The owner of My Tree Guy of Franklinton won’t take a job more than 15 minutes from home
Jonpaul started out splitting barbecue wood; now he runs My Tree Guy himself, climbing and cutting trees for customers no more than 15 minutes from his house.
Franklinton, NC
When Jonpaul first walked down to the woman’s property, he found a house buried in trees. “The house had never seen the sun,” he says. “That’s how overgrown these trees were all the way around her house.” Moss lay 2 inches thick across the roof.
He worked there every weekend for two months. “I opened the whole thing up,” Jonpaul says. “I took all the trees out.”
When it was over, the homeowner gave him a large gift of money. He tried to refuse it. “I didn’t even know what to say. I didn’t want to take it,” he says. “I gave it back to her. She gave it back to me.” Part of the money went to chainsaws. “That’s how I opened my business,” he says.
The business is My Tree Guy of Franklinton N.C., and it is mostly Jonpaul: a climber who trims and takes down trees in Franklin County and the towns just north of Raleigh. He keeps his territory deliberately small. Asked what he does, he does not dress it up. “I trim trees. I cut trees. That’s what I do for a living,” he says. “I’m a tree guy.”
He came to trees through firewood. Jonpaul started in 2012 splitting wood, much of it for barbecue, and the trimming and cutting grew out of that. “I learned about wood before I even learned about cutting trees,” he says. “So it kind of fell in. And then I loved it.”
The part he loves is the climbing. “I’m a climber, too, so I climb trees on a regular basis,” he says, and he has a blast doing it. A few outfits that have no climber of their own hire him on contract to go up for them.
Customers tend to remember that part. One wrote that she was impressed by how he climbed the trees and cut the limbs without hesitating. Another, who had two trees taken down, went further in a Google review, writing of never having seen anybody fly into trees the way he did, and meaning it literally.
He takes residential and commercial work alike. “Trees are trees,” he says. “I don’t care who owns them.” The jobs customers describe tend to be the awkward ones. He dropped a 70-foot oak into a tight spot in one fenced backyard, then cut it up and stacked the wood. He took down a big pine that stood beside a house and was hemmed in by power lines. At another house, a fallen tree was leaning on a healthy one; the man called in the morning, Jonpaul was at his door by early evening, and within 20 minutes both trees were down and cut up. One couple kept him for weeks clearing trees 80 to 100 feet tall from around their house, part of seven months of tree and yard work on the same property.
The company writes on its website that it weighs each tree’s size, weight, drop path and nearby structures before deciding how to bring it down. Trimming limbs away from power and utility lines for one customer, he cut them so they would look natural and would not need cutting again for a while. Another homeowner, whose yard was ringed with fences, retaining walls and plantings, wrote that when the work was done, everything was just as it had been before. A family living out of state got photos from him while the job was underway, and he would not take payment until they had seen the finished work and approved it.
He also talks customers through the work. One man, whose tree had blown over onto another and was leaning toward his home, wrote that Jonpaul told him how he planned to get it down and then went to work. Afterward Jonpaul wrote back that he hoped his explanation would help with his own tree felling down the road.
Jonpaul runs the business by himself. “Just me. I don’t answer to nobody but me,” he says. Several customers mention a crew, and on one removal a second man hauled off the cut tree while a third ground out the stump. But Jonpaul says he is hands-on with everything he does, and he is wary of handing the work to anyone else.
“People aren’t going to care about what I care about the way I care about it,” he says. He hates to put his name on things, he says, “when people don’t act like I act, so I’m not going to do it.”
That standard shows up in his own writing, too. Answering one customer who had held him to a promise, he wrote that it isn’t every day he is held to his word, and that it was awesome to have someone hold him accountable.
“I love my livelihood,” he says. “I appreciate my livelihood.”
Plenty of his customers come back. One wrote that Jonpaul had done several jobs for him, and he thanked another for the many jobs. When a Wake Forest church needed a tall pine trimmed before an event, Jonpaul told the caller the job was on him, then came out and moved his truck three times to reach the branches.
His service area runs through Franklinton, Youngsville, Wake Forest, North Raleigh and the country around Falls Lake. Jonpaul measures it in minutes, not miles.
“Furthest away I go from my house is 15 minutes,” he says. “Period.”