Steven P

Look in the tip sites - link above

90k - if you compare yourself to pretty much all 27 year olds then you are well ahead of them, average being just a little under 25k, and the upper 10% starting at about half what you think is an OK salary for a business owner. So at that, and even at 50k you are well ahead of pretty much all your mates. Again, a 50k desk job will be double their average salaries too. Internet reckons an average business owner - the founder running it day to day which sounds like you are on mid £40ks - - which will have all the stresses you do with staffing, booking jobs, potentially the overheads of an office to keep up and so on. Which brings me to a small question then - to take 90k out of the business, what does the turn over have to be? That might be the answer you want. If you work hard, get a good turn over, then you might expect better rewards, the internet reckons 2% of turn over is decent, ranges from 1% to 10% which would suggest your business turn over from 900K upwards - assuming the upper 10% because the overheads might be less - need tools and vehicles but no expensive city centre offices. Final thought on all of this is how much you are returning into the business - tools, training, advertising, cash for a rainy day,. and so on. Last final thing, I wanted to pick you up on the freelance climbers wages, a day rate, less 4 weeks holiday, plus bank holidays, sick days, money into a pension, insurances, machines, 'company' vehicle and so on - their take home won't be near 57k less tax. That is if they can get work every other day of the year - not sure they will. Same with all contractors, the rate sounds great till you deduct everything and take account that they don't work 200 days in the year

Will the saw clean OK in the washing machine too?

So the way I see it working is that the local tree companies are pretty well set up with what they do with their waste - whether it is their own yard, locals, or wherever. You are unlikely to get masses of offers from them unless they are quite local to you, and your house is nearer than their base. Companies from outside the area are more likely to be looking for somewhere to tip rather than drive a load of logs lots of miles back to their base - and of course that is less work, and you'd get a call if you are between theirs and the job site. Don't think you will be turning them away daily. Remember you are offering them a service and so it has to be worth their while - not many will drive a lot out of their way. However when it works it works well, and build relationships with those that come will lead to more (in fact they might win more work locally knowing they can cut the cost of going to the local tip)

If it isn't nailed down.... leave a single (working) light bulb in the hall I think. Mind 10 years later we are still using the fridge, freezer, wheel barrow (new bucket though), desk chair, curtains, and a couple of light bulbs that were left for us. Ditched the cooker cause it was proper minging.

Fire today, but got coal delivery at the weekend (it can sit in the garage till next season) - I tend to burn a bucket from each sack to make them easier to carry, probably an age thing, else wouldn't have bothered, 19 deg first thing in the coldest spot of the house, no need at all for a fire

Listed as free now - perhaps understanding that retail price doesn't equal the price on the ground? With better pictures and perhaps gathered together into a pile where someone can assess better how much there is he could probably get something from a local. Free and they should go at the weekend. nearly £600 and I suspect the add would be there for a while

£595, the photo's don't do it justice, looks about next door to nothing, there must be more hidden behind the photographer

£6!! I am coming to live near you then, my nearest supermarket breakfast is £6 -each- without a drink, certainly Hagar the cook isn't Gordon Ramsey. Blown over? Crumpled I would guess to avoid taking out the fence

Happens in other industries too where the training is expensive but competition for employees is there. Being honest with the employees gets a return - you get some bad apples but you can ditch them along the way, the good ones you keep. A mate has his own business, first 5 years was constant staff turn over, reducing over time, but after that he had a core team who worked for the business. Money isn't everything but will encourage a disenchanted employee to look somewhere else. Being a decent boss is worth a few ££ in a pay packet, £10 on a random box of doughnuts just because it is a Wednesday is worth many times that. But - as above you have to recognise problems and fix them quick.

