Jeff didn’t start with a dream to become one of the largest tree-service businesses in Nebraska – he started as a normal college student, just trying to find his path.
In his search, he realized a few things: how to work hard, and he loved to make things beautiful. Putting that insight into action – and with a big heap of courage – Jeff set out with a hand saw and pickup truck. He would begin an adventure to a 20-year career and multi-million dollar enterprise.
Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Jeff Grewe and I started Arbor Aesthetics tree service almost 19 years ago.
Today, we are a 20 to 25-person tree care company. We specialize in high-end tree trimming, tree removal, and plant health care services. We will diagnose your tree, treat your tree, and keep it healthy.
What was your background? How did you come up with the idea?
Before I started this, I had no background in tree care. What I did know how to do is I knew how to work very hard.
I was always mowing the lawn or doing something with my grandfather who was kind of a Mr. Fix-It.
The story starts when I was a student, just trying to figure things out. I was a chemistry student, then a computer science student, then a political philosophy student – I kept changing.
I would change majors, I would lose interest, I’d take a year off, I’d change majors, lose interest, take a year off. I was grappling with the question, “What am I supposed to do with my life?”
And it was clear I was not an academic – there was no path forward there for me.
And I had to get honest with myself, “Who am I, and what am I any good at?”
I work hard.
I do that well. I work with my hands well. I can figure things out.
So it was sort of a ‘come to Jesus moment for me’, Can I accept being a blue-collar worker?
In doing that, I went on to have a much richer life. Much more than if I had continued down the path of doing what I thought I was ‘supposed’ to do.
What were your first steps to starting the business and coming up with your product?
Luck comes into a lot of things – luck and taking the opportunity when it presents itself.
In 2004, I worked as a landscaper for a company here in Omaha in the summer, and I enjoyed it. In 2005, I applied for that same company, and they didn’t hire me back! I don’t think the economy was very good that year.
I applied for another big firm here in town, I got a job, and I lasted for maybe four days before I walked in and I went up to both the owners and quit. It wasn’t much of a fit and I was never a very good employee.
So, I finally mustered up the courage to hand a flyer out around my neighborhood. I was offering to do yard work – trimming trees, digging holes, mowing yards – whatever you needed.
Actually, I didn’t even put it out. My 10 and 11-year-old stepbrothers hung the flyers because I did not have the courage to do it myself.
But I got this huge response from it. It was one of those fateful moments, those little things that you do that alter the course of the rest of your life.
And I had no idea what was on the other side of this little step.
Now, it wasn’t little to me. I had a lot of anxiety around it. I had procrastinated. I was, you know, afraid of being rejected and the experience of what was new. I was a very fearful person back then.
But on the other side of that, I found something. Tasting what delivering this service to people felt like, experiencing their satisfaction, and recognizing that I had an aptitude for this – I started making real money. The path, I mean, it was like manna from heaven was just laying itself out before me.
I had to do the work. And it was not the first thing that I tried. I mean, I tried a dozen other things, and they all cracked out. They failed one after another, and then boom. That was the answer. It’s very clear.
And the farther I went down that road, the more obvious it was to me this was it. So much so that I dropped out of school to continue it.
How did you know this is what I’m supposed to do?
How did I know? The work was fantastically interesting to me and a whole bunch of things had aligned for me.
I was making money. I was good at it. It was the hardest work I’d done in my life, but it was easy. And I had discovered a skill that I could make trees beautiful. I was born to make trees beautiful.
Very early on, like week two, I was ideating with a friend of mine, trying to come up with a name for the company.
I don’t want to do what other tree services are doing – I want to make trees beautiful. And we were going back and forth, and he said, “Arbor Aesthetics.” Like that’s it, Arbor Aesthetics.
So Arbor Aesthetics existed before I owned a rope, before I owned a chainsaw.
The whole thing started with a borrowed pickup truck, a $20 hand saw, and a hell of a lot of work.
And a big willingness to figure it out.
When did you decide you were going to drop out of school and start?
It was Halloween 2005. Halloween is always a very special time for me because it’s when I went all in.
I used to get business by just going door-to-door. If I saw a tree at the house that needed to be trimmed or removed, I’d knock on the door.
I had gone up to this elderly woman’s house. She had this giant dead pin oak in her front yard. I offered a price she can’t refuse, like $500 to remove this $4,000 tree (I was just happy to have the work).
