Consultant
Phil Giordano
Founder and Consultant, Grade-A Tree Care
Felici “Phil” Giordano is a Kansas City native. He started tree work in 1980. Most of the first decade and a half was line-clearance — the kind of climbing you do around energized conductors for Kansas City Power & Light — and then union work. He became president and lead negotiator for the IBEW local that represented those crews.
The company exists because of one storm. On October 22–23, 1996, a surprise ice storm glazed the metro. People still call it the October Surprise. KCPL and the contractors could not keep up. Phil spent the following months taking trees off houses, opening streets, and cutting what the ice had already killed. Grade A Tree came out of that winter.
“That storm did not create a marketing story. It created a queue of yards that needed a crew who would actually show up.”
What 1980 still teaches a 2026 job
Phil has watched the same streets lose American elms, then ash, then the Austrian and Scots pines people planted as cheap screens. When a Leawood homeowner asks why a 40-year-old pine went brown in six weeks, he does not reach for a slogan. He talks pinewood nematode, sawyer beetles, and why K-State has been telling eastern Kansas to stop planting Scots pine.
Same with ash. Wyandotte County confirmed emerald ash borer in 2012. Johnson County followed in 2013. The removals we still do in Overland Park and Shawnee are the tail of that wave. Phil’s value on those jobs is not a certificate framed in the lobby. It is having seen what a dying ash does to a driveway when nobody budgets for the removal.
Consultant, not a mascot
Johnny bought the company in 2023. Phil stayed on as consultant. That is a real job here. Large removals, storm nights, and anything that looks like a vascular wilt still get his eyes. He is the person we call when a red oak in Prairie Village browns from the top in July and a neighbor has three more pin oaks inside 50 feet.
He also still thinks like a line-clearance man. If a silver maple is riding a service drop on a Grandview bungalow, the question is not “can we save the limb.” The question is how we take it without dropping the line or the porch roof.
- Storm damage and ice-loaded hardwoods
- Utility and service-drop clearance
- When a tree is a takedown, not a treatment
- Kansas-specific killers: pine wilt, EAB, oak wilt, bagworms
The October Surprise, in plain terms
October 1996 was not the first ice Kansas City had seen, and it was not the last. It was the storm that taught Phil the company had to be built for the week after the news crews left. That is still how we staff 24-hour emergency work. The phone is answered. A crew is not “added to a list.”
Affiliations we can actually name
- IBEW (former president and lead negotiator)
- Kansas City Power & Light (former)
- Grade-A Tree Care