Bolton, ON based Just for Snow is erasing blue-collar stigma with a crew-first culture

Running a chaotic operation out of a 10x10-foot shed with beat-up pickup trucks and messy schedules, Just for Lawns' founder Mikayel Ter-Grigoryan was ready to quit the green industry forever – until a shift in perspective changed everything.

Early on, Ter-Grigoryan was focusing a lot of his energy on pursuing other business ventures, reluctant to commit to the green and white industries largely over what he saw as a "big stigma ... a negative connotation" associated with the work. That inattention was taking a toll. By 2020, when COVID-19 hit, the Bolton, Ontario-based company was unraveling.

"We started around 2014, and it was basically just me and a couple guys from there for about five years. I was doing all the sales, and I had a couple guys running around cutting grass. The company was relatively flat," he says. "At the time, I thought, 'I'm gonna fully get out of the business.' "

Rethinking the business

The turning point came when new people joined the company, including Nemanja Vasic, who now serves as business development manager. Informal chats with the new team led Ter-Grigoryan to rethink his outlook on the business.

"I said, 'Let me take this seriously and actually double down on the industry, not just be avoiding the stigma of the business," he says. "Second, let's actually have a mission around the company – something that is bigger than just us going out there and trying to make money, cutting lawns or shoveling driveways."

That new mindset, plus a trip to the Snow & Ice Symposium in 2021, where he met other business owners, "helped me understand what other companies were doing, and I thought it was really interesting," Ter-Grigoryan says. Inspired, he decided to shift toward focusing primarily on snow and Just for Lawns became Just for Snow.

Setting standards

With a new focus came a new mission – to instill a culture centered on supporting his employees.

"I wanted to set a new standard of the way we were working and just improve and make things better," he says. "Honestly, I was just tired of working the way that we were working. When new team members joined the company, I wanted to make it better for them. I thought that customers would eventually see this difference and respond, but it was a lot more about creating a better environment for us to work every single day."

Beginning in the summer of 2020, company practices were organized, standardized, and professionalized:

• Operations: Transitioned from chaos to control through structured practices.
• Culture: Employees felt valued and were provided a clear career path.
• Results: The changes led to a much more successful season and immediate growth.

Strong and united

"Just from making those first few changes, we got some initial momentum," Ter-Grigoryan says. "Going into that winter, I started to realize that there was a lot more to the business, and that we could actually do something significant with it."

What was once a company of two crew members has grown to as many as 120 in the winter. More importantly, the team is strong and united, Ter-Grigoryan says. "We've been able to put the right people in the right places, and they're people who are passionate about what they're doing, and who get rewarded for what they're doing."

As the company has scaled, Ter-Grigoryan has made sure to keep its focus on its employees. "Whether it's a clean elevated facility or the best equipment possible, that sets the tone and provides a good work environment," he says. "Even if we couldn't do a lot, we did a little bit, but we did it at a really high level, just to show the team that we care. And I think that was a fundamental point to our culture of the team, understanding that we do have a certain level of care toward them."

A commitment to personal development

Beyond the financial success of Just for Snow and its team, Ter-Grigoryan is aiming higher: "We want to make things better for the next generation in the trades."

Initially, he envisioned promoting this message to the public in general, regardless of industry – sort of a blue-collar public service campaign. But with limited resources, he decided to start small, by walking the walk within his own company, showing employees of Just for Snow that they can make their jobs into meaningful, rewarding careers.

That includes, but means much more than paying a good wage. Ter-Grigoryan has built a culture and a system of personal development, which includes meetings around the company's monthly book club, offsite retreats and full-day training camps, and other training opportunities – and not just for the management staff.


Just for Snow's management team (which is relatively young from the top down) is entirely made up of former crew members who've worked their way up the career ladder.

"We've demonstrated that they can go from a shoveler to virtually any other position in the business. And they can see that the entirety of the management team is comprised of people who were in positions just like them," Ter-Grigoryan says. "All we've really done is lived up to the promise of taking talent from those positions and putting them in higher positions. From my perspective, if every single company makes these changes within their businesses, that's going to change the industry, and the view of blue-collar jobs at large." 

Just for Snow gets serious with new approach, high-value clients

In 2021, Mikayel Ter-Grigoryan discovered a community that he wanted to become a part of at the Snow & Ice Symposium in Cleveland. They were a small company but wanted to build something at the level that they were seeing in the U.S. market. He didn't need to be the biggest, but he wanted to be the best with the most recognizable brand.

The company's name says it all. "A lot of companies have 'green' or 'landscape' in their names, but many of them are also doing snow; and for a lot of them, snow is their main business," Ter-Grigoryan says. "So, I thought, 'Why don't we just double down on the snow and then say: This is what we do.' "

Even with systems and a plan in place, the path to building a serious snow company was not without bumps. "That first big season was really, really challenging. Obviously, in the beginning, we made tons of mistakes," Ter-Grigoryan acknowledges. "It was complete chaos. But things improved as we restructured the entire business around having the right equipment, the right setup and the right approach to service."

Refining the portfolio

Ter-Grigoryan knew it wasn't enough to just change the way the company operated – it needed to transition out of the residential business and find clients that would appreciate its higher-level service approach. That shift took time and some bad clients before it could break through.

"When you're breaking into commercial, you're taking all the scraps in the industry – typically it's the customers that don't want to pay, or customers that treat their contractors poorly. But you'll work with them so you can break through," says Business Development Manager Nemanja Vasic.

As its book of business grew, Just for Snow reached a point where it could be more selective. "Every year we would always look at our clients; specifically, we'd look at our bottom 10%, 15%, 20% – clients who would take forever to pay or wouldn't pay, clients who had completely unreasonable expectations, clients who would speak to you like you're much lesser than they are – and dump them out of the business," Vasic explains. "We would replace them with better clients, and that's evolved into working with AAA clients."

The client base today is strictly commercial, and the company has developed a specific niche serving transportation clients, including logistics (trucking) companies and public transit facilities in Toronto.

"We're working with clients that will sign blank checks because they need good service completed, and they'll pay anything for that," Vasic says. "And that's now translating to clients that look at you as a partner; they don't look at you as a contractor, they look at you as an integral part of their business, particularly during the winter months. And that's how they treat you, that's how they talk to you."

A win-win approach

Working with higher quality clients comes with some pressure: Quality work is absolutely required. Because trucks and buses need to run on time, the standards for snow and ice work at these facilities is exacting.

But Vasic says that serving clients with high expectations has helped to elevate Just for Snow, both in terms of capabilities and in terms of morale: "It's been a slow and steady evolution, but now we know what clients we need to target in order to offer better work and better pay and better everything for our team, so then our team is incentivized to provide better work, so we get better clients," Vasic says.

Just for Snow's Mikayel Ter-Grigoryan shared his views on employee recognition during the awards luncheon at the Snow & Ice Symposium - view the video here.

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.