunk, and then just shove it over, amazing what large machines can do in the hands of a skilled operator. Then they shove them in a huge tub grinder spreading the chips everywhere or trucking them off, and then grade it out a bit. Doing residential work is a bit different because finesse is needed, but the material handling is about the same, and grapple saws aren't new to excavators. They even make rubber tired ones, so simply driving them from job to job is very doable too. With a grapple saw on a mini to midi ex and some plywood huge tree removals become no big deal once they're down, mayer has simply taken the newer bigger versions of these cranes and long reach forktrucks and turned them into a long reach feller hoe. Once again bigger iron used intelligently for the win, and material handling is the name of the game. To me with some climbing gear, a pickup, and a cnd a bucket truck and large chipper looks about like what that probably does to you, but they're all simply escalations of tree work iron.
