Michael Bice owns a company with the word Lawn first in its name, and the work he likes best is trees. “Personally, I guess trees,” says Bice, who runs Greener Grounds Lawn & Tree in Birmingham.
He took the long way around. He began by mowing yards with a push mower. Then he worked for a lawn care business, and after that with a tree guy. When he started his own company, it was a lawn company. “I started my own lawn care business and then slowly got into trees,” he says.
The name followed him. The company once went by Greener Grounds Lawn Care, with tree removal, pruning and stump grinding listed after the mowing and mulch. Today it is Greener Grounds Lawn & Tree, and tree work leads its list of services, from emergency storm calls to lot clearing. Bice is the sole owner. Most of the work is residential, though the company takes commercial jobs too.
What he says he tries to do on a tree job sounds like something a lawn man would worry about. The crew takes extra care, he says, not to tear up a customer’s grass or cause other damage. “We take extra care on the property, make sure everything is cleaned up,” he says. “We try to leave the property better than we found it.”
The company describes how that works near a house. Instead of dropping a tree, the crew rigs it and lowers it in sections, with bucket trucks for height and a grapple truck to haul the debris. One job it lists, in Crestwood, involved a large tree leaning toward a roof after heavy rain had softened the ground. The crew took it down piece by piece and had the yard cleared the same day.
One homeowner described a worse day. A tree had come down on her house, and Bice and two men from his crew, Josh and Jeff, were there within an hour, removing the tree and covering the roof with a tarp.
Bice has six employees, not counting himself. He leads by example, he says, and they know what is expected from working with him for so long. “We’ve done a pretty good job of holding on to employees and not having to keep hiring people,” he says. “So they’re trained on how things should be.” Doing what he says he will, he adds, is how he was raised. An earlier description of the company said Bice trained every new hire personally before that person worked a property alone, and that crews wore uniforms and drove lettered trucks so customers knew who was in the yard.
The crews stay close to home. Bice puts the usual reach at about 13 miles, though he says it depends on the job. Homewood, Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Hoover, Fairfield, Gardendale and Fultondale are among the places the company serves.
Off the job, older versions of the company’s pages said, Bice worked clay and fired up his own kiln, and for a stretch every new customer got a mug he delivered himself. The same pages said he climbed trees for fun, not only when someone hired him to take one down.