Many people enter the snow services industry because of a family background, or they began plowing driveways in high school and grew from there. Signature Land Services owners Jen and Tim Schrage took a completely different path, getting into the industry after having been purchasers of snow services for a number of businesses they owned in their Anchorage, Alaska market.

To put it mildly, the couple's business pursuits have evolved over time. When they were first married in the 1990s, Jen had a career in media sales and Tim, a serial entrepreneur, operated a chain of more than 30 liquor stores and then a chain of lube and tire shops. When the couple had children, Jen decided to stay at home to raise them, while helping Tim to manage the residential/industrial real estate development operation he had started.

"We had a couple different building projects that we were working on, and had a challenging time finding contractors who would actually show up," she recalls. One of the things that needed to be done was clearing snow. They had a truck and plow, and she "nudged" Tim do some clearing on their properties. To speed the process, he soon purchased a used wheel loader at auction.

In 2008, they hired a few people to help maintain the properties they owned or were building, and Signature Land Services was born, expanding to outside clients in 2010 - which meant expanding their fleet of wheel loaders.

"They were parked in the backyard," Jen notes. "We lived downtown with this little alleyway, and I thought, 'Our neighbors are not going to appreciate this - we've got to figure something out.' So we bought our first site for Signature Land Services in 2011."

In 2012, Tim exited the lube and tire business and they decided "we should really try to make a go of it with the Signature Land Services thing." That "thing" has grown into a year-round business with about 50 year-round employees, swelling to about 150 in the winter to service 130 sites. As president, Jen is the face of the company and the major client relations manager. Tim is vice president and focuses mainly on the operations.

Home-grown network

The couple credits some of their initial success to their Anchorage roots, and the contacts they'd made over decades in the business community. But they say it was their personal understanding of what businesses look for in a contractor that has made the biggest difference.

"Understanding the needs of retail sites, and with the business acumen that Tim had developed over more than 20 years in business, he was really able to kind of talk the language when it came to the snow business," Jen says. "When Tim would talk from the operational perspective, they were thinking, 'Ok, they get it. They're talking about where the snow needs to go and what the customer experience will be like, and what a slip and fall means to a business, and how to deal with insurance and liability.' "

Tim says they took their time to set up the business exactly as they wanted it, a luxury that many getting into snow services don't have. "When we finally made the decision to go both feet in, we were well enough capitalized that we were able to take the time to buy the correct equipment, to hire the correct people, and to perfect our craft before we went out and asked our relationships that we already had formed in town to hire us," he says.

The "right" clients

Jen describes Anchorage as "a big, small town - so your reputation is critical." Continually picking up and turning over clients isn't an option. For that reason, they make sure any client is a good fit before taking them on - which has been key to their 99% year-over-year retention rate.

Signature doesn't use subcontractors or third-party trucking services, so attracting the ideal client to maximize its internal team and equipment is key. "3Our ideal client is a one-inch trigger or a bare pavement account that utilizes at least two-thirds of our services, like the sanding, the shoveling, the hauling component. If we can put those together, that's a client we can really serve well," Tim says.

Beyond that, size is less of a concern than the quality the client is seeking. The company's largest retail site is a multi-tenant retail facility with 65 acres of asphalt and its smallest is the local dentist's parking lot. "As long as we can hit that suite of services, we can make it work for us," he says. In keeping with only contracting with the right clients, Signature is very specific about what properties it won't service. "We don't do anything that has a bed - no apartments, no condos, no hotels, no residential," Tim says.

The Schrages are focused more on ensuring the longevity of their business than in growing it dramatically. "3We have the ability to flex and take new accounts on, but we're super cautious about how we do that," he explains. ""It cannot be at the expense of our existing clientele."

Tim cites one example of a multi-unit bank that contacted Signature early last winter, when Anchorage received 80 inches of snow in a two-week span and the bank's snow contractor wasn't able to keep up: "I explained to them that we could help their contractor get over the hump, but we couldn't take over their account during the season. We're over-staffed. We're over-equipped. But we're very cautious about taking on too much work and not performing for our clients," Tim says.

Family and the future

The Schrages have two sons, one of them working full-time in the business and the other attending college and working at Signature during the summer. "Jennifer and I are in our early 50s, and the clients we work for, for the most part, are our same age," explains Tim. "We all grew up in Alaska together. So now our challenge is getting our younger managers in the right places and getting them involved in our community so they can meet the people who will be our clients five or 10 years from now."

Pivot to pavement and more
Navigating the unique challenges of working in The Last Frontier

With beautiful views of the mountains, water and wildlife, what's not to love about Anchorage, Alaska? When it comes to providing snow and ice management services, it can be a bit of a logistical nightmare that impacts ancillary services, material use, and equipment choices. All of this requires Signature Land Services to operate a bit differently than it might in the continental United States.

