It's been two years - am I living a life of treedom?

I've been looking at the lifeoftreedom.com website & making a new version of it to reflect where I'm at now, rather than where I thought I was going two years ago. It's also a good chance to write...

Short version: am I living a life of treedom? Yes. Thanks for reading; see ya.

Long version

I initially set out on a journey that I thought would leave me with a tree business as my full-time income. I knew I wanted to teach short courses in woodland stuff in my woodland. However, when I started out I was starting more or less from zero. Age forty five and starting right back at the start again with seventeen year olds. That was humbling.

But you may have noticed I’ve not posted anything for a while. I am so busy, I’ve literally not even had time to leave comments or like the fine musings of Walter Egon. (though I have been reading Walter, love the muntin work - as always, exceptional). So I thought I’d write this up after a day in a woodland where I managed to fell a total of 77 oak trees.

Screw technology for keeping count. Tally counter for the win.

Treeschool

I finished my course at treeschool in the spring of this year (2024). Weirdly, I’d done my teaching qualifications way back in 2010 and somehow, through a combination of people retiring and leaving, I ended up with my trees and woodland management teachers job - albeit in a part-time capacity. That was fortuitous.

Work Experience

I had two work experience placements during treeschool. One was at “the estate” where I later went onto work for two days a week and the other was at “tree company”. You’ve probably figured out by now, that these are not the real names of the places. I’m keeping the names abstract because the names are not that important. The names have been changed to protect the innocent kind of thing.

Treecompany was in reality about a six-month thing. I got on well with everyone, but I think I gave it the kiss of death when I was suddenly booked out for three months at the estate. I was never asked back, but I do still get on with the owners and those people that I am in contact with.

The Business

I did absolutely end up with a tree business - but it does techwork for a very select bunch of customers (so select, that there is only one). I had very much hoped to be working in the business two days a week. My plan was to have the other three days a week filled with an actual job (the backup plan) that brings in an income. Retraining is fun, but there’s only a certain amount of money available to fund it and once that was gone (which it now is) a salary is essential. Taking a salary from a new business is the kiss of death and I’ve always advised other people never to take a salary until you have one years worth of it in the bank after the king has stolen taxed his share of your hard work.

Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face

To be clear, I didn’t actually get punched in the face. I’m in the right line of work for it, and I am bit of a smart arse, so I am expecting it to happen at somepoint. I did sort of metaphorically punch myself in the face though.

My working week originally looked like three days at The Estate and somehow I decided that I’d take up a part-time teaching position at Treeschool. The idea was that I’d use the weekends to run The Business. The deal was that as soon as the business was consecutively booked out on Saturdays and Sundays for more than two weekends in a month - it was a lovely plan - I’d get a full-time wage again (albeit about a third of what I was on in techworld) and I’d get to grow the business. Perfect plan.

I started at treeschool in the second week of August of this year. After one week I was offered / asked for the role to be full-time, so I promptly resigned at the estate. I was sad to see the estate go, I got on really well with the gaffer, but it wasn’t really for me. I loved working with him and I hope to work with him again in the future if our paths cross. There’s a much longer story to the resignation than I’m writing about, but short version is that whilst I loved working with the gaffer (the man has balls of steel when driving a tractor with a forwarder on it) and he taught me a lot and we had some great banter, there’s only so many metres of “the lord not lords” fence I can fix. It was in essence, a dead end job. I could have applied for the gaffers job when he retires in the future, but even then there’s no further I could go. And also, I’m just not that good around people with lands and titles. There’s something about me they just don’t like. Maybe they know, that I know, that they don’t have magic blood.

When I got to treeschool they were advertising for someone to do two days a week to make a week with the three that I was doing. As the start of term was approaching there were no applicants and it was looking like they’d be a massive hole in the teaching week. One thing led to another and I asked / was offered / doesn’t really matter how it happened – but I ended up full time. Teaching is not a dead end job, there’s loads to get your teeth into especially when you’re very much living and working in the topic. Trees and woodland management? I’m your man. What I lack in experience and hard won knowledge, I make up for in enthusiasm and a dedication to learning. There is this saying that “that those that can’t, teach” and I have never bought that. I prefer “those that can, do”. Yes, teaching is a bit of a niche endevour and it is not for everyone. Lazy? good luck prepping classes. Shy? Good luck standing up and dealing with a platter of humans from all walks of life who are staring at you to entertain and educate them.

