The History of Davey Tree

Matt Fredmonsky, manager of corporate content at Davey, shares his knowledge about the history of Davey Tree, from John Davey's start in tree care to the employee acquisition. 

In this episode we cover:  

• John Davey (0:45)
  • Davey's move to the U.S. (2:41)
  • The Tree Doctor (4:00)
• Building Davey Tree (5:13)
• Davey's Employee Ownership (6:09)
• Benefits of Employee Ownership (7:48)
• Davey Tree in the 1980s (8:36)
• Davey Archives (9:50)
• Doug's history with Davey (11:25)
• A Focus on Employee Education (12:03)
• Davey Tree Expert Company of Canada (14:27)
• The Future of Davey (15:25)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.  

To learn more about  Davey Tree's history, click here.

To get your copy f Davey books, Green Leaves and Growth Rings, go to shopdaveytree.com

To learn more about careers at Davey, go to Jobs.Davey.com.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you! 

Transcript

Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more, because here at The Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. This week we have a great episode. We are looking at the deep and rich history of the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm joined by Matt Fredmonsky. He's Manager of Corporate Content for Davey. Matt, how are you doing?

Matt Fredmonsky: Good, How are you, Doug?

Doug Oster: I'm Doing great. As both of us being from the journalism backgrounds, we love telling our stories. Tell me the story. Start off with the story of John Davey.

Matt Fredmonsky: Sure. John's got a really fascinating story that goes in all sorts of different directions. The earliest story we have about him and things related to growing plants and taking care of plants starts when he was four years old. His dad was a farm manager, and I think John seeing what his dad did, as most kids do, wanted to emulate his parents. His dad taught him how to plant a potato crop. As a 4-year-old, this was essentially one potato that they cut in half and then buried it in the soil. He said, "John, this is basically how you take care of a plant, and you're going to learn to grow this thing and hopefully have a good harvest when the time comes." That's where everything started for John, was digging in the soil, planting potatoes in England as a little boy trying to emulate his father.

Doug Oster: About what year is that, are we thinking?

Matt Fredmonsky: John was born in 1846, so this would've been around 1850 in the area of Stawley, England.

Doug Oster: Then how does he get to the States, or does arboriculture start before he comes to the States?

Matt Fredmonsky: Really, he was focused on agriculture in his early life, of course, starting out like his dad did. He was a farmhand that was shopped out and worked for different farmers around England. It wasn't until his teens that he started to move up the ranks a little bit from farmhand to really learning how agriculture works. He did some studying in horticulture and floriculture in England before he came to the US in 1873.

Doug Oster: Where does he land in 1873?

Matt Fredmonsky: First, he came to Warren and he spent some time there. One of the businesses he had in Warren was a greenhouse. He was selling, I guess you would call it luxurious plants, mostly potted plants, flowers, things of that nature to folks. That was really the genesis of his plant healthcare business, if you will, here in the States. Then eventually he came to Kent around 1880. His first job here was basically managing the landscape at Standing Rock Cemetery here in Kent. That's where he really started to put into practice some of the theories he had about caring for trees and the landscape beyond farming and simple plants and lawns and things like that.

Doug Oster: That's interesting. It goes all the way back to Kent back then, and that Davey is still in Kent. That's really cool.

Matt Fredmonsky: We, throughout the years, have had some opportunities branch-out and go beyond Kent, and it's really been a focus of company management throughout history to stay where our roots are here in Kent.

Doug Oster: How did he start the company and how was it built?

Matt Fredmonsky: It really starts with The Tree Doctor. In 1901, he published his book The Tree Doctor. This was essentially his magnum opus, if you will. It was explaining to folks the importance of trees, why you should care for them, and how you can care for them. It was a small business that he had prior to the book being published where he was doing some simple landscape care around the city of Kent. When the book was published in '01, it really started to generate a buzz and really generate more calls for tree care and service to John. That was where things started to grow. He actually started looking at this as something that could be a viable business for the family.

Doug Oster: He was a very early influencer?

Matt Fredmonsky: Oh, most definitely. A lot of people don't realize that John Davey's name really is up there when you think of some of the great environmentalists of the time. John Muir in particular, folks like that.

Doug Oster: Then from there, all this time later, we have this huge company all across the country and in Canada. Talk about those initial steps in growth?

Matt Fredmonsky: The company was really, although we were spread out geographically and had a lot of folks in different locations throughout the early 1900s, it was still fairly small. We were doing, I think, about $11 million in total annual revenue in the late 1950s. To give you a sense of how that's grown, I think we're around 60 million in total annual revenue in 1979 when the company was acquired by the employees. Today, of course, we're over a billion dollars. It was really fairly small, especially through those Great Depression era years until the employees acquired the company, and then it just took off.

Doug Oster: Tell me a little bit about that, about the employee ownership? That's always something that's fascinated me about Davey, because when I interview the arborists about this, they're all just so excited about that. Every time I bring that up, it's just a great topic for them.

Matt Fredmonsky: In '77, the Davey family had run out of people who could serve as president and run the company. It was at that time that they decided they were going to put it up for sale. The employees at the time didn't want to see the company sold to a competitor. They didn't want to see it sold to a conglomerate and maybe broken up and just dissolved. They really banded together as Davey employees tend to do, and they sat down and figured out, "Okay, how can we make this thing a possibility for us to become the owners?" It just galvanized so many people, especially in the core leadership of the company, into realizing that they could not just work for some family or hierarchy or board or shareholders, they could really work for each other and make it go.

It was this long process. It was about 18 months where they were trying to figure out the financials and they were trying to figure out if personally, financially they could make it work. They were trying to get offers together to offer them to the family and the board. They had to fend off other folks, other companies who were trying to buy the company and were competing to buy Davey. Ultimately, they were successful, thankfully. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here talking about it today.

