Careers
Join Our Team
Vertical Forest Design is actively recruiting people who share in our vision.
Bringing products to market requires patience and deep knowledge of the end user.
When it comes to machinery and design, we are innovators, and we love to partner with other innovators to make the industry better. If you have ideas, the patience to develop those ideas, and a desire to help other tree people, Vertical Forestry can partner with you to make them a reality.
Innovation and design are important in the tree industry. Our products typically undergo a very careful development process. At Vertical Forestry, challenging old ideas is second nature. This attitude is the beginning of our design process, but we also value experience and design excellence. We have deep roots in the arboricultural community, and a commitment to bringing useful innovations to market.
When it comes to technology, we treat it like a friend; new friends are silver but old friends are gold! There’s nothing like keeping the old machines going for the long haul, and that’s another of our goals!
Vertical Forestry enthusiastically embraces the challenges and opportunities presented by machinery issues in the industry. Some business owners’ strong suit is arboriculture, not the machines that are the tools of the trade. We believe that for a business to be strong, some of the know-how for machinery needs to be in-house. WE delight in developing talent and helping business owners along the way.
Relying on third parties for every diagnosis or repair is expensive and ultimately takes control over clients’ projects away from the business. We would love to partner with you in building a strong maintenance and repair team within your business so that you can grow confidently for the future.
The foundation of good maintenance is good mechanics. Vertical Forestry can help you recruit and develop good mechanics to maintain your fleet. We also are able to assist with software and reporting issues. One of the key components of maintenance is finding careful, capable operators who will take good care of equipment in the first place. Another is timely reporting of issues and damages.
Involving everyone. Finding the right person for the safety & training role relates strongly to the maintenance issues, because accountability is the key for maintenance to be successful in the tree business. Trees are hard on equipment under the best of circumstances or can destroy equipment in months if accountability is lacking. Even a strong team of mechanics will become demoralized if they feel they are simply repairing others’ careless mistakes – over and over! That’s why successfully managing a fleet of machinery requires support across an organization. To assist with building this culture, Vertical can start the ball rolling with some training and support for your team.
Welding. One element of maintaining a fleet of tree equipment is welding & metalworking – tree equipment tends to get dented, twisted, or bent and metalwork is part of many repairs. In addition, there’s a nearly constant need for modification of equipment. Some modifications are simple – a reinforcing gusset, a bracket to hold a water cooler – and others are more involved, like repairing broken trailers. Either way, once your fleet grows past about 3 crews, it’s necessary to begin training the maintenance team on metalworking and proper welding repair.
Parts. Minor repairs constitute the bulk of repairs. Small items – like lights, pins, bolts, and fittings, should be fixed quickly and efficiently. But it can take significant time to go and get these things on an as-needed basis. Vertical Forestry can supply you with the most common parts used in Arboriculture and keep the stock current. This will allow mechanics to double their efficiency on repair work by eliminating the time spent o procuring parts for the smaller repairs, and lessening the time spent on major repairs.
Training. Vertical Forestry believes in training mechanics and providing them with the tools they need to succeed. We can provide detailed development plans and training programs, if appropriate, to bring your staff to higher levels.
One great way to lower the cost of equipment is to use it for more years. Regularly scheduled maintenance is the first thing that comes to mind, but there is also rebuilding – which refers to the re–capitalization of a piece of equipment to extend its useful life for a period of time. Usually, the cost of the rebuild is less than new equipment and the extension of its useful life is less than the life of brand-new equipment. There are some conditions that strongly warrant this kind of approach.
One of the most rewarding things we do is develop new products for the tree industry! Most arborists and tree people have a few ideas they’ve thought about. Bringing these ideas to fruition can be very rewarding. Our innovations fall into three broad categories.
Customization
The most common kind of innovation is the modification of existing products to make them better for the tree care industry. Many products or techniques are already in existence but have yet to be used in our industry. Often some small alterations or additional equipment can result in an excellent solution to a problem.
One example of this principle at work is the issue of partially fallen trees. When trees fall in storms, they often get hung up in another tree, utility lines, or even a house. These trees often need support just so they can be safely worked on. Vertical Forestry has employs two solutions for holding up partially fallen trees; timber-frame scaffold for propping them below and Tirfor® Grip-Hoists for holding them from above. The latter employ steel cables and offer a fully static support with many times the strength of rope and can be tensioned or slackened with precision control. Both solutions require adaptations to improve the efficiency of the device. For propping trees, we have developed specialized pads for quickly positing timbers under trees. For the grip hoists, we provide static pulleys (snatch blocks) and extra-wide webbing to allow the Grip-hoists to be anchored to other trees without damaging them. Together, these customizations allow these existing products to be used safely in our industry and allow tree work to proceed in otherwise dangerous conditions.
Our customizations go far; here is a partial list of the kind of work we do:
New Products
Occasionally we’ll make a completely new product. These endeavors can be time-consuming, especially if the project is extensive, but very rewarding. When considering whether to make a new product, we ask ourselves if it’s needed, and if we would use it in the tree business ourselves.
These projects can be very exciting – if you have an idea you’d like to share, please reach out! Just talking about the subject matter can be rewarding and result in improvement even if the design doesn’t come to fruition.
Here are a couple of the kinds of projects we can do in-house
Vertical Forest Design is actively recruiting people who share in our vision.
