Tree company branches out

By KIM WILLIAMS

Two school friends armed with a chainsaw and a cache of second-hand tools have built up a tree care company netting $11 million a year.

Twenty years ago, former Long Bay College seventh formers Eddie Chignell and Brandon Whiddett started Treescape, after a summer of odd jobs became an unexpected business opportunity.

"I was waiting to go to university the following year, and we just started to do some odd jobs, basically just to get some money, and it just sort of went from there," Mr Chignell says.

"We started getting some more work, and started to realise there was a bit of a niche in tree care and tree work, so we decided we would just carry on.

"I flagged university and we built the business."

Treescape looks after all facets of tree care - maintenance, doctoring, pruning and removal.

Today the company's client base includes local authorities, developers, schools, hospitals and the Historic Places Trust.

Last year the company moved New Zealand's largest tree (139 tonnes) a kilometre from one spot in Auckland's Starship children's hospital grounds to another - an operation involving up to 20 people.

Treescape is also looking after One Tree Hill's tenacious pine, and erected the cables that now support it.

The company has branches in Auckland, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Wellington and Christchurch.

"It's a competitive market, but our company was pretty fortunate because we came in at the beginning of the industry in New Zealand," Mr Chignell says.

"We just threw everything back into the company. We took minimal wages, and, being single, didn't need too much to live on, so all the profits were thrown back into the business."

The marketing strategy was initially very much a grass-roots effort.

"We'd get an A4 piece of paper, and get someone to type our names and our phone number on it, as many times as it could fit, then we'd cut it up with scissors into little card-like things and give them out to people."

Now the company has a sales and marketing manager, and advertises in the media and Yellow Pages.

Mr Chignell says one of the biggest challenges for the company is a shortage of qualified and experienced staff.

The company has a permanent fulltime staff of 110, and expects to need a further 15 over summer.

"We do in-house training, but we still have to bring people in from overseas ... from England, Canada and America."

Another challenge is keeping up with an increasingly fickle market.

"The market changes all the time, and you just have to be at the front of the changes, so you know what's going on.

"We've got a pretty good handle on the industry now.

"We have been around for 20 years, so we know our clients and what's going on in the industry."

Mr Chignell believes the keys to Treescape's success are a solid work ethic and consideration for clients.

"We like to treat our clients in the manner we like to be treated ourselves.

"That's something that's really hard to carry on achieving when your workforce keeps getting bigger and bigger, but that's what we try to do."

Mr Chignell hopes the company will branch out into Australia in the next two years, but says that depends on a continuing stable market here.

"We could be [in Australia] now if we wanted to, but we've got to finish off a few things.

"There's no use going across the Tasman and losing our market here, so we just want to make sure of that first."