Doug Oster: What are the positives for the employees to be part of the company in that manner?

Matt Fredmonsky: Employee ownership really is something that unites us from a cultural perspective. We're working for ourselves, we're taking better care of the equipment because we are owners. We have more control over the future direction of the company. We don't have to deal with outside investors who might be stipulating some corporate actions and business actions that we take. It really does give us a sense of control and ownership.

Doug Oster: That gets us to the late '70s. Talk a little bit about this continuing evolution and growth.

Matt Fredmonsky: It was really in the '80s, a couple of years after the employee acquisition happened in '79, that we started to see exponential growth in terms of the employee size, where we're operating, total annual revenue in sales. If you talk to the older folks and you look at some of the oral histories we've done in the archives, it really is attributed to that sense of camaraderie and ownership of the company that employee ownership facilitated, because they really needed to make this thing work. One, because personally they took out loans to help make the acquisition happen.

The company borrowed money, which it had to pay back in order to buy shares from the Davey family so that it could become employee-owned. They had this big obligation in terms of financial debt that they had to take care of. That wasn't the only driver, but it was a pretty important one. Again, just the fact that they cared about the business, they cared about each other, the environment and what they were doing for it, that really just drove them in a positive direction.

Doug Oster: Tell me about the archives, because with both of us having a similar background, I could spend hours, days, weeks looking through those archives. Do you spend time with those archives and what's some cool stuff that's in there? You're talking about a long history.

Matt Fredmonsky: Yes, so when I tell people that I work in the company archives, I like to think of that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones where they're like wheeling that box into this huge warehouse of just labeled boxes and it's just, you don't know what's in there. Really, our archives are a lot smaller, but that's a little bit of what we do, is cataloging stuff that's a piece of history and then filing it away for, hopefully, potential future display in a museum or some other kind of display space. Some of the neat things that we have in the archives are old handsaws that date to the '50s. We've got old chainsaws from the '50s, '60s, and '70s.

We've got an old climbing saddle that's probably from the '30s. Old ladders that were used before we had bucket trucks. That was one way that they got up into the trees. Some of the old scientific tools that they used and soil testing kits from the '20s. Our richest collection is probably our black and white photographs, but some of those old tools, hand tools that the guys really used, that the crews used, are just really neat to look at.

Doug Oster: My history with Davey goes back to the '80s, living in Ohio. We all, that's who you use. You use Davey Tree. You see that green truck? That's going to do your work. Since that time, and even today, I talk about this often on the podcast, twice a year I have the team here living in this declining oak forest. Thank goodness I do, because they're looking up when I should be looking up. Just the technical skill of watching them with a guy at the bottom with a rope, a guy at the top with a rope, and a supervisor watching everything, it's pretty amazing to see, I think.

Matt Fredmonsky: That's something that hasn't changed much, is educating our employees. That's been a focus of ours going way back to John's days when we founded our first Davey Institute of Tree Sciences in 1909. I think that's something that relates today, is that education is an important part of our safety culture, because whether it's job briefings, tailgates, all of the materials that we have available to keep our folks safe are part of that curriculum, and just thinking about educating everybody so that they can continue to stay safe.

Doug Oster: Matt, I actually did a podcast where three Davey employees were one of many who came to Kent and spent actually four weeks learning all sorts of things and testing, and they all just loved it. I guess that part of the company, as it's evolved, for me, that's just amazing.

Matt Fredmonsky: Yes, so DITS is a really great program that dates back to 1909 when John founded it. The intent there was twofold. One was to educate our employees in John's method of tree surgery, which was very specific and was tied to a lot of patents. He wanted them doing things the right way, right? Do it right or not at all. That's one of our original company mottos. The second component of that was that this was held in the winter months as it is today when landscape work typically slowed down. He wanted to retain his best employees.

When work orders picked back up in the spring, send them back out there better equipped to do an even better job than they did before. DITS is really neat. A while ago, I got a history request on it for some research. RJ and the folks at the Institute are probably going to kill me for throwing this number out there [chuckles]. My rough math is about 5,000 Davey employees over the years have attended that program. It's really a ton of folks who have just been really thoroughly educated in proper tree care.

Doug Oster: I know the company is still growing. When did Canada come into this? Was it early on that Canada became part of the company or was it later in the evolution?

Matt Fredmonsky: Canada was there almost from the beginning. We've got some information that suggests like probably around 1911, we had crews working in Canada but at that time it was probably folks who were US employees who were migrating across the border to handle work demands that were trickling across. Probably because we had a lot of crews working in New York, even in Ohio, we're fairly close to the border. That's what we think it was at that time. It was in 1930 that the Davey Tree Expert Company of Canada was actually founded in the Toronto area. They've just continued to grow along with us since then.

Doug Oster: Before I let you go, what are we thinking about the future of Davey? What's coming up?

Matt Fredmonsky: In long-term, that's a great question. If I had a crystal ball, I'd love to look into it and find the answer. I think that if Davey is true to its history, we've always been focused on our employees. I'm going to guess that that's where we're going to continue to go in 30, 40, 50 years from now. Employees will be talking about how much the company is investing in their training, in their safety, in their ownership, and really just setting them up to be the best arborists that they can be.

Doug Oster: Matt, I can't tell you how much fun that was to hear about that history. When I come to Kent, you and I are going to spend some time in those archives poking around looking for some cool stuff. Thanks again for your time and all the great information.

Matt Fredmonsky: Sounds great. Happy to help you, Doug.

Doug Oster: It was really fun to learn all that cool stuff about the genesis and evolution of Davey. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Now, tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster, and do me a big favor, subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss an episode. If you've got an idea or a comment about the show, please send me an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S @ davey.com. As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, you know it, trees are the answer.

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