Consistency of Communication

You can’t change an industry if you aren’t consistent about communicating a different way of thinking.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Our industry has a deeply established business model. A property has trees, somebody identifies a problem or an opportunity, and a tree company gets paid to perform work. Sometimes that work is necessary. Sometimes it’s beneficial. Sometimes the best thing for the property, the customer, and the trees is to do less.

But how do we get more people to recognize the value of the trees they’re already paying to maintain?

How do we help property owners understand that a tree isn’t simply an obstacle, a liability, or a future removal job? And how do we help professionals develop business models that reward knowledge, stewardship, preservation, and long-term value?

Those are big questions. They also require consistent communication.

I recently watched a lecture about removing obstacles that prevent consistency. One of the exercises challenged me to identify the identity behind my own inconsistency.

When I fail to publish something, what am I telling myself?

“I’m not good enough to be visible to the world.”

That belief encourages me to keep preparing, keep researching, and keep trying to acquire more proof of work before I share my ideas.

But I’ve spent more than 20 years learning things the hard way. I’ve worked in tree care, experienced the demands of storm recovery, and learned to approach problems through the lenses of safety, training, and operational discipline. I don’t need to wait until I know everything to share something useful.

The identity I’m choosing to practice is:

“I already have something of value to offer the world...” My new standard is simple:

Publish useful content consistently.
Share lessons from actual experience.
Explain concepts that help people understand the value of trees.
Participate in conversations that challenge conventional thinking.
Turn observations into educational material instead of letting them disappear into another camera roll or notebook.

I’m setting an initial target of repeating these actions 18–21 times to build evidence that I can trust myself to follow through. I’m also interested in accountability partnerships. Sometimes having another person know what you committed to makes the difference between having a good intention and actually executing it.

There’s a combat analogy I keep coming back to.

You don’t change an entire operational environment with one successful mission. You establish standards, train people, repeat the necessary actions, assess the results, and adapt.

Changing the tree-care industry is going to require that kind of persistence. We need more people consistently communicating the economic, environmental, structural, and social value of trees. We need to make preservation understandable, measurable, and commercially viable. And we need to demonstrate that professionals can make a good living by knowing when NOT to cut.

Here’s my question for this community:

What’s one message about tree preservation, tree value, or the future of our industry that you believe needs to be communicated more consistently?

And is anybody here interested in an accountability partnership where we help each other actually publish and execute the ideas we’re constantly discussing?

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Consistency of Communication

Apex Arborum

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