Snow removal companies can’t count on winter for steady business

‘The last four winters have been stellar for the snow removal industry,” said Greg Scharf, owner of Greg's Lawn & Landscaping in Cedar Rapids. “But 2001 and 2002 weren't good - no one was making any money.”

Because of winter's unpredictability, Michael Schultschik, owner of Custom Lawn & Landscaping in Cedar Rapids, doesn't rely on the snow removal aspect of his business for income.

“Some winters are busier than others,” he said. “You don't know how much you'll work.”

The typical Iowa winter includes 32 inches of snow and several freezing rain events, according to Annette Dunn, the Iowa Department of Transportation's winter operations administrator.

Schultschik works alone when it comes to snow removal, though he does hire college students and temps for landscaping work in the summer. He's been operating his own landscape and snow removal business for five years.

Running as lean as possible, he performs a cost/benefit analysis on any purchase he makes for snow removal. A year and a half ago, he purchased a V-blade for the truck he uses to move snow.

Although it was costly, he said it removed the need for other types of blades.

“The amount of time it saved me improved my business,” Schultschik explained. “I was able to move more snow in a shorter amount of time.”

Greg's Lawn & Landscaping makes purchases on a much larger scale, but Scharf also makes sure his decisions are cost-effective. For example, to keep on top of possible winter storms, he invests in a meteorology service.

“Whether you're calling out 100 guys or 400 guys, every 15 minutes they're working is a whole lot of payroll,” Scharf said. “The media can hype up the weather too much for us to pay attention to that.”

With locations in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Greg's Lawn & Landscaping has been in business since 1983. Scharf employs 85 people, and counts on all of his employees for snow removal and landscaping.

“If you don't want to do snow, you don't work here,” Scharf said. “We hire a lot of on-call people to do snow, including subcontractors - concrete guys, roofing guys, etc.

“But my employees are on-call during the winter months - five months a year.”

To transition Custom Lawn & Landscaping from lawn care to snow removal, Schultschik purchases any new equipment necessary, and then makes sure his truck is checked out by a mechanic. He also performs any necessary maintenance on his snowblowers.

In addition to stirring up new business - and focusing on landscaping - Schultschik spends the summer and fall connecting with regular customers to make sure they're signed up for winter.

His client base is a mix of some 20 customers, commercial and residential. Each customer's agreement is customized.

“Some customers want my services every time it snows. Others only want service when snow accumulates to a certain amount,” he said.

“And some customers are taken care of on an on-call basis.”

Because most businesses want snow removal to occur before they open, Schultschik takes care of those customers first.

Scharf starts on winter preparation in June. Greg's Lawn & Landscaping owns 78 trucks and several end-loaders - his two full-time mechanics spend time making sure this equipment is ready to go.

This summer and fall, Scharf also added 68 new snowblowers to his fleet, purchasing them from as far as Utah and Indiana.

Due to changing emissions regulations, snow removal companies may be facing limited options for snowblowers. Scharf currently runs snowblowers with two-cycle engines because “they start better in winter versus four-cycle engines.”

But the industry is moving toward four-cycle engines due to their better emission ratings. Scharf said four-cycle engines work well, but they freeze up in cold weather and may need to be plugged in to start.

“Contractors don't often have the luxury of plugging in a snowblower to start it,” he said. “After sitting in a truck for 20 hours, if you pull a four-cycle engine out and try to start it in cold temperatures, it may not start.”

Another problem cold weather brings is preventing the pre-mix of gas and oil. Scharf found out the hard way that mixing gas and oil for two-cycle engines too far in advance can backfire - the cold weather affects the octane in the mixture, and snowblower engines won't start.

Now, his employees calculate how much gas and oil need to be mixed, but they don't actually do it until the equipment needs to be used.

“A lot of quarries close at Christmastime and don't open until the following spring,” Schultschik noted. “So, to be prepared with enough sand, you either have to store it yourself or go to a concrete company and purchase it.”

But the weather sometimes makes that tricky.

If the sand comes into contact with cold air, the moisture in the sand mixes with the air and turns it into a large, frozen, unusable block.

For this reason, Schultschik uses only small amounts of sand. He also buys salt every year.

“I have a push spreader that I apply salt with,” Schultschik said. “I easily go through 2,500 pounds of salt in a season.”

Scharf erected a salt storage building in Cedar Rapids last year. His Iowa City location also has one.

“We've gotten into pre-treated salts because we use half the product we did when compared to straight salt,” he added.

He also points out that pre-treated salt works down to -15 degrees F, while normal salt only works to 15 degrees F.

The most salt his company has gone through in a year was 8,500 tons.

“At any given time, we're sitting on 3,000 or 3,500 tons of bulk salt,” Scharf said. “Loads are coming in on a weekly basis.”

Iowa's Transportation Department uses some 200,000 tons of salt each winter season, according to the department's winter operations administrator.