Getting ready for the winter season

'Tis not quite the season yet, but winter and its accompanying notorious four-letter word are edging closer with each falling leaf.

While many of the area's snow removal companies offer diversified services that include concrete work and green services such as mowing, fertilizing and landscaping, the time to prepare for the snow removal portion of their business is at hand.

'It's a big conversion going from lawn care and landscaping over to snow,” said Greg Scharf, who has owned and operated Greg's Lawn, Landscaping and Snow Removal for the past 31 years.

'We work on trucks year-round getting them ready for the snow season. Snow is the worst thing you can do to a truck,” he said.

Scharf has four full-time mechanics dedicated to keeping the trucks and equipments in operating condition. While he plans to add on a great deal of part-time seasonal workers to help with snow removal, he said it is becoming more difficult these days to find them.

'The economy is changing and people are loosening up with their purse strings a little bit more,” he noted. 'With more people putting on house additions and the like, that is what is consuming a lot of the labor pool. We just can't bring them on fast enough right now.”

In a good season, such as last year's persistent snowfall, this line of work isn't for the faint of heart.

'We were running 24 hours a day, and last year it seemed like it hit us every weekend,” he recalled. 'It just kills your guys.”

About 90 percent of his business comes from commercial clients, with residential making up the rest.

'We can get through most of our routes in four to six hours,” he said, adding that the continual storms can beat up his plow crews.

'We run the crews 12 to 15 hours and try to give them a break after that,” he explained. 'It really depends on what they are doing. If they are equipment operators, that is different than if they are doing sidewalks. You just can't run those guys that long.”

‘Putting the plows on'

The trucks themselves, however, can tough it out a bit longer.

'Truck-wise, you can run a truck for a couple hundred thousand miles, depending if it has no issues,” said Jim Turner, sales manager for Culver's Lawn, Landscaping and Snow Plowing in Marion. 'But with our smaller engine equipments like the snowblowers and hand blowers, every couple of years we have to buy new equipment.

'Since we use them year around, we don't specifically get the trucks ready for just the snow season,” he added, 'other than putting the plows on and making sure they are working correctly. It's the same for our salt spreaders.”

Culver's maintains its own staff for in-house maintenance and employs 100 people that work in the snow removal.

'If we have to put on more people, we try to hire instead of using subcontractors,” he added.

But his company, too, is experiencing difficulty finding workers.

'I think we've had an ad in the paper and online as well as our sign out all year long, and the response has been terrible,” Turner said. 'It's been a struggle for the past couple years.”

In terms of dollar value, its commercial snow removal business is larger - but in terms of the number of accounts, Culver's snow-season clients are primarily residential, making up 60 percent of its snow business, Turner said.

'We've got a lot more older folks in Iowa nowadays who will need the help with snow removal,” he noted.

Dan Sherman of Dan Sherman Custom Concrete and Snow Plowing in Alburnett has been in the business for 20 years and converts his truck fleet over fairly easily between seasons.

'We actually do concrete work, but we have several pickups that basically all we have to do is put the plows on them,” he said.

Another truck is fitted with a sander in preparation when the snow season sets in. He has one employee designated solely for his company's equipment maintenance.

'Last winter was a killer,” he said, noting that his team of seven worked 10- to 15-hour shifts, seven days a week at times to keep up.

'We just worked a little extra,” he said, adding that it actually turned out better because much of the time the snows quit by 10 or 11 o'clock at night, so his crews could get started earlier and be done by morning when his business clients were ready to open.

Along with the continual vehicle and equipment maintenance and replacement cash outlay, there is yet another cost factor with which snow removal businesses must contend, and that is the price of sand and salt used for clients' parking lots and driveways.

'We just got in two semi loads of salt,” Sherman said, recalling that he'd only ordered one load last year and ran out. 'I did find more, but I had to pay a premium price for it.”

Last year's supply came from Clinton, and the price from his Kansas City supplier for this year is higher.

'It was $15 a ton more this year,” he said.