Simplifying Snow Contracrs

We have seriously cut back on snow ops in the last couple years and really only do it for our full service clients. We are also mostly T&M and they are all structured the same, basically as simple as it gets:

Snow Removal Service:

Labor (intentionally high, we put in verbiage includes any applicable equipment costs) 

Ice melt product @ $0.XX/lb

And a holiday version of above service with a higher labor rate, and that’s it.

This has evolved over time, pre-Aspire and the first few years we experimented with having different services/tickets for walks vs plowing vs salting, costing and invoicing different equipment by the hour, but it just becomes a giant headache for everyone and honestly isn’t worth it in our opinion… I do think clients tend to prefer the simplicity of the way we do it now, and crews absolutely do love having 1 ticket per site versus multiple to manage. 

They are all as-needed services (other than the small few we have that are fixed seasonal prices, then we have monthly tickets) and we use “schedule an event” to generate and place the tickets on the schedule. There’s good KB articles about that.

We also run pretty much entirely T&M, and Winter 2024 was our first real snow season in Aspire. Overcomplicated things by having multiple services for the crews to clock in and out of in an effort to make sure our invoice layouts looked familiar for customers. I think what I’m gonna do this year is have one service and tweak my layout such that the equipment items are the lines that show up, since we charge based on what equipment is being used on site. Materials are their own item with their own cost. 

Like ​@jgrasch said, as needed tickets, schedule an event, and then we also use events in the invoicing portion to allow easy attachment of a description of that event to all associated invoices.

We already use the schedule an event option which has helped but what tends to happen is that since the guys don’t have to select the equipment they are using during the green season they tend to forget that part and if they are on a site where they plow and then assist with shoveling/blowing they never switch over and its always tricky to correct after they go home and come back more then 24 hours later. 

• jgrasch do you guys charge a flat t&m rate no matter if they are in a plow truck vs. snow blowing? Do you guys charge a labor rate when salting or just by the LB? 

​@JimMell We indeed charge just one one flat rate for snow removal services per hour, regardless of what they are doing. We used to charge different for shoveling, blowing, plowing, salt truck ops, and skid loader operators that incrementally increased, but now it’s one rate that’s close to the middle/average of what we were charging for the separate services. Any Ice melt product/bulk rock salt is charged by the pound on top of the labor cost of spreading.

We now almost exclusively do residential snow removal for very loyal clients where visits are relatively short, so it just made sense for us to do it this way. The loss in productivity (and additional cost to client...) from pauses in service like when, for example, the guys doing the walks have to flag down the crew lead (often plowing), stop him from what he is doing, get their phone out, clock the members out of the walks ticket, clock them into the salting ticket, and then continue what they are doing can be completely avoided. 

Having done it both ways, we prefer this way and it works for us and our clients, but I totally understand why you would charge differently per different aspect of snow removal. It just depends on you and your clients.

​@jgrasch do you guys use this policy for commercial snow as well?

​@JimMell Only one commercial snow is this way. The others are all seasonal fixed price, easier for them to budget it that way. 

We have no residential fixed price for snow.

​@jgrasch and you are calculating that based on sqft of paved surface and sidewalk surface? If so id love to take a look at your kits if you would be comfortable with that. What region are you operating out of? We are in PA

​@JimMell 

Honestly wish I could share but we don’t have any snow removal kits! Like I said earlier, we’ve really downsized our snow operations in the last 5 years or so (even pre-Aspire) and we haven’t taken on too many new clients. All of the commercial clients we still have pre-date me being here and they receive % based increases every year on their fixed price so I’m not sure how they were initially bid, but I imagine it was based off of sqft of hard surfaces and complexity of the lot and level of service. We’re in SE Wisconsin and there’s no shortage of contractors that cater to commercial that definitely are cheaper than us - and that’s ok. It’s not our niche anymore.

If anybody else has snow removal kits they’d be willing to share I’d be interested in seeing them as well.

​@jgrasch Thank you for your input on simplifying our snow contracts. We decided to use your model for our T&M contracts of 1 price for everyone to make time keeping, scheduling and invoicing much more simplistic. We are also only offering T&M contracts with per visit salting or seasonal contracts and no other option at this point.

Best of luck this season! I personally don’t even want to think about snow yet! haha

we just finalized some kits if youre still looking at these!

I am working through our contracts now. If your willing I am to trade kits so we can both see how we are setting them up. Let me know.