The service area
Where We Work
We work with local businesses across the United States. This metro is home, and it's the one market where the local knowledge is already ours.
Nationally, and from here
We work across the United States. This is the part we know without asking.
Nothing about what we do requires us to be down the road from you. We’ve built a hundred-page site for a commercial tree service in Plano, Texas, and the work was no different for the distance. Reviews, answering, follow-up and a website all run from anywhere, and local search cares where you sit relative to your customers, not where we sit relative to you.
What being here does give you is one market we don’t have to research. Vancouver and Portland are twenty minutes apart across a bridge, they share a labor market, a media market and a weather forecast, and they sit in two different states.
This one isn’t a market we picked. It’s where we live. Our founder was born about ninety miles downriver in Astoria, the small coastal town where the Columbia finally reaches the Pacific. The same river that makes the state line here is the one he grew up at the end of.
For a local business that isn’t a technicality. A company working both sides answers to two regulators, files under two tax systems, and is asked different questions by customers depending on which end of the bridge they live at.
It also means a lot of general advice about local marketing is wrong here in a specific way, because it assumes the answers travel. Across this river they don’t.
What changes at the water
Same drive, different rulebook.
Start with who is allowed to do the work. Oregon licenses contractors through the Construction Contractors Board, and the rule is broad: anyone working for compensation on any construction activity involving improvements to real property needs a CCB license. There’s no dollar threshold. It turns on what the work is, not what it costs.
Two details in that are worth knowing if you’re in one of these trades. Tree servicing is named on the list, alongside roofing, electrical and HVAC. And gutter cleaning, pressure washing and debris cleanup are outside it, because Oregon draws its line at improvements rather than maintenance.
Washington calls the same idea something else and prices it differently. Labor & Industries requires Contractor Registration: a $30,000 bond for a general contractor, $15,000 for a specialty contractor, and liability cover of either $200,000 plus $50,000 property damage or $250,000 combined.
Then the money. Oregon has no statewide sales tax, one of five states with none. Washington has no personal income tax on wages, and pays for that with a Business and Occupation tax charged on gross receipts, where a business can’t deduct labor, materials, or any other cost of doing business.
Read that last one twice if you’re thinking about crossing north. B&O is owed on revenue, not on profit. A Washington business that had a flat year still writes the check.
None of this is advice and all of it moves, so check it at the source before you act on it. The point here is narrower: a marketing company that has never noticed the river is going to write you the same page it wrote for somebody in Ohio.
The service area
Fifteen cities, on both sides of the bridge.
This is where the trucks actually go and where the work actually is. Vancouver is home. Portland is the other half of the metro, and the smaller cities either side are close enough to serve properly rather than nominally.
Washington
Oregon
Being listed above means we work there. Four of them also have a page. A page only gets written when there’s something to say about a city that wouldn’t be true of the one next to it, which is a slower business than adding names to a list. These four had something.
Cities with a page of their own
Both halves of the metro are broken out in full elsewhere: all 71 Vancouver neighborhoods and the eleven unincorporated county areas, and all 93 Portland neighborhoods and the six sextants.
Straight answer
So what changes if you’re somewhere else.
Less than you’d think, and we’d rather say that plainly than pretend distance is a problem so the local list looks more important. A business ranks in a shape around its own address. Being three states away from us changes nothing about that shape. Being three states away from your own customers changes everything about it.
The one honest difference is the learning. Half of what makes a local page work is knowing which questions have a different answer in that particular town, and here we already know where those lines are because we live on one of them. Somewhere else we go and find them, deliberately, before anything gets written. That’s work rather than a problem, and it’s the same work either way.
Which is why the list above is short. It’s where we can answer a local question without looking it up, not the edge of where we’ll work.
The trades and practices we work with are listed here, and everything we do is here.
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