So just to clarify why the answers aren't really being serious..... I doubt this is 2 tonnes of wood but.... For a fire wood business: Collect the wood, say 1 hour round trip, 60 miles just to give a figure £30, drivers and mates time, 2 man hours at £15 each way. That is a minimum of £90 expenses to turn up at your house Load the van, very helpful postcode you have given, and the photos show a terrace / row of flats, with limited parking and access via a narrow stair, loading would be another hour I reckon, so that's another £50 of expenses (working 'men' cost more than ones being driven in my line of work, hourly rate is higher). Before they leave give you what you are looking for? £100? Unloading at the other end, just tip, no time required but you do need a yard Turning into logs - a lot of this is small stuff, not sure how a processor would deal with that, might have to be manually cut and split. 2 tonnes of logs would take me 2 or 3 hours manually (for Silver Birch), so say another £50. Where are we at? Say £290 in expenses, add profit for the business, employee NI or contractors rate, insurance, and that turns into £350+ just to collect and make firewood. Now lets put these logs through a kiln or air dry them for a year. Air drying... £25 with handling So need to sell these 2 tonnes for about £450 to make any money at all (with delivery) .. it isn't making a lot of financial sense so far. 2 tonnes will turn into a lot less firewood with waste and what cannot be made into saleable logs. Back to my first comment though, not convinced from the photos that that would create 2 tonnes of logs. So for a domestic user, £100 to hire a van £20 to buy a mate a breakfast £100 for you Collect the logs, load up, dump at their house Spend time making logs and storing them for a year, perhaps add in a new saw chain, oil, fuel, and so on Cost of £250 for someone to collect them themselves in one go See the finances aren't adding up really here. If I lived around the corner and could collect a car boot of logs each time I was passing then my cost would be whatever I gave you for the logs. 1 hour in your garden cutting to car boot length and stacking for easy access. Perhaps this forum is the wrong one for this - though you might get someone local who will take them, might even help you tidy the garden in exchange (rake up the branches and so on) Assuming that you had a tree surgeon take down the tree - 2 or 3 tonnes is a professional job - there is a reason why they weren't biting your hand off to take the logs away even while they had the kit and man power there to do the work Sorry to say, gumtree or facebook adds might be the way to go and get some cash from it, advertising on here and the finances don't add up for most of the members -EDIT- For reference in the first picture there is a stick in the middle - about 12kgs? Pick it up fairly easily one handed, you'd need 150 of these to make 2 tonnes

The watering can confuses me, are you out watering the trees with that?.... I think I said in the last post the I am not convinced that a fast growing tree puts down enough 'tree', so you might get a nice big tree, the energy stored in it won't be as much as a slower grown tree - I think. However it will still be creating a store of energy to burn. On the other side though they should dry quicker than slower growing trees so harvesting to burning in a season and not several seasons? Good and bad points. Interesting post and good to see it working - will see next winter if you are complaining of being cold I guess? (saying that I have just 'planted' 60 willow sticks with the intention of some fire wood in 5 or 6 years time also - planting being "shove the stick in the ground an hour before it rans and hope for the best" - some are surprisingly sprouting!)

What are your running costs for the kit? add in the purchase cost divided by their life, and some maintenance costs, and divide into hours, then add in your wages and mark up for the company / business costs (insurance, advertising and so on) and that will be the minimum you can ask for won't it? For your competition I guess it all depends where you live, a remote area in the South East / London catchment area is going to be a lot more than a remote area such as the Shetlands I think. Final comment, how much can you process an hour - not flat out but at a speed you can do all day, and that will dictate the market rate I think - retail price for a load of local logs, take off 1/3 for their profit to get their maximum costs and then - which are the cost of the wood, drying and processing Not a very useful answer I know but it is quite variable what to charge.... though some one will no doubt say charge till you are near the point where the phone stops ringing!!

Zero hours contracts get bad press, but assuming that some weeks there is work, some none then giving him a contracted number of hours -could- be problems in the future even if they total hours works evens out. Suppose he is short of money one week, no work, you get the phone call "but the contract says you'll pay me for 10 hours work regardless".. However for every horror story out there most firms employ people, the cities are full of office blocks with employees in them, so it must work out well. All I'd perhaps say is be prepared to say no to requests unless you are being unreasonable (so an occasional early dart to pick the kids up is OK, but if it is every day at 2:30 and "I've got to go get the kids" then you need to set boundaries). Remember with employment however much you like them with the business you have to treat them as employees for a lot of stuff, keep a distance and stick to the routines.

Most free wood can be burnt in a wood burner, if you are offering an incentive to the local tree surgeons, then that wood will definitely burn (If I give away some home baking, beers or notes for logs then I am pretty sure I will make it burn!!) Another top tip is to walk about - fresh air is good - and as you do listen for 2 stroke engines - that might be a chain saw at work and the waste needing to go somewhere (though often can be a hedge trimmer or a strimmer), and give the local tree surgeons a call, they arn't all on here, and see how that goes too

Never heard of it but google helps!! So, no but they look nice in blossom, so why not? Only comment about fast growing trees - hardwoods or softwoods - is that a greater volume doesn't necessarily mean more fuel (think willow vs. oak),

Won't help identifying the tree but from the angles of the photos, does the tree belong to the client / customer or their neighbour? Just curious.