It’s a job I have no business taking. I don’t know what I’m doing.
After about two days on the job, I’ve got a 35-foot extension ladder resting on a dead branch up in the tree, bungee corded with a 12-foot power prune making cuts. And it’s falling down next to me and next to the woman’s house and next to my ladder.
I had this awareness – I’m probably going to get injured or I’m going to ruin this woman’s house. Something bad is going to happen.
So I came down. I let the lady know, “Ma’am, I’m going to go buy some climbing ropes and a saddle, learn how to climb and rig, and I’ll be back to finish this job.” And that was Halloween of 2005.
It was with that that I realized I had a choice to make.
If I’m going to continue down this path, I have some new skills to develop and some more equipment to buy.
I cannot balance finishing school and Arbor Aesthetics. I’m going to need to be all in on one or the other. And I was so done with school, and I knew that that was not going anywhere for me. A degree would not yield anything for me in life.
And this, Arbor Aesthetics, was the greatest experience of my life. I’d never experienced anything like that. This was the path forward.
It felt, at that time, like a directive from God.
I struggle with, is there a God, isn’t there a God? I kind of go back and forth. But in that moment, it was as clear as anything I’ve ever felt in my life. To not do that would be to defy the will of God.
I’ve only had that experience one time and it was that.
So I dropped my classes, I bought the ropes, bought some videos and I taught myself how to do all this. Christmas of that same year, I came back to remove this tree. It was fantastic and terrible and it was freezing conditions and all that.
How did you validate the business?
Back in the day, testing ideas out was very gorilla. It was me and a couple of other college kids. I would see the market in this part of town and want customers there. So I’d go and canvass it with flyers.
It was very front-line, hands-on. And in some ways, it was a real gift. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know to be concerned about these things. I just went out and did it.
There’s, you know, paralysis by analysis, right? Like “I got to have it all figured out.”
We’ve learned to not do that, and still try to do that today. For example, when we start a new initiative, one could think, “We need to have this figured out and this figured out and this figured out…”
You know what? We need to have this one thing figured out. We’re going to launch and figure the rest out as we go. Some of it’s going to fail. A lot of what we’re going to try is going to fail. Some of it isn’t, and we’re going to modify it as we go.
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs that I know fail fantastically. They modify and modify until they have a winning formula. But their willingness to fail still impresses me.
So, I didn’t have a strategy. It was the E-Myth, right? I was a technician who could see with my own eyes trees that needed to be trimmed, and put a flyer in that door, right? I had no shame about it.
I’d go up to mansions. I would wear my work pants and an Under Armour shirt, and with a lot of passion, I would tell this millionaire how badly I wanted to trim their trees. And some of those clients I still have today.
Sales are a huge part of growing your business. Believing in myself was a key part of that.
I could go up, interrupt this person, take them away from their dinner to talk to them about their trees – because I knew what I could do for their trees. I knew bothering them now was going to be worth it later on if they hired me.
It was this belief in myself and my product and what I could deliver. And how badly I wanted to make those trees beautiful.
I mean, I was so passionate about making trees beautiful. People to this day will run into me at a gas station and be like, ‘You came to my house 20 years ago. I’d never met anybody so passionate about Burr Oaks before.’
So, no, I did not have it all figured out.
But, if you have some of it figured out, and as long as what you’re doing is not reversible or a death sentence – like if this doesn’t work out, you’re dead in the water – you’ve got a lot of room to experiment. Fail, get up, and try again.
What did you do uniquely in the market? How did you grow?
So, there are two stages to the business. There were the first ten years of the business when I was just a tree guy trying to make a living.
I didn’t know how much I was making. I didn’t run my company like a business. It wasn’t until the last ten or eleven years that we wrapped our heads around how to grow and scale a business.
But in the beginning, how did I grow? I would go into a market that I wanted to be in, for example, a high-end neighborhood in midtown Omaha. I would do a fantastic job on a handful of trees at a low price, and then I would canvass the rest of the neighborhood. I would have yard signs in the house I was working at, and then there was an energy about us and a presence about us.
We created a vibe and awareness, and I got new clients by delivering a high-quality service. It was very guerrilla marketing, hands-on in the early days.
Even the name, Arbor Aesthetics – I didn’t want to be working for people who didn’t know what that meant, right?
