Trey Rosenbaum

“Fifteen years ago, I started running a landscape consulting business on the side, but a year and a half ago, I made it official. Now, I own Natural State Land Consulting.

‍One of our biggest challenges is finding workers. The rising wages in Arkansas due to minimum wage keeps me from hiring highschoolers or really anyone who I have to hold their hand a little bit. People just aren’t ready for the workforce. There aren’t people with the right degrees in my field, because only a handful of colleges offer them. Tradesmen are mostly what I need, but I can’t find them. 

Even if I do find someone qualified for the job, the government makes it difficult to hire them. I want to start them at twenty dollars an hour, but I also have to pay for healthcare, benefits, bonuses, employment taxes, state taxes, workers compensation, etc. By the time I’ve paid for all of that, the employee costs me forty dollars an hour. I can’t afford that.

‍There’s also a lack of motivation among people to work. The people in the manual labor crowd are on government benefits right now, and they’re making too much to get a job. Sometimes, they only want to work a few hours a week to keep from crossing a certain income threshold. They don’t want to lose their benefits, so they’re impossible to hire.

In regard to taxes…the instructions regarding sales tax in Arkansas are far more difficult than in other states. Lots of landscapers struggle to figure out how to tax labor. I have a tax exempt form for material that I resell to customers, but the problem is, I don’t know where to draw the line. What if I rent equipment? What if I use my own? What if, what if… I just tax everything. I don’t understand it.

At one point, I ended up paying penalties for eight months, all because I couldn’t get a firm answer on what I was supposed to charge sales tax on. Some months I overpaid; other months, my taxes showed up late because I couldn’t figure out when my due date was. They kept sending me late payment notices, but they couldn’t even send my PIN in the mail.

Another issue is that sales tax is really high in smaller suburban areas. I can’t do work in certain towns because by the time I tack on that twelve percent tax rate, I’m barely making a profit. If there was no sales tax for labor or other services, the market would be more competitive. I would be able to do more work in smaller towns where a lot of the demand is.

I want to have employees. I’d like to have two small crews and have all the equipment bought and paid for. I want to make more money and donate to charities, pay my employees well, and invest in my kids. I need hirable employees, but there are none. I need a better tax structure.

Despite these problems, I still love Arkansas. What I love most is that everybody knows everybody. I can be working in a neighborhood, and my client’s neighbor will come up to me and say they know me from somewhere. My friends in bigger cities and states lack that sense of community. I’m always inviting people to move here.”

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‍Trey Rosenbaum‍

Arkansan, entrepreneur, and owner of Natural State Land Consulting

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