From snow clean-up to spring cleaning

After a particularly snowy winter, are snow removal companies flush with cash – or were they iced out? CTV’s Jeff Pickel reports.

While some people around Waterloo Region are excited to say goodbye to winter, for others the snowy season gave them a boost for their bottom line.

“There hasn’t been a winter like this since I’ve been at the company,” Tony Zurell, general manager at Fleischauer Brothers Landscaping, said.

Although all that snow translated into cold hard cash for some companies, the winter wallop also brought some challenges.

“I think we hit three times accumulation levels as last year by January,” Zurell said. “Snow dump sites were filled up. We ended up having a salt shortage in the area.”

While some people were able to reap the benefits, Zurell said profit margins were largely dependent on the business model companies were operating on.

“You can boil it down to essentially two different ways,” he explained. “You’re doing contract pricing – so it’s a set amount that they’re paying to have all the services completed. The other way is you’re paying the labour costs and material costs.”

Zurell said Fleischauer Brothers Landscaping was working on a split framework.

“We do have roughly 50 per cent contracts, 50 per cent time/material. It levels out a lot in these cases. Again, if the entire client list was time/material, we would have done even better. But we have to look out for the business long term.”

Now that most of the snow has melted, and Wednesday marked the last official day of winter, many landscaping companies are switching out their salters and plows for wheelbarrows and weed whackers.