I wanted to do high-end work for people who had who had money and could afford a good service. I enjoyed working with that kind of clientele. That’s sort of what I came from, and that’s what I wanted to continue to work with. I wanted to offer a high-quality service.
So even the name, “Arbor Aesthetics” does not sound like your low-cost tree care option, and it isn’t. The neighborhoods we went after fit that. The name reflected it. The logo reflected it.
What Were Some Of The Biggest Lessons You’ve Learned Along The Pathway Of Building? What Would You Tell New Business Builders?
You know, some of it is vet who you trust.
I had sort of a partner – he was my childhood best friend early on – who ended up stealing money from me, betraying me, and doing a lot of damage to the business.
It’s not the first time that I’ve looked the other way, because it was easier – keeping a relationship. This friend, this partner, it felt safer having him with me than doing it by myself. I ended up parting ways with him when I discovered how much money he was stealing from me.
It was a real growth opportunity. One, I learned I can do this by myself. I don’t need him with me.
Two, I need to be more careful about the relationships that I enter into. I have an affinity for this type of person. I need to be aware of that, right? Most of us have probably had toxic friends in the past, and we’ve learned from that experience.
Importance of Mentors
Another key, and most significant for young entrepreneurs, is having mentors. Having coaches, having peers, and not doing it by yourself.
It can be really, really, lonely early on. Your friends aren’t running a business. Most of them aren’t.
They can’t relate to everything being on the line.
Entrepreneurs love entrepreneurs, right? Entrepreneurs love sharing their stories. They love seeing somebody young and going after it.
Finding those people that are 2 years, 3 years, 10 years, 20 years down the road from you that you can learn from. You don’t have to learn every lesson the hard way. You can accelerate your growth by working with people who are ahead of where you are.
Indecision will kill you.
In the early days, you just need to start.
Indecision is the killer of entrepreneurs. You need to make a quick decision sometimes, even if it’s the wrong one, to keep moving forward.
Be someone who likes to solve problems and take action. That’s really how to weed out if you want to be an entrepreneur or not.
Did You Ever Have Any Oh Crap Moments?
Well, I’ve nearly died in trees on several occasions.
That was another one of those things. It was times when I was exhausted, or I didn’t want to recognize how dangerous the job was because I had an objective in mind. I’ve had some serious close calls. I’m lucky to be alive. In the early days, desperation breeds desperate moves.
The reason that there’s never been a tree in the house is luck. 15 years ago, I remember when it was going to happen, just by some fate that it didn’t happen.
Recession
In the Great Recession, nobody had any money. People weren’t paying their bills.
There was no work, so I couldn’t pay my bills; I wasn’t making any money. And the people who owed me money didn’t have money, so they couldn’t pay me.
So I wasn’t paying my equipment bills, and nothing was happening. That was fantastically scary for me.
We haven’t experienced any kind of actual threat to the business since then. But there have certainly been threats.
How Has The Business Changed Your Life? Both Positive And Negative?
Positive Side
I don’t know that I could be anything else.
At least not in my younger days. Entrepreneurship, or being an owner and self-employed, is my identity.
It is who I am. I don’t have a boss, I don’t have anybody telling me what to do. It is me figuring it out and making my own decisions. Deciding the path that I want to go down.
This is the kind of company that I want to own, that I want to run.
This is the kind of boss that I want to be.
These are the decisions that I want to make, good or bad. They’re my decisions and I get to learn from them along the way.
I get to entertain ideas that maybe don’t make the most economic sense, but they’re valuable to me. I think they’re gonna yield growth that will benefit me, my family, and my business.
So it comes down to freedom, intentionality, opportunity, and risk.
I am inherently a fearful person. It acts against my inclination to continue to grow this business.
But I’ve done scary things before. I can reflect back: ‘That was scary,’ or ‘That was really big,’ or, ‘We came out okay and maybe it worked out for us’ or “It was a disaster but we learned from it.’
And that applies to all of life.
Having courage and taking ownership – those are core to me. They have very much come to life, and live and breathe in me, because of this business. If I were working for somebody else (it’s hard for me to comprehend it), I would be living their dream.
And that’s not something that I would be able to do. Unless I found perfect alignment – and I never had – that’s not something that I could get up and do every day.
