Protecting Your Business’s Reputation

By Phil Harwood, Esq.

Snow pros risk damaging their business’s reputation when they overcommit themselves. Taking on too much work and not being able to perform adequately is a common complaint of contractors across all industries. But it is especially risky for a snow contractor to overcommit because of the nature of our work: when it snows, every customer expects to be serviced at the same time.

Of course, the reality is that not all properties can normally be serviced simultaneously. There is an acceptable window of time that most reasonable customers allow for service to be performed. When performance falls outside of that acceptable window of time, reputations suffer. And, as we all know, damaged reputations are difficult to recover from.

Calculating Capacity

The challenge for snow pros is that it’s not easy to calculate capacity. Making this determination requires some math skills and knowledge of the inputs. During the selling season, monitoring capacity utilization is an even greater challenge.

There is no alternative. Snow contractors have no choice but to calculate and manage their capacity or their reputations are at risk. And there are many benefits:

·        optimized resource allocation,

·        reduced overtime costs,

·        improved service delivery,

·        better equipment utilization,

·        setting appropriate staffing levels,

·        increased profitability, etc

All of these benefits impact the bottom line. Knowing your true capacity and planning accordingly equals more profit.

So How Do We Do This?

To help you with determining your capacity, we are holding a free webinar Tuesday, September 8 to delve deeper into this area and provide some best practices for doing so.

Who should attend this webinar? Snow commanders, owners, managers, operations directors, and anyone else involved with sales planning, resource management, or growth strategy. This webinar applies to understanding your limits and maximizing what you can profitably handle.

This webinar will uncover proven methods for determining your operational capacity and planning growth that your business can actually support. There is a roadmap. The only question is whether or not you are up for the challenge.

Hope to see you there!

Have you registered for
Grow! Snow 2026?

We are quickly approaching GROW! Snow, being held in Dayton, Ohio on September 21-23. If you haven’t registered yet, now is the time.

GROW! Snow is a 2-day educational and networking event,
co-hosted by Marty Grunder from The Grow Group (and Grunder Landscaping) and the Snowfighters Institute. The event is comprised of panel discussions, breakout sessions, a facility tour, networking lunches, and dinners.

GROW! Snow is a great opportunity for snow pros and their teams to learn, network, and be more prepared for snow events than ever before. When the big one hits, your team will be ready to attack it with a vengeance until it has been defeated, and everyone is safe.

Hope to see you there!

Now go forth.