At a glance

Since 2020, Altitude Arborist has roughly quadrupled in revenue. The team answering the phones and scheduling the work is still one person. This is the result of two leaders deciding what they wanted their company to be well before they were actually able to make it happen.

Hunter and Megan Townsend started Altitude in 2016, and the first purchase was a bucket truck and a chipper. Plenty of tree services start with a pickup and a saw. Hunter had run the plant health care program at Fort Collins Tree Care out of college, then managed a state forest, then spent a year at a local tree service before deciding he wanted to build his own business. Megan was practicing medicine and supporting Hunter on the side before joining full-time in 2021. They started with two goals, and Megan still states them in that order: take care of their people better than either of them had been taken care of, and take care of clients better than Hunter had seen it done. They started with the low-hanging fruit. The truck got graphics. The crew got matching arborwear shirts and that was just the beginning.

For the first few years, Altitude ran on QuickBooks and good old fashioned carbon copy. Handwritten estimates, top copy to the client, bottom copy filed alphabetically internally. It was impossible to stay organized and they quickly outgrew that and moved to ArborGold. It worked, but they received a level of service they were not willing to accept. When something broke or data went missing, support could not help. One data loss led to missed jobs and poor client experiences. Arborgold lost their trust and Altitude Arborist realized they needed to find a partner they could rely on. In 2021, the same year Megan left medicine, Altitude moved to SingleOps.

They quickly found that their onboarding specialist at SingleOps in 2021, Zack, embodied the type of reliability they were looking for. Megan and her team pushed Zack hard through their onboarding, asking questions that went past the standard walkthrough. When he did not have an answer, he went and researched and prepared an answer that gave them a solution and confidence in proceeding. 

Five years later, Zack is still their customer success manager. When Julie, Altitude’s plant health care manager, hits something she cannot work out, she books time with him directly. Megan calls SingleOps “the premier software in our industry,” and she says she wants to see it stay that way. The level of service and partnership that Megan’s team receives is what Altitude sets out to provide to their clients every day. 

For a long time Hunter was the bottleneck for how fast the business could quote. Their systems were manual and the work piled up for an owner that wears many hats. He still estimates work but he’s no longer the bottleneck. 

When he is stretched, the estimate goes to Julie, to their operations manager, or to Megan, who is clear that she has not done production work in years. Altitude prices by labor hours or by trunk diameter rather than by feel, so they put out consistent bids no matter who creates them. SingleOps’ estimate templates make it very easy to build bids based on costs for line-items that you’ve already built-in.

It changes the client conversation too. When someone asks for a discount, the number has a derivation behind it. “We’re able to stand behind it and say, this is how much it costs to do this work, because that’s how much it costs, not because we came up with an arbitrary number.”

The same logic reaches the field. Altitude’s crews are certified arborists, and they are equipped to act like it. If a neighbor walks up while they are on a job, they can price the work themselves, send it to the office, and the client can have a signed estimate that day. Selling or climbing, everyone has what they need to do the whole job.

Altitude’s estimates go out as branded digital documents with line items the client can toggle: included, recommended, optional. Terms and conditions are included at the bottom of every one. The client signs online, and the signature carries a date stamp.

Megan does not put a number on the win rate. What she will say is that the team gets through more estimates in a day because nobody is fighting the software, and that the professionalism compounds.

Altitude started its plant health care program around the same time it started with SingleOps, and Megan has never been quiet with us about what was missing. That feedback shaped what we built. The Tree Inventory that launched in early 2025 is the version Altitude advocated for.

Inventorying a tree requires entering its diameter at breast height (DBH), so this being built into their estimating workflow just makes sense. There is a DBH on every estimate now. The experience is smooth, professional, and clients love it. Altitude now benefits from a growing PHC division with SingleOps there supporting the work.

Altitude has roughly quadrupled since 2020. The number of admins to support client communications has not. That’s because SingleOps automates client follow-ups for bids, invoices, and more. 

One office manager runs phones, email, and every trim schedule for a business four times the size it was five years ago. SingleOps supports businesses that want to scale without adding a tremendous amount of overhead.

None of this holds up if the company underneath it is not rooted in core values, and Megan learned that over the years. People left, telling her on the way out that the job was not what she had described. “What we thought and said we were, wasn’t what we were in our team’s eyes” is how she puts it.

So she and Hunter wrote their values down years ago, with two rules: no more than six, and leadership has to embody them or they do not make the list. Community focused. Safety always. Positive attitude. Continuous improvement. Servant heart. Held up by forgiveness, accountability, integrity, and respect. Altitude now hires, promotes, and parts ways on that basis.

It is also how Megan decides who to work with.

There is a field in SingleOps where a company enters its core values. Megan says she used to be embarrassed that theirs was empty. It isn’t anymore. It’s now populated for every employee to see when they login.

In 2025 Altitude bought its first business, a small Boulder plant health care company whose owner, in his eighties, was ready to retire. Megan is teaching herself AI now, working out a secure setup before she puts it in front of the team.

Her reaction to pulling up 2020 again says most of it: “Oh my gosh, we only made like three hundred thousand dollars that year. To think that we were like, sure, we can just double in one year and support our family. No wonder Hunter was about to have a coronary.” 

They did double it and then they kept going. And the company that bought a bucket truck before it had clients is still the one deciding what it wants to be next. One thing that is for sure is that they’re proud to stand on their values and work with partners like Granum for the journey ahead.