We were lucky to catch up with Mark Fairchild recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mark, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Starting my own business has always been an ambition of mine. It was not ever really a choice in my mind, but more of a calling to be able to create a job that can help others and does not feel like work. I have had a lot of jobs in my life where going to work felt exactly like that, work. I always felt like there were options in the world to create something that was mine and that could offer beneficial services to the public.

I have been climbing for almost 25 years and it’s definitely a passion of mine. I am not someone who can sit down in front of a computer all day and being outside is really important to me.

I started by getting a job as a groundman with a tree company in Colorado and learning all that I could about the business. I started to learn to climb trees and studied hard to start learning tree identification and different climbing knots. When my oldest son was really young, I used to sit on the floor with him and work on my knots. When he was just two years old he told me “Papa, let me show you how to tie an “astronaut” (astro-knot in his mind).

I started my own company in 2016 with just myself and my rafting boat trailer. I was so thankful for friends and family who reached out to me for tree services and got me and my business started.

Mark, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My company is called Colorado Trees and we provide tree trimming, removal, and treatment services. I was able to study plant health care and receive my Pesticide Applicator License to provide tree treatments. I really believe in this part of the business and it’s always relieving to my clients when they find out that although their tree is infected, there is a way to save it.
Sets us apart:

What sets us apart? I believe there are a few things. When you look for tree services finding a tree business that is insured and licensed are the basic things to look for. Colorado Trees also has ISA-Certified Arborists on staff. Our team takes tree and plant health care very seriously and we believe in discussing your options for every tree and making decisions together to ensure the best plan for your trees.

Our team holds safety as our top priority and does an exceptional job of ensuring each other’s safety as well as the safety of our clients and their homes.

Lastly, we care deeply about the environment. Two years ago, we offset our carbon by partnering with a grasslands project in Colorado. This year we have partnered with One Tree Planted and have pledged to plant one tree for every tree we trim or remove in burn areas in Colorado like the Troublesome Fire in Grand County. We have pledged to plant a minimum of 500 trees in these areas this year. We believe in making a difference and making it easy for our clients to participate.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

Our clients are the best! We are so lucky to have operated from a word-of-mouth perspective for most of the time we’ve been in business. The majority of our clients have come to us from a friend or a family recommendation. We often find that our clients have shared their experiences and let their friends know that we left their space better than we found it, and were professional.

As we’ve grown we’ve begun connecting with our clients via email newsletter and social media. We believe that this connection not only helps us connect with our clients but allows us to share more knowledge and education as well. Taking care of trees can be difficult or stressful as they provide shade and often memories or sentimental value for people. Providing more information and having another stream of communication has been helpful, especially for our treatment program.

By providing multiple streams of communication, we feel like we are better able to support our client’s needs.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

The tree industry is a hard industry regardless of surprises like the one we had back in 2020. One of my lead climbers who also was in charge of driving the work truck called me in the morning as I was getting ready to leave, he asked “Where’s the chipper”? I responded, “at the yard with the truck”. He answered, “I’m here at the truck and the chipper isn’t here.” He then looked around the truck and found tools and other obvious signs that our chipper had been taken off our truck and stolen overnight. We contacted our storage owner and eventually received footage of a big white van pulling our chipper out of the gate. They hid their faces from the cameras and their license plate was unreadable. The chipper is an important part of our business and is an expensive one as well. This was a frustrating situation but we powered on. Eventually, months later while on vacation we received a call from Vermeer, the company that makes chippers… they had FOUND OUR CHIPPER!! Their crew was working on a different project and saw a chipper with flat tires under a tarp in a storage space, they ran the VIN and identified it as our chipper! It eventually was returned after many fixes, it pays to stay positive and overcome even the most frustrating situation.

Another time in 2022 our work truck broke down and our engine was warped. Needless to say, it was not going to be a fast fix. and we had jobs on the books for the next few weeks. Not only did we not want to let our clients down but we know that we are responsible for the lives of our employees and did not want them to be out of work. After hearing that we had weeks to wait for our truck to be fixed, I dreamed up a plan one night to make my personal truck, a Toyota Tundra our work truck. I needed a way to allow the chipper to chip into my truck and catch the chips.

The next day I got to work. I bought plywood from Home Depot and built essentially a wooden box in the back of my truck. Neighbors liked to call it an outhouse, honestly, that’s kind of what it looked like. But it did what it needed to. My crew and I used my truck like a tree truck for almost three straight months. This meant my crew and I had to manually remove chips from the truck each time we dumped, collect fewer chips each day or dump more often, and although it made life harder for our team, they never complained. We continued working each week this way until our work truck was fixed. It’s about innovation, perseverance, and not letting problems take you down.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://coloradotreetrimming.com
• Instagram: @coloradotreetrimming
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ColoradoTrees
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/colorado-tree-trimming-and-removal
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/colorado-trees-arvada?osq=colorado+trees

Image Credits
Colorado Trees Photos