Editor's note: If you operate in the Midwest, Northeast or to a lesser degree the Mid-Atlantic United States, you got a front-row seat to the climatology changes having a profound effect on snow companies. This story features excerpts from a recent conversation I had with snow and ice professionals in areas the survey showed were most impacted by these challenges.

Interview participants:

• Bill Butts, VP of Business Development, Outdoor Pride Landscaping in Manchester, NH
• Bob Marks, CSP, ASM, President, EMI Landscapes in Macungie, PA
• Eric Klopfer, ASM, VP of Operations, Environmental Management (EMI) in Dublin, OH

Changing climatology we’re seeing in many areas of the United States and Canada means that business as usual may be a thing of the past.

Later starts

Bill Butts: This is my 37th winter. There’s been a number of different types of weather patterns; but the theme over the last five to six years is that winter is now January to March when it used to be November to February. As a company, we’re trying to figure out how to navigate that.

Shorter seasons

Bob Marks: We’re in the Lehigh Valley and if you look at our average snowfall, it’s a graph of very high numbers and very low numbers. The shorter seasons are a real thing. We don’t average a November event; we’re less than one per year. But December is typically three events, which again is not a lot; but when three turns to one or zero, that makes a big difference.

Less urgency from clients

Butts: When we talk to our clients, there’s less of a sense of urgency to get a contract executed because we’ve had so many nice seasons and everybody’s thinking this is great. So, a false sense of security has developed.

Event changes

Marks: I’m not sure our winter snowfall total is different, but the types of precipitation we’re getting is a big topic. We don’t go through many events anymore where it is just pure snow. We’re either dealing with very heavy wet snow, or often sleet or rain in the middle of it. That makes for extra challenges on how you clean that up versus just 4 inches of powdery snow that you push and go home.

Non-winter impact

Eric Klopfer: When we were kids, we were going trick-or-treating through the snow. And now we’re mowing the second week of December for the past three years. It’s changing a lot of things about how we operate. Contracts are different, not just on the snow side, but on the maintenance and install side.

Staffing

Marks: When we’re hiring equipment operators whose job sites will be shut down when it snows or they’re laid off, that’s a little bit easier to deal with. But if we’re hiring seasonal people just to work on sidewalk teams, hiring them in early November and expecting them to be there two months later doesn’t work.

Butts: The ability to hire and retain quality individuals year over year hasn’t changed. What has changed is the sophistication of the equipment. The number of experienced operators has dropped. So that’s a challenge.

Client education

Butts: A lot what we do is not so much selling to the customer, it’s educating the customer. These younger generations of property managers have very little experience with observing weather other than [wondering] is it going to impact their camping, skiing or their beach day. You start telling them there’s a snowstorm 48 hours away, they’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’ We think that everything we know, everybody else knows, but it’s not the case. You have to be bit more cognizant of their level of knowledge with the snow and ice industry.

Marks: We see property managers come from out of the area. They don’t know what a real winter looks like yet. We’ve had to reeducate ourselves on how to educate the clients. Covid did that as well. When I was selling, I would go out to a site, meet the property manager and talk. That doesn’t happen as much or as easily as it used to. So, we are educating them through email, phone calls, getting them onsite when we can. But it takes a little more work now.

Contract changes

Marks: Contracts are the No. 1 topic in my area after last year. You know, seasonal-type contracts versus per inch or per push. Seasonals were not that common in our area. As far as what’s coming from the clients, I’ve actually been pretty disappointed this year from larger clients that have their own contracts. They are as unforgiving as ever. The topic of conversation on our end is ‘How do we work together so that you can have the best service and you can have the companies that give that service be successful so that it’s good for everybody?’

Klopfer: A couple years ago we instituted a policy that three-year minimum contracts are our only option. There are anomalies, but three to five years is really where we’re pushing right now [because of the lack of urgency to sign contracts]. We don’t want to have to retool our entire business. We’ve signed, probably 20 to 30% more contracts over the past two years, but it hasn’t snowed.

Butts: New Hampshire has 75 inches of snow on average, so there’s a lot of risk for a building owner. They like fixed-fee contracts because it gives them budget security. We ask some tough questions; but at the end I think they like that we ask: ‘How much do you budget for snow? If you have $100,000 budgeted for snow, you might be undervaluing the cost to deliver service safely and efficiently. And if you are, we want to help you figure out the right way to budget correctly so nobody’s really at risk.’

Winter prep

Klopfer: There’s a lot of shifting of equipment. We have the work to keep it busy. But as far as the rest of the prep goes, you still have to have the salt, the liquid setup. We’re still putting the brine stations out; we’re still prepping all the equipment. Startup fees help us offset some of that cost.

Marks: It only takes one storm to make or break you. We use a lot of seasonal operators for our heavy equipment, and we used to train them in November. If we train them in November and we plow for the first time in mid-January, they’re no longer trained. We still have our first training at a certain time, then we set intervals that if we go X amount of time with people not coming out, they’re due for retraining, even if it’s just reorientation with the site.

Micro-climates

Klopfer: We service roughly a 60-mile radius, but it gets split almost in half north and south by Interstate 70. You could have six inches of snow 10 minutes north of 70 and rain 10 minutes south. We have service locations everywhere in that radius so it’s a lot of shifting people and equipment.

Tools and technology

Klopfer: [Site camera technology] has always been a little cost prohibitive, but I think it’s come down significantly. If we’re not taking this to our clients, the camera companies are going to. It’s already happening across the country. They’re going to the very large corporate companies and saying, ‘Let’s put these cameras on your site. And you can then dictate when service is going to happen.’ That’s not really a partnership we would like to work with.

Butts: The opportunity to introduce liquids to your client is an opportunity to add value, create a sustainability initiative, reduce salt and corrosion damage to their infrastructure. They’re all facility people. If you tell them they don’t have to redo their walkways every five or six years, because brine will reduce damage, they’re listening. [We tell the clients] brine provides safer surfaces sooner and longer. And as soon as you start saying safer surfaces sooner and longer, it feels like a risk management answer.

Listen to the full Snow Talk conversation, "Getting Squeezed," at www.sima.org/podcast.