By Jimmy Miller
Pat Covey believes just about everyone who works at the Davey Tree Expert Company has seen the photograph.
Covey joined the company in 1991 and is now the team’s chairman, president and CEO. In front of dozens of employees and invited guests Friday, Covey celebrated the company’s completed renovations of its corporate headquarters in Kent, Ohio.
But first, Covey contemplated the crossroads it took to reach this point. He says he often wonders what would’ve happened if John Davey hadn’t moved to Kent in 1880 to become what the company calls “the Father of Tree Surgery.” What would’ve happened if Covey had never found a small ad in the Akron Beacon Journal promoting Davey Tree?
But Covey talked most about the crossroads depicted in the photograph. It’s a picture of Jim Pohl, Jack Joy and Doug Cowan, members of the employee ownership committee, signing the deal in March 1979 with attorneys looking on. The Davey family was in its third generation and couldn’t find someone who wanted to run the company. There were shareholders who wanted to cash out. That’s when private equity companies in New York came knocking.
“They were headed well down the path of becoming private equity owned or being owned by someone else outside the family,” Covey says. “109 employees pooled together their money, whatever they could come up, and offered the Davey Company away to sell it back to the employees.”
It was a big moment for the company, which ranked No. 2 on Lawn & Landscape’s Top 100 list last year. It now employs over 12,000 people and pulled in $1.5 billion dollars in revenue in 2023. On the heels of the 45th anniversary of that signing, Covey believes Davey Tree is on the right trajectory to surpass $2 billion or more in the next five years.
The newest company crossroads? A completely updated corporate headquarters and development of its nearby Science, Employee Education and Development campus, which will open in Summer 2025. Davey Tree added a third wing spanning 38,4000 square feet to its corporate headquarters, which first opened in 1984. Construction started in 2020 and wrapped up in November 2022, which is when Lawn & Landscape last had a look at the Davey Tree campus.
The company also just completed renovations on its existing North and South wings to match the updates in the third wing, placing an emphasis on features like soft seating collaborative areas, environmentally friendly lighting and modernized work stations with desks that adjust heights at the push of a button. The company also redid its meeting rooms and company café area, plus it constructed a sizable gym with a full locker room.
In all, the company’s headquarters includes spaces for 370 workstations. The third wing made room for 70 more jobs at Davey Tree.
Davey Tree’s SEED Campus is currently being built across the street. Once completed, the 170-acre property will house educational classrooms, a 10,700-square-foot indoor climbing center, laboratories, greenhouses and multiple research plots with over 500 species. It’s also on schedule to receive LEED certification.
“Kent, Ohio, has been an integral part of Davey Tree for over 140 years,” Covey says. “Davey continues to show our unwavering support to the Kent community and Northeast Ohio, and the completion of our corporate office renovations is an example of our commitment.”
