Offering wood for building materials, shade from the sun, trunks for hanging hammocks and branches for climbing, trees are America’s No. 1 renewable resource. In a storm, however, a weak or oversized tree can become the stuff of nightmares, endangering lives and wreaking thousands of dollars in damage.
This is where O’Brien’s Tree Service does some of its best work.
O’Brien’s Tree Service has been offering superior tree-care service, in emergency situations and otherwise, since its inception in 1991. In fact, O’Brien’s offers customers throughout the Philadelphia area an experience they are unlikely to find elsewhere. In addition to decades of skill from fully insured tree surgeons, O’Brien’s offers extremely competitive prices and quick turnaround, providing service within a week to 10 days, compared with the industry standard of two weeks. In emergencies, of course, O’Brien’s delivers a much timelier response.
“When some of these big storms roll through, you see a lot of trees falling on people’s houses or cars,” says Andrew O’Brien, owner of O’Brien’s Tree Service, which is based in Chester Springs. “Within 20 minutes we can be at somebody’s house with a bucket truck, and within an hour we can have a crane there pulling a tree out of the house.”
When a tree crushes a car or crashes through a roof, the longer a homeowner waits to have such work done, the costlier the damage. In such matters, O’Brien offers simple yet powerful advice: “Don’t waste any time calling me.”
“It’s good to have someone like me around when a tree falls on a house or something like that happens,” he says. “Not only can we respond quickly but the insurance company will pay to rectify the situation without the customer having to worry about it; they just need to call to get us in there as soon as possible. Don’t worry about the cost and let us deal with the insurance company. The insurance company wants you to waste time getting estimates; they just want someone to get in there ASAP. The sooner they can get the tree out of the house, the less water damage there is to the interior, so there’s less of a claim [for homeowner’s insurance].”
He references an instance recently in Radnor, where a fallen tree crashed through a home during a storm. The homeowner was not on site to realize, and as a result no one called to have it removed. Water continued to stream into the house, turning what could have been a $12,000 to $20,000 claim into a $150,000 claim.
Its nimble size and years of expertise help O’Brien’s excel at handling these kinds of jobs, many of which are simply too big for other firms, O’Brien suggests.
“We’re a small company that gives personalized service,” he says. “We specialize in doing some of the more difficult tree work, mostly because we have two cranes that enable us to come in and do whatever needs to be done. Most companies will have bucket trucks and climbers—and we do, too—but we also have the bigger and more specialized equipment for the more difficult jobs that most other companies just can’t do.”
Customers also take solace in the fact that, when they call O’Brien’s, they know exactly whom they are dealing with: the gentleman whose name adorns the side of each piece of equipment, Andrew O’Brien. There is no middleman between owner and customer.
“I’m the one talking to them,” O’Brien assures. “You will get the answer you want from me. If I give you a price, that’s the price. And I will spend some time talking with you; it might be five minutes, or it might be 45 minutes, but I make sure I sit down and understand what the customer is looking for.
“I hear from customers all the time, about other companies sending estimators out to meet with them,” he continues. “[The estimators] are usually in such a hurry to get everything done that they’ll throw a number at a customer and then they are out the door. It’s all about profit; it’s nothing but production for them.”
Not with O’Brien’s, however, which has earned a reputation for being among the region’s best. With O’Brien’s, customers’ trees and properties are in the hands of well-trained professionals, providing safe, efficient and superior service. In fact, some members of the O’Brien’s team are certified arborists. Also, O’Brien’s has been accredited by the Tree Care Industry Association, the so-called “Voice of Tree Care,” which has been helping tree-care businesses flourish since 1938. This business growth program it gives tree-care companies such as O’Brien’s the tools needed to strengthen the foundation of their businesses and construct a successful future.
“I started this business out of the ground, and I’ve been doing it now for 23 years,” he says. “I have guys on the crew who have been doing this kind of tree work for 10 years or more. We’re all local guys. We all like what we do, and we know what we’re doing.”
O’Brien’s currently serves residential, commercial and municipal customers throughout Chester, Delaware and western Montgomery counties, as well as parts of northern Delaware. Within the next five years, O’Brien expects to add Bucks County to its service area. In addition to tree removal and pruning, O’Brien’s also performs services such as deadwood removal, lot/land clearing, stump grinding and property grading. Everything is done to beautify customers’ properties and/or remove hazards, such as dead or dying trees, all in a worry-free, environmentally responsible manner.
“We have a log truck that removes material from the job site, and we also clear brush piles, taking everything with us,” he says. “Everything we do gets recycled or reused in some way.”
Giving back has long been a part of O’Brien’s business model. The company volunteers for notable area nonprofit organizations, including the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia’s Roxborough section. The center maintains an on-site Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic that cares for injured, sick or orphaned wildlife with the goal of reintroducing animals back into their natural habitat. O’Brien’s trims trees on the center’s property and does other site cleanup so staff members can focus on rehabbing animals and other essential duties.
Clearly, O’Brien’s Tree Service is in a class by itself. Considering all that it brings to the table in its devotion to protecting customers’ life and limb, some might even be tempted to describe the company as above the rest.
O’Brien’s Tree Service
1148 Conestoga Road
Chester Springs, PA 19425
484-576-6577 | www.obrienstreeservice.com
Photograph by Paul Reitano
