Your Way Tree Service bought a tub grinder and stopped hauling its trees to the landfill
Jesse Montoya built his Los Angeles tree company from door-to-door work in 2008, and a machine in his own yard changed what happened to the trees his crews cut.
Los Angeles, CA
For years, the trees Jesse Montoya’s crews took down around Los Angeles went out on trucks to the landfill. The landfill ground the wood, and Montoya paid the dumping fees.
“Before I had my Vermeer machines, we would take trees to a landfill, they’d grind them and I would end up with the same product we can produce now,” he said in a 2020 profile published by Vermeer, the equipment maker.
The fix was a Vermeer TG5000 tub grinder. Montoya secured land for a yard, bought the machine through RDO Equipment Co. in Rancho Dominguez, California, and started grinding his own wood. “We knew that with the TG5000, we could remove a tree, bring it back to our facility and handle it ourselves,” he told Vermeer. “It saves us a lot of fuel and time on the jobsite.” By his count, a tree that once took two days to take down and process on site now took half a day.
The grinder is the clearest marker of how far Your Way Tree Service had come from its start. Montoya founded the company in 2008 by going door to door for work. By 2020 it had 48 employees. It also had its own yard, where the trees its crews cut came back as wood chips and recycled material for landscapers, developers and golf courses.
Montoya, a native Californian, worked for larger tree companies before he went out on his own. He picked a hard moment to do it.
“We just started with two guys and myself, never thinking it would be as big as it is now,” he told Vermeer. “We started right when the recession was starting, and we figured we could get into the business as the big companies were declining because of the downturn. We thought that we, as ‘new guys,’ could come along and really evolve.”
The work was mostly at homes, on a wide mix of trees. “Our focus is mostly residential tree removals, care and pruning,” Montoya told Vermeer. “Most of our trees are native oaks, sycamores and palm trees, but we have different specimens from all over the world.” His crews handle pines four feet across and eucalyptus 150 feet tall and 12 feet across. “We are sometimes bringing down some big trees, and for a job like that, if you don’t have the right tools, it can be miserable,” he said in the same Vermeer profile.
The tools came one machine at a time. Montoya added brush chippers and stump grinders, equipment he told Vermeer he “never thought I would have.” The tub grinder was the big step, and it started with a conversation. “One day I was expressing my situation to a couple of specialists with Vermeer RDO, and they helped me come up with a way to turn an expense into a profit,” he told the trade magazine Recycling Product News in 2020.
Those specialists helped him choose the machine for his facility and figure out which type and size of material would sell best in his area. “They set us up and helped dial in everything from the right teeth, hammers and screens,” Montoya told Recycling Product News.
Montoya talked about safety in the same breath as equipment. “Just because of the line of work we’re in, having the right tools and safety procedures in place can make a big difference,” he told Vermeer. “Safety is number one for us. It’s important to have the right people with the right safety measures in place operating the right equipment. That’s the way I want to run this business.”
The TG5000 works for other people, too. The company rents it out across Southern California, from Ventura County to San Diego County. Its yard has also taken in other people’s green waste; a couple of the reviews the company posts on its site come from people who unloaded there.
Most of the work still happens in people’s yards. Crews prune and thin trees and reduce their crowns and height. They skim palms, which the company’s site describes as shaving the dead fronds and their remains off the tree, and they clear brush for owners who have received a notice from the fire department. When a tree stands too close to a house, or on a lot too tight for heavy machinery, the company brings in a crane and takes the tree apart in sections, lifting each piece and lowering it to the ground.
The company’s range runs from small one-off jobs to tree management at celebrity estates and golf courses, as Vermeer described it. For homeowners associations and apartment complexes, the company starts with a yearly plan. Each tree is assessed for pruning or removal, and the most urgent work goes into the first phase. The company writes that an inventory of all the trees can be plotted on a color-coded map.
Customers notice the shaping. One wrote in a review that the crews leave trees looking beautifully sculpted.
Another remembers early 2025. After large branches fell on her property and a tree there caught fire, a Your Way crew cleaned up the damage and checked the property for other fire and wind hazards. The company did not charge for the work. Yvonne J. wrote in a review that the kindness and generosity meant a great deal to her, and that the work was top quality.
Montoya, looking back on the grinder in 2020, kept it short. “Bringing on the TG5000 was a little breathtaking,” he told Vermeer. “My crew and I were speechless.”