ABOUT
Pleasure to meet ya!
Hello and thank you for taking the time to find out a little about me. I am Ryland Popke, Owner of R&A Tree Service, LLC. I provide free estimates and take care of any tree related situation or clearing such as cleaning up after a major wind storm, power line dangers, cutting trees out of the way for new development or road and even identify potential danger trees near buildings and such. I look forward to working with you and getting whatever job you need done, correctly.
Thanks for your interest!
So how did this business get started...?
Well, from just shy of nothing!
Nothing but a couple of our dads old saws we dug out from the cluttered garage, some rope from the hay barn next door, a new leaf blower my parents got for the driveway (not tree work), an old jet-ski trailer made into a flatbed trailer to haul branches/wood on and last but not least... a conversation in the Enumclaw High School parking lot as we were both leaving to go to each of our after school part time jobs (2015).
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(Ryland Popke & Alex Smith)
Two buddy's in high school who loved to work hard and play hard, and it was now the time to work hard. At the time we both had our multiple part-time jobs with class during the day and the only thing we knew for sure on what we wanted to do after high school was work the hardest we could and get paid for what that was worth; which was hopefully more than those part-time jobs. We both had cut/split/stacked and sold a decent amount of firewood all through high school and the cutting of it was always the best part but, that wasn't what paid the bills - the splitting into firewood was where the money came in. We saw that the profit margins can pay out better than what we were currently doing, that is if... you were good at tree work. A couple months went by and maybe a half dozen YouTube videos with the right amount of common sense later, we decided it was time to buy some Craigslist climbing gear. Like anything else... we taught ourselves how to safely climb and get the trees down into smaller sections; especially in tight areas. Thank God we caught on quick because, a few side job, ad posts on Facebook...next thing you know we were removing trees in backyards, falling timber out of the way for a buddy's new house going in, and rigging down trees over kitchen windows. Right away we realized if we quit our side jobs and use that time to invest into tree jobs, we might be able to make this an actual company that payed each of us at least the same as our other jobs were paying us at that time AND we would be loving what we were doing. So, we rolled the dice, booked out our calendar's with a couple tree jobs, got on-line, enrolled in Marketing class our Senior year (1st period) and every morning a few weeks straight, we finally figured out what licensing we needed, waited till we turned 18 years old so we were eligible for a business license, made an appointment with a local insurance agent we never even met, paid for our insurance and a bond... and worked literally every single day possible until we walked across the graduation stage together in 2017!
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Long story short, we paid each other out with the last $80 bucks or so that we put aside in the paper envelope marked “ R&A savings.” Alex decided to head right, go to school and work his way up into being a successful Lineman. I went left on mutual agreement, signed the company over into my name as one owner, expanded out into an increased insurance amount coverage(still with the same agent even!), transformed into an “LLC”, invested in a 2018 model Vermeer wood chipper, built a totaled dump trailer into a successful working chip trailer (that’s a story in itself), purchased a couple of needed work trucks, upgraded all the equipment needed for safe tree service/logging work, hired some employees and to this day serve this business locally out of my hometown in Enumclaw, Washington.
Not a whole lot of history... but that’s because it’s not just the story of how the car got to the runway. I have a long road ahead to continue growing my business, in the meantime, I love what I do and I am here and happy to help if needed!
Thanks for reading!
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Logging
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Tree service
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Timber falling
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New road clearing
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Land clearing
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24 Hr Storm service cleanup
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Commercial & Residential
Owner/Operator, Ryland Popke
R&A Tree Service, LLC. (903) 932-3371