Short seasons

For starters, rather than focusing on landscaping during the relatively brief Alaska growing season, Signature primarily turns its attention to concrete and asphalt work such as paving, reconstruction, excavation, seal coating, striping and sweeping. "Basically, if you can walk on it, we can do it," says Vice President Tim Schrage.

And there's no time to waste when it comes to getting that work done. "Winter here goes well into May. If we're lucky, we get 12 weeks of summer," he says. "Once the first of the year comes, our snow business is really handled by our management staff, and my focus turns to identifying what our clients want done during the summer construction season," he explains. "Because if they don't have it on our books by March, there's a chance they're not going to get it done before snow flies again."

Keep on trucking

There's no shortage of land in Alaska, but there is very little land that can legally be developed, which means few places to stack snow around client sites. This requires Signature to haul away snow for about two-thirds of its clients.

Recognizing this, Signature got an industrial site permitted as a yard where it can truck in and dump snow. It operates two snow disposal sites in its service area, giving them prime resources to get the job done, regardless of whether it'9s an 18-inch snow season or, like 2023-2024, 136 inches (a second-all-time total).

"We'll let other contractors in to dump snow if they're in a pinch or they don't have another option," Tim explains. "But, generally, they're for our clients, and we handle everything from the trucking to the bulldozers to managing the site."

Signature Land Services operates mainly out of two facilities. In the winter, one becomes a materials warehouse and trucking shop, where it parks its fleet of dump trucks for hauling snow; the other is the main yard, which is where their large fleet of wheel loaders is housed when not in use. "We run the wheel loaders down the roads. We stage larger blades all over town, and we've got the loaders parked in town close to our clients to ensure fast response time," Tim says. The company also has a shop about an hour north of its main offices to service sites there.

Hold the salt

"Bare pavement" is not the standard in the Anchorage market, Tim says, noting that one of the reasons comes down to cost: salt in Alaska typically sells for about 10 times what it would in the lower 48. But there are other challenges beyond the cost to using salt.

"We have really cold ground temperatures, and by late December there will be 19 to 20 hours of darkness. We don't see any solar gain to help with melting, so the application rates and the modifiers for the product are so high that it's cost prohibitive for your average client," he explains.

A few clients, such as medical facilities, opt for salt; but in most cases Signature Land Services applies a "salty gravel," which is 3% to 5% of salt mixed with gravel to keep the gravel piles from freezing solid.

"We plow and get up as much snow pack from the day's traffic as possible, and then we apply the blended salt aggregate," Tim says, adding that because of the amount of gravel that needs to be applied, sweeping services are added to its snow removal accounts.

"We have a fleet of street sweepers that we run out in the spring, and then we stockpile all of that material and spend part of the summer rescreening it. We add some more fracture to it, add salt, and stockpile it, so we're able to recycle a lot of the material we use."

Gravel is also collected from the snow dump yards, which increase in height about 10 inches per year thanks to the material that is scooped up with the snow. After the snow has melted, bulldozers are used to push that aggregate into piles that can reach 80 feet tall.

Planning ahead

Equipment is also harder to come by in Alaska. "If you want to be successful in our market, you need to be able to plan ahead," Tim says. "There are few places here to go get parts, and you can't drive across the state line to get parts somewhere else." That means ordering in advance and in bulk. And just getting equipment shipped in represents an added cost.

"For example, we order our winter cutting edges in June and have them shipped slow boat across the United States, because it's going to take six weeks to get here by truck and that's going to add one-third to the cost," Tim says.

Signature Land Services owns two and sometimes three of everything it needs, because in the event of a breakdown, it's not easy to rent equipment. "Some of our specialty equipment, like asphalt pavers, aren't even available. And our own fleet of wheel loaders is bigger than any rental yard here might have."

Anchorage anomalies

Is there such thing as a "normal" winter in Anchorage? "I wouldn't say we have one 'normal' type of winter in Anchorage. What we know is that we're going to get inclement weather. We don't know how much or when, because that is so influenced by the jet stream here,"Tim says.

In October 2024, the city got 20 inches of snow and a few weeks later faced 50- to 60-mile-per-hour southeast winds, which is not uncommon but is problematic. "When the wind comes out of the southeast, the temps come up and we get into icing situations," he explains.

Tim says they're at the mercy of Prince William Sound Gulf-effect weather and down-sloping winds. If the winds are coming over the mountains, it will put Anchorage in a shadow. The snow will be in the company's other service area in the valley, and Anchorage gets nothing. Or if it stalls out on the mountains, Anchorage will get all of the snow and 20 miles away won't get any.

"We're in a bowl here. Right on the other side of the mountains is the Gulf of Alaska, and depending on the winds, the meteorologists, in most cases, can't really tell us what's going to happen until a couple of hours out, maximum."

Patrick White has covered the landscape and snow and ice management industries for a variety of magazines for over 25 years. He is based in Vermont. Contact him at pwhite@meadowridgemedia.com.