The plan then changed to treeschool during the week, and The Business on weekends.

Burn Rate, Reversing Trailers & MPG.

There’s a concept in the business world of a burn rate. It’s the amount that your business burns though each month. I didn’t have any debt when I got into treeworld. I do now. I feel ok about it, but I’d lie if I said I was totally happy about it. In a nutshell, my personal finances funded my business somewhere around the ten thousand mark, I got a chipper on hire purchase for four thousand, and I put a blower, hedgetrimmer, two batteries and charging station on my credit card. All in all, I have about fifteen thousand of debt. Granted about ten of that is to myself and the business is charged 2.5% interest on it a year, but the other five is “acceptable”. It does however put my burn rate up. The monthly payments are about £150 give or take a few pennies.

The truck and trailer are the backbone of the business. A powerful pickup and trailer capable acting in concert to give me 3.5 tonnes of payload. That’s about enough to do a four hundred year old oak tree in about three trips. It’s certainly more than enough for domestic arb. However, my drive way isn’t big enough for two family cars, a pickup and a trailer so I had to rent storage space at a local storage yard. I should have needed two bays, as the total length of my rig was over the bay allocation space by about five feet. However, the bay backed onto a slope and owner was kind enough to allow me to dig out five feet into the bank. So he charged me for one bay – £65 a month which was acceptable.

Kind owner let me dig out five feet.

So he was charging me for one bay, but then he had to move me. I could go into another bay that also had space on the back, but it was a very hard reverse with the trailer and I was surrounded by very expensive caravans, boats and motor homes. In short, it wasn’t working for me and I asked for two bays. Fair enough, this was now doubling the £65 to £130 a month.

I was noticing on jobs was that the setup of getting the truck and trailer to the house and loading up the chipper onto the trailer was taking about two to three hours of time. I was starting to doubt my rig. Was it the right rig? Didn’t matter, it’s what I had and I could afford the extra rent because I was working on weekends. Business costs - nothing more.

I’m driving 300 miles per week to work and back. Treeschool is about a 60 mile round trip and my ancient rav4 (trusty and I love it) gets about 24mpg if you’re hammering it and about 32mpg if you’re driving like a grandmother. I was starting to think. The business has a truck, it costs £300 in “road tax” (commercial rate) and about £500 in insurance a year. Then I have £130 a month in storage costs. That’s about £2300 give or take each year.

What if I had a van instead of the truck and trailer and what if the van belonged to me personally, rather than the business. I could then use the van without getting hammered by “benefit in kind” theft tax. As a bonus, I could still get the chipper in the back and it could live on the drive. I could sell the truck and trailer, pay myself the money back and use that to buy a van with mileage better than the rav4.

Getting rid of the truck and trailer is a no brainer, it means I can do more with less. But where would I find the time?

There’s no time for treework!

I did know that new teachers experience a year of hell. That first year of teaching is a nightmare. Prepping stuff for class, finding your feet, learning all the stuff that you don’t see as students (ten million acronyms, process for this, a process for that, a spreadsheet here and word document there) takes a lot of time.

I teach eighteen hours a week over four days of the week. Fridays are my desk day and that’s the day that I have to get all the paperwork done and planning for the next week. LOL. I am routinely up until well past midnight on most nights of the week and up at the crack of dawn to make a 30 mile journey through busy congested motorways from Northumberland, into Tyne & Wear and then finally into Durham.

It’s also been eating up my weekends. I have managed to keep one job on the go though, a lovely woodland thinning job where there’s about 1000 oaks to come out of a twenty-five year old woodland. I was there today. It was glorious late October day.

This 261 owes me nothing. It’s a proper trooper. Also, the gaffer would be proud of that stump.

I learn something everytime I’m there. It’s really good fun working small trees on a first thinning as you can / have to get them to do crazy things to get them on the ground due to the densely woven canopy. And that brings me back to learning and the question that now seems to have an obvious answer – did I really think I’d be done learning once I’d finished being a student at treeschool?