Being an entrepreneur I get to reinvent myself all the time. I couldn’t be doing what I did 10 years ago or 20 years ago – I could not be doing the same thing. I get to constantly decide – if this isn’t working for me anymore, or if this is where I want to be. I have total agency to make that happen right away.
Downsides of entrepreneurship
Especially when we were growing the business – neglecting my marriage
I was putting more into the company than I did my wife. We ran the company together, but there were certainly challenges along the way.
Building was very lonely for a long time and that was a struggle. It wasn’t good for me. It wasn’t until seven years ago, that I found Entrepreneur’s Organization. In it, I found other entrepreneurs doing what I’m doing I found people who are wired the way that I am.
Entrepreneur vs Owner
I would add one more – You can engage in a lot of bad behavior, but no one’s going to call you out on it.
I’m a recovering addict, and for the first 10 years, the business I was an addict. I didn’t run the business well and nobody was holding me accountable (except for employees who said ‘I’ve had it’ or clients who said ‘I’m not going to hire you again’.)
There’s a great opportunity when you are self-employed, to live a messy, undisciplined, life. A life that an employer would not tolerate.
Is there anything you would tell your younger self, right when you were getting started?
Oh, man. You know what I would do? I would give him a hug.
And I’d tell him it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.
Because I didn’t know it was going to be okay. I mean, a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to prove themselves; they’re trying to be enough. And I was constantly trying to prove myself.
And in Arbor Aesthetics, it was another flex of my ego. Look, what I’m doing, I’m going big!
But underneath the ego and the narcissism, because all that’s a cover, is this fear that I’m not enough.
Growing the business, and seeking more, was just an effort to fill this cup. But the cup can’t be filled through more stuff or more achievement.
And that’s probably what a young Jeff needed: a hug and ‘it’s going to be okay, you can do this.’
Great adventure
And finally, I would say to anybody that’s seeking entrepreneurship, it will be one of the great adventures of your life.
I strongly believe it’s not for everyone. And it’s not as sexy as you think it is, or that it’s led to be.
Like where I’m at right now, yes, I’m yielding a lot of the fruits of the hard work, right?
But it’s been a hellscape along the way – some of it unnecessarily, some of it I could have avoided by speaking with other people.
But be ready to be more courageous than you’ve ever been, to work harder than you ever have, and to grow and learn more than you knew was possible.
And some of you are meant for this, and some of you aren’t and it’s okay.
Not everybody should do this. We couldn’t all and shouldn’t all be entrepreneurs.
But the journey, values, and work ethic that goes into it will benefit you for a lifetime.
What are some of your favorite books, classes or resources that have helped you?
Emyth Revisited – This was fundamental for me when I was starting.
Dave Ramsey – Dave is good at helping understand the foundation of business. Kinda like the blocking and tackling of some of the fundamentals you need to know. He’s really good at making things simple.
Where can we learn more about your business?
Jeff Grewe Arborist Photographer, PBS Film
Breakdown
In this section, Humble Starts provides a summary of the main lessons from Jeff’s story. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own journey towards enterprise building.
Learnings from Jeff:
1. An Enterprise can be a calling
Although it’s not always this way for everyone, entrepreneurship can be a calling. As he was starting, Jeff knew that this was for him.
One of the beautiful things about building a business is you get to build something that fulfills you. You get to build something that centers around your skills and interests.
Notice that it wasn’t Jeff’s first try – he was searching for something that would fulfill him and it took some time to find it. But when he knew that it was his opportunity, he took the jump.
2. There will be scary things, and that’s ok.
Entrepreneurship requires courage. It’s a continual task of putting yourself out there and taking risks. Jeff’s first step was simply putting up flyers and asking for work – and that small task required courage.
Along the journey, again and again, Jeff took steps that required courage. Enterprise building can be a crucible of development, and Jeff’s story reflects that.
Pursuing this isn’t easy, but that’s also one of the parts that makes it valuable.
3. You don’t need a brand-new business model.
Jeff didn’t reinvent the wheel – there were already tree-care companies in the market when he got started.
But he didn’t just copy the other companies in the space – he went after a target market and differentiated himself in his name, quality, and focus on customer service. Jeff was strategic in separating himself from his competition and going after a high-value customer. There is an advantage in building around an ideal, target client.
When you think about starting, it’s a myth that you must build something brand new, never-invented-before. Instead, focus on a specific, target customer and build a unique offering or value to serve them.
