A growing family firm, Berkshire-based Arborfield Tree Care has been providing a broad range of professional tree surgery services for more than 20 years.
WORKING in a tree surgery business has a triple bonus for 23-year-old Molly Smith. She knows she can always get help from her mother Kim, who also works for the firm. Or from her father Martin, who runs it. And, if neither of them are available, she can always turn to her grandmother Joy, who also just happens to work there.
All of them agree that having the help of three generations on hand is a tremendous bonus of working for a truly family firm, Arborfield Tree Care.
Molly, an arborist in training, specialises in theory rather than practice, and helps her mother in the office, which has been increasingly busy as the firm grows, today enhanced by half a dozen male tree surgeons from outside the family.
Martin said: “We’re growing at quite a rate at the moment. Over the last few months we’ve taken on three extra staff so you can imagine we’re pretty busy, which is great. It’s just all hands to the pumps.”
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Most of the firm’s work is for domestic customers, but it also includes most of the local councils in the Berkshire area (including Reading Borough Council and Wokingham Borough Council), plus private schools, churches, retirement homes, NHS properties and hotels.
Arborfield Tree Care was established in 1997, but truly started life in 1994, when Martin got together with Kim. It is based at Wokingham in Berkshire with a fleet of vehicles that now comprises a cherry picker, two Unimogs, two transit vans (one of them a tipper, the other with a crane) and a John Deere 64 chipper with a grain trailer.
Martin said: “We’re very passionate about what we do, how we look and how we treat people. It’s more than doing a day’s tree work for somebody, it’s important to be totally professional about the whole thing.”
Recently, one of the firm’s specialities has become hiring out pot-grown Christmas trees and wreaths made from Nordmann firs. They’re hired out in pots in one year, then collected and looked after by the firm so they’re fit for the same owners the next year. To add that bit extra, the firs are each given their own names from their families they spend Christmas with, such as Treeyonce, Bob, Magic or Echo.
Martin explained: “It’s a Polish idea, but it means we can just offer something a little bit different and we tend to specialise in that. It makes it something a bit out of the ordinary and not a lot of people bother to do that. But we do and it works.”
The whole team is focussed on making the business succeed in delivering a broad range of professional tree surgery services across Berkshire, Hampshire, Surrey and South Oxfordshire and the surrounding areas.
And the advantage of being both a family and a firm? Martin said: “It just gives us so many rewards. For a start, there’s the trust we all have in each other. We’re always flexible and then there’s the honesty and complete lack of any clashes between us. They just don’t happen at all.
“It all works for us and for our lifestyle. Kim and Molly are able to look after their horses and dogs and I’m still enjoying so much of my job. Even now, on Sundays, I still get excited looking forward to getting back to work on Monday.”
Pushed to recall any downside to having family and work life so entwined, Martin made one admission – that as a child Molly often missed out on such treats as holidays abroad with her parents.
That said, she doesn’t seem to bear a grudge. Currently, the expectation is that Molly will end up marrying her boyfriend Lewis – who also works for the firm – and that together, in the future, they will take control.
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