For future, it might be better to ask if people who know him to ask him to contact you - I wouldn't pass on anothers contact details to someone I don't know - while 90% have good reasons to get back in touch, some do not and I would give the searched for the option whether to be in touch or not

When I was in school the teachers pushed us all to university (looks good for the school if large percentages go to further education), so that's where I went. If I had been a fireman for example, straight from school, or the police, I'd be retired now with a pension, but that's another thing. I was on holiday last week (UK caravan park), and on changeover day at 10:00 a bus load if immigrants (and it was a bus load) walked through the site with their cleaning trolleys - still earning the same minimum wage that a local would earn with the added hassles for the holiday park to check all their employment status and bus them in - locals wouldn't need that (by the way, the place was spotless, cleaners did well). The press was reporting last year that farms cannot get labourers (If I remember rightly, once daffodil picking with bonus on a piece rate paid better than a lawyer). Point is 'the system' will push as many kids to further education as they can, whether it is the best thing or not, and the manual jobs are looked down on by many with a degree. Once you get into the work system making a career jump is harder. Finances - when I did the sums, and a £45k student debt (for England), 5 years of 'economic inactivity' while you do exams and a degree then start at the bottom of the ladder, compared to a 5 year apprenticeship or training, no debt and earning, you kind of even out in your mid to late 30s who is better off - university graduates tend to get ahead a bit later in life... if the apprenticeship route stays as an employee - go it alone and they will be financially better off till nearer retirement. Same in all industries.

and here is another..... my stove puts out heat into the living room and also via the upstarts chimney breast - but that secondary heating upstairs only kicks in when the stove has been running for a while and the brickwork heats up. So if you are only using your stove for a couple of hours a day your brickwork isn't going to get noticeably warm. Yup, go through the stove and check off where it might need maintenance - they are full of consumables and parts to maintain - sweep the flue (once or twice a year), fire bricks (vermiculite, fire clay or a cast refractory), register plate, door seals, glass seals, (and glass), clean the air ways and so on, even as far as dislodging crows nesting in the chimney. Assuming the stove has been well installed, chimney the right height, air space around the stove (else the hearth gets hot but the heat can't get out), and a stove fan can help too. Fuel is important in the mix - go soft woods and spend time just feeding the stove and see how hot you can get it (some hard woods burn less fiercely but sit burning for hours, a good softwood will vanish but put out a short load of heat), big lumps of wood burn slower than kindling, but guess you know all this. If I was struggling (and when I do) an good clean is the first option though, solves most things

Ash isn't hard work to split, Willow it more work

To soon in the year to have leaves to help identify the tree. A pile of wood like that could be lots of thing - recently had an Alder but looking at some of smaller branches you'd think it was ash at a first glance. How heavy are the larger pieces? Willow will be lighter than ash for example, and have you got a close up of the ends - growth rings closer together or further apart (Willows tend to grow quick, ash slower).

If local to me is any guide, double fronted garage, double width drive and a nod that the bus stop is 1/4 mile away with 4 buses an hour, but no re-routed bus service even when there are 100+ new houses. Oh, and the local jobs are not in town either, but Glasgow so each of these cars will be making a 15+ mile round trip 5 days a week.

Kind of goes with what I do with my apples, take away any thing that is obviously dead or looking 'off' (diseased), take them back to where they originate from, then look at any branches that are crossing each other and touching - get rid of which ones you think you should and then keep the inside open so that it is more of a goblet - open in the inside - rather than a mass of branches, Apples ripen with sunlight, so need to let them get access to that. After that if you want a shape go for it. The cooker in the back I have let let go a bit - trimmed back the branches part way and late last year purely so I could get past with the mewer,., and the branches low down went mad., The ones I did in the spring - the high up ones and trimmed back more carefully have done as they should. Apples are fairly robust (most fruit trees are), get it wrong and it just takes time for them to recover and then to fix what you need to - examples here are My Boys tree was snapped off at ground level, last spring sprouted again, and next doors pears were butchered 6 years ago but are slowly coming back again now, Dad used to cut his cherry tree down every 10 years, grew back again OK

(reminds me, clear crayon, draw on the walls before I sell and move "LEAVE", that should make the next few coats of paint interesting.)