Growing your business with the right equipment By Olivia Roy
J
ust about every serious snow contractor remembers what it was like to start out with one pickup truck and a plow. When the snow came, there was good money to be made. More importantly, you found your passion, grabbing every opportunity that came your way. You hired your friends, took on more customers, and dreamed of a bright financial future. However, dreams do not always turn into reality and, at some point, all attempts to further grow the business seem to hit a brick wall. The larger customers that you were attracting were more demanding, the crews were larger but not as reliable, and you found yourself worrying more and more about contracts, liability insurance, and the price of salt. You had more overhead, your equipment was aging, and your margins were being squeezed such that it felt like you were simply treading water. The problem stemmed from the fact that your efficiencies were too low to generate the profits needed to fuel your growth, and you most likely found yourself working day and night during every snowstorm at whatever task was necessary to simply stay afloat. That was the scenario for most every commercial snow contractor 20 to 14
25 years ago. Having a couple of large steady clients allowed some local growth, but trying to expand much beyond that was extremely challenging, especially in a very competitive market. Today, however, is a different story. In the last 10 to 15 years, the industry has had a significantly different experience whereby small companies have turned into hugely successful enterprises in a relatively short period of time, running fleets numbering in the hundreds. When recently surveying many of the largest selfperforming U.S. commercial snow contractors, two factors stood out far above the rest as making that possible. The first was the move away from truck fleets to construction equipment. The second was the introduction of a new type of hightech/high-efficiency snow pusher, starting around 2006.
Construction equipment vs. plow trucks The industry has made a decided shift into heavy iron. Skid steers, compact track loaders, wheel loaders, and even backhoes have taken the place of plow trucks in large commercial retail malls, distribution centres, railyards, hospitals, and corporate parking lots. They have proven to be superior to
traditional plow trucks for several reasons, largely coinciding with the advent of the box/containment plow or snow pusher. Construction machines offer several advantages to trucks. Not only do their power and efficiency dwarf the capabilities of trucks, but the business model requiring machines to be parked on site for the entire season is so attractive to both contractor and customer that the practice is now standard. Today’s largest snow fleets are now dominated by machines, with plow trucks relegated to serving small outlying accounts that require the flexibility of a routed vehicle. Here are some of the obvious advantages the construction machines offer over trucks with plows when taking on large commercial properties: 1. T hey are ideally suited to the business model of seasonal contracts whereby equipment remains on a customers’ site for the season and crews start plowing when they get there. This model allows for a natural rotation of operators while it also minimizes the insurance liability of having employees drive to and from their work sites in company vehicles. 2. T hey allow for more efficient ISSUE 1 – 2020 | SNOW MANAGER
