Swift Tree Services | Tree Surgery Case Study
How Adam and Stephen took Swift Tree Services from survival mode to £150k revenue growth and 25–30% net profit — by rebuilding how their business worked, not just how hard they did.
They weren’t failing. By every external measure, they were succeeding.
That was the problem.
THE SITUATION
Adam Lawson and Stephen Warner founded Swift Tree Services in Poynton, Cheshire, thirteen years ago. They built it the way most trades businesses get built — on reputation, on graft, on never letting a customer down. By the time they came across My TrueNORTH, they had a business that looked, from the outside, like a success story.
Inside, it felt very different.
THE CHALLENGE
The business had grown. The workload had grown with it. And somewhere in that growth, Adam and Stephen had stopped being directors of a tree surgery company and become its most important operatives — the ones everything ran through, the ones who couldn’t switch off, the ones the whole thing depended on.
In Adam’s own words:
“We were going out there very competitive with our pricing — if anything, a little bit too competitive. Our stress levels increased. Our time at work increased up to six days a week every week. We felt good and busy, but we were also very close to being burnt out.”
Stephen recognised the same pattern from his own position in the business:
“You start to lose the love of it. You start to find it just more of a headache. You don’t know how you’re going to improve it, and you don’t know whether or not you still want to do it.”
This is the trap I see most often with business owners who are good at what they do. The competence that built the business becomes the ceiling it can’t grow beyond. You can’t be in two places at once. And when everything runs through you, the business can only move as fast as you can.
Adam described reaching a fork in the road. Keep going the same way and risk losing everything — or find a different way through.
They put the white flag up. And they reached out.
THE WORK
Adam and Stephen came into the Pillars of Progress™ programme — a twelve-session structured engagement focused on one specific outcome: getting the people, systems, and processes of a business working well enough that the owner can step back from the day-to-day and start leading rather than doing.
When we started, Swift Tree Services was operating with one and a half teams. Adam and Stephen were both working full time in the business — on the tools, in the cab, quoting jobs, managing problems.
The work began with an honest audit of how the business actually functioned: where the bottlenecks were, where the decisions were being made, and where the dependency on the two directors was built into the structure by default rather than by design.
Then we rebuilt it.
Team by team. System by system. Role by role.
Not quickly. Not painlessly. But methodically, with a clear destination in view.
THE INSIGHT
The shift that matters most in a business like Swift Tree Services isn’t operational. It’s psychological.
For thirteen years, Adam and Stephen had measured the business by how busy it kept them. The number of jobs. The hours on site. The speed of the response. These felt like the metrics that mattered because they were the metrics they could control.
What they hadn’t built was a business that could operate and grow without their physical presence in it.
The Pillars of Progress work is about making that shift real — not in theory, not on a whiteboard, but in the day-to-day structure of how a business actually runs. Who makes which decisions? How jobs are quoted and managed. How a team holds itself accountable without the director standing over it.
Adam’s reflection on what changed captured it simply:
“It’s not all about the cost of the business.”
The wage bill that had once felt like pressure became something different when the business was structured to absorb and justify it. Stephen described the feeling of operating three full teams — the point they reached by the end of the programme — as the moment the business finally felt like something:
“A company with a future.”
THE OUTCOME
By the end of the Pillars of Progress™ programme, Swift Tree Services had moved from one and a half teams to three. Adam and Stephen had shifted from working full time in the business to a 50/50 split — half their time still in operations, half working on the business as directors.
That structural change showed up clearly in the numbers at their 25/26 year-end.
Revenue increased by £150,000. Crucially, that growth came entirely from tree work — not from rental income or any other revenue stream. It was a direct result of increased operational capacity and the team model they had built.
Net profit landed at approximately 25–30% — a figure their accountant confirmed was a very healthy margin for the industry, especially during a year of significant structural change.
Adam and Stephen’s own assessment of where they had arrived:
“The guidance and mentorship has made us both feel like the hard work is worth the effort. The numbers don’t lie.”
Their total investment in the Pillars of Progress™ programme: £7,700+VAT.
Their revenue uplift in year one: £150,000.
(That’s a 1,848% ROI!)
THE LEGACY
Swift Tree Services was never a failing business. It was a successful business that had outgrown its structure — and was running its owners into the ground in the process.
The work wasn’t about rescuing something broken. It was about rebuilding the foundations so that what Adam and Stephen had already built could do what they’d always intended it to do: give them a business that worked for them, rather than the other way around.
They came in burnt out, working six days a week, uncertain whether they still wanted to keep going.
They left with three teams, a 25–30% net profit margin, and a business their accountant calls healthy by any measure in their sector.
“It’s made a hell of a difference.”
Adam & Stephen | Co-Directors | Swift Tree Services | Pillars of Progress™
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In arduis fidelis.