Continuous Learning

Obviously the answer to the above question is “no”. However, the learning experience in this new context is not a magical fun experience. It is in fact brutal – especially on my sleeping schedule. I’m not complaining about the late nights though, one thing about teaching is that it is by far the best way to re-enforce knowledge and learn a topic. You HAVE to be right when you’re teaching people. My area of lecturing is trees and woodland management, so that means I am upping my knowledge in this area well beyond the level 3 knowledge I need. I have this sense that I’m going to end up doing an MSc in this topic (level 7) - I can feel it. The other side to teaching is that you get to hone your craft. Teaching is not a case of standing up and reading words off of a presentation. It’s about leveraging the activities of a group of people at different parts of the learning journey to drive them up Blooms Taxonomy. At level three (what I teach) you’re basically concerned with getting people to the applying and understanding level.

I try to do things that benefit me in at least two ways. This allows you to get the most from what you’re doing. Teaching does a few things for me. Firstly, it’s helping me hone my craft so that when the day comes to go solo and start teaching in my woodland (at least five-ten years away) I’ve got a solid teaching game. Secondly it gives me a salary, which I am very grateful for. But it also gives me a third thing – a reason to continue to learn the area of trees and woodland management.

YouTube & Treework

I imagined that when I graduated, I’d have this tree surgery / arboriust business and that I’d be just like the people on YouTube. I’m not. I do have some YouTube videos, but I’ve not made one in a while an I’m unlikely to add anything anytime soon. One thing that YouTube doesn’t show is that vast array of jobs in treeworld. Sure, everyone wants to see someone climb up a massive tree and dismantle it, but there’s much more to it than that. Did you know it’s possible to scan the internals of a tree and produce a 3D image of the decay?

Courtesy of www.treesafetytesting.com. This is a bit of kit called a PiCUS. They cost about £20K all in.

Jamie - are you saying you’re going to be a teacher, do a masters and get into tree surveying?

Not quite. I’m saying that now that I’ve arrived in treeworld, there’s a tonne of things to do. I certainly want to remain “on the tools” as the work is great and keeps you in great shape. I also want to remain as far away from “business speak” world that I can. “hey, can you get me the KPIs for our recent APAC campaign with our FMCG vertical” 🤢. I don’t miss that world. I much prefer the world that has me coming home with three woodlands worth of soil under my fingernails and smelling of sawdust and petrol.

However, being totally frank - I am approaching fifty which means nothing in itself, but I do have to prepare for the days where everything hurts. For example, my left wrist is killing me today from throwing brash too aggressively. There will be a day that physical work can only take place every other day. I hope those days start when I am 90, realistically they’ll probably start when I hit sixty.

I didn’t realise how much I liked physical work until I started doing it more and I fully recommend to anyone who can take the hit on their salary, to ditch the desk job. However, I’ve got twenty five years at least in working with tech and there’s a tonne of tech in treeworld. Survey gear is one area, but then there’s the software like geospatial databases (QGIS) and Autocad. Not everyone in treeworld has those skills and they are the type of service a business can make some nice gold from. I do have those skills – I don’t intended on letting them decay and I do intend on getting some of that gold.

So let’s go back to what I originally intended to do: treework, woodland stuff and making stuff from the arisings of my work. I’m kind of there, but not quite. I have a tree company, but it isn’t full-time. I am doing woodland work, but at the expense of neglecting my own woodland (I have been only six times this year to work it - oh dear) and the workshop - let’s not talk about the workshop.

I still intend to get to the point in my life where my week is composed entirely of my own business. Some survey work, some woodland management work (some desk and some tool), some teaching and most importantly, some woodcraft. It somewhat saddens me that the only thing I’ve made this year is the hearth (still needs the wood work doing, but I did get it framed and tiled) and half an outdoor kitchen.

A nearly finished hearth and the outside kitchen is a quarter done.

Pithy ending

They say it is about the journey, not the destination and I agree. I said I’d follow my nose on the tree journey of mine. Truth be told a bit part of it was a giant leap of faith at the mercy of the gods. I sacrificed a rock solid tech career to see what would happen. I’m not quite where I want to be though. I have a truck and trailer to sell, my woodland needs some attention as 1200 trees arrive in less than fifteen weeks, and I seem to have taken a sojourn into teaching and will likely end up doing a MSc (and we all know that’s leading to a PhD don’t we?)

However, my life now is entirely tree based. As I write this, I stink of chainsaws and sawdust and I’m about to light a fire made of firewood that I felled, split and stacked myself. Tomorrow I’m preparing classes for after the half-term in my new career as a lecturer in trees and woodland management.

So am I living a life of treedom? You tell me.

Thanks for reading and as always – I appreciate your attention.

Cheers,

Jamie.

p.s - it may be a while before I post again. Busy bee.