What we help you decide
The decisions we help you make.
Six places where a snow and ice removal contractor wins or loses money on equipment. In each one we bring the market census, an engineer's arithmetic and a straight answer, and we say plainly when the right answer belongs to your attorney, your accountant or your own field measurement.
- Which setup fits each lot: strip mall, mid-size lot, big-box, distribution center, campus, sidewalks
- Truck, skid steer, compact loader or wheel loader, and when a site should ride a route or get its own machine
- Straight, V, expandable or wing plow; fixed-edge or segmented pusher; a blower when there is no room to pile
- Cutting edge, trip system and terrain following, matched to your surfaces and the hardpack you get
- Upgrade the attachment before you replace the truck: what a better plow does on the truck you already own
- Push, blow or haul: stacking room, pile growth and the point where hauling becomes the cheaper answer
- Sidewalks: blower, compact machine, utility vehicle with blade and spreader, or a crew with shovels
- A tractor as a four-season carrier when you mow all summer
- Your service level turned into machine hours: the depth that starts the clock, the completion time, the surface you promised
- How many machines and operators the window takes, and the extra unit that gets you there nine storms out of ten
- Acres per hour corrected for your lot, your snow and your push distance, not the brochure number
- Fewer, bigger machines when you cannot find drivers: what two loaders do to a seven-truck route
- Route density: the isolated account that never pays, and the one that fits between two you already have
- A real reserve: how many spare units a fleet your size should hold
- The residential route: stops per operator hour, drive minutes per stop, cost per account per event
03Cost per acre, not sticker price
Five winters · all in
- All-in cost per hour and per cleared acre for each machine, at your actual snow hours
- What summer work does to the number: a loader on 800 hours a year is not the same machine at 200
- When a new machine pays for itself, in pushes per season and acres under contract
- Buy, lease, rent or sub it out, unit by unit, at the rates you get
- Whether winter revenue carries the payment, not just whether the return looks good on paper
- Replace the oldest iron, or run it two more seasons with a better plow on it
- A resale range to expect, with what it rests on
- What a quote must state: equipment, mount, controller, wiring, lighting, required accessories, installation, freight, taxes
- Whether the installed price you were quoted is in line with what dealers are asking and what public buyers paid recently, dated and located
- Who really owns the brand on the box: 72 manufacturers and 102 brands, each tied to its owner
- The dealer questions that matter before winter: install lead time against your first contract date, storm hours, parts on the shelf
- Mixing brands: what it costs on the seventh truck in controllers, wiring and parts
- What to inspect on a used pusher or blower before you pay for it
- Buying a retiring competitor: what his iron is worth on the used market, so the rest of the price is what you are really paying for the accounts
- Where to grow next: normal snowfall, commercial property and the count of public buyers, by state and snowbelt metro
- Payload check by configuration: truck, plow and spreader against the rating, converted into buckets of the material you run
- An application-rate grid by pavement temperature and surface state, calibrated on your own event logs
- Which product where: rock salt, calcium, magnesium, blends and acetates on concrete decks, entryways and lots
- How to measure pavement temperature, and what a pavement forecast service is worth to you
- A calibration routine and an event log that serves billing, cost per site and your file in a claim
- Pre-wet, brine and your own brine maker: what you would have to measure before the payback is real
- Storage and staging: pad, cover, loading time per truck, salt at a second yard
06New technology, checked before you buy
We will say not yet
- Every claim on the same scale: observed, documented by a third party, vendor claim, hunch
- Brochure arithmetic: a machine 40 percent more productive saves 29 percent of the time, not 40
- Routing and proof-of-service software: what it costs, the hours it must save to pay, what your trucks should be logging
- Does it bolt onto what you already own: the trucks, the loaders, and the plows and pushers on them
- Electric loaders, sidewalk robots, spreader controls: what is proven, what is a demonstration, what we would wait on
- Stress-testing a purchase: a brown winter, a wage jump, a late install, a second dealer in reach
