What I Know

Brian Akehurst had finally secured a big commercial client for a snow removal contract. It had taken him five years of courting, and it was a big contract – between $200,000 and $500,000 for maintenance and snow management.

But then, two days after inking the paperwork, the area was hit by a massive snow storm. The client – high-end office and medical buildings – has a lot of foot traffic, and a zero-tolerance attitude.

"They don’t want any snow on the property. They don’t want any ice on the property. It just takes a lot of attention to detail," says Akehurst, president of Joppa, Md.-based Akehurst Landscape Service.

Add this new, demanding client to Akehurst’s already full schedule, and the 98-employee company and its 150 snow removal subcontractors were truly swamped. In the middle of the winter, when all the equipment is already allocated, picking up new work – during a huge storm to boot – was tough.

"Just making sure we had everything in place – equipment, manpower, supervision – it’s just a scramble to get everything in place to make sure you can handle the job," Akehurst says.

In the end, it all worked out. Buy the snowstorm – and subsequent growth in the company’s snow management department – helped Akehurst learn to subcontract more work. Now, the company can provide client requests for services like paving, stone masonry and concrete work that it had turned away before. A lot of those subcontractors then come back to work for the company in the winter.

"If we have a subcontractor that helps us out with snow, we’ll use them during the course of the summer. It keeps them happy and they look out for us during the winter," Akehurst says.

The full-service company, which brings in $6 million a year, has been around a long time – 130 years. So, while Akehurst is concerned about profits and turnover, maintaining a sterling reputation is his highest priority. "One thing our company has done is grow slowly," he says. "Not that it’s always the best, but the main thing we’re looking at is to continue to have the reputation we have with our clients and provide them with the service they expect."

And adding new services, which would help strengthen client relationships, could backfire if the company wasn’t ready and didn’t do the best job it could. "We wanted to give the service customers were expecting," Akehurst says. "With the age of our company, reputation is one of the biggest things we have. It’s one of our biggest assets. We didn’t want to tarnish it by doing something new. We wanted to make sure we didn’t fail."

The company used to refer client requests for things like paving or concrete work to other firms. But now, with business drying up, they try to keep more of it in-house and use subcontractors to help build client relationships.

"We had subcontractors before, but we didn’t utilize that resource. We weren’t really quite sure we wanted to," Akehurst says. "When you’re busier, it’s easier to turn away work. With the economy the way it is now, we’re actually bidding different jobs that in the past we would have walked away from."

But Akehurst cautions contractors from rushing out to provide services they aren’t prepared to offer. They need to think about the necessary manpower, equipment and time commitment new and different types of work require.

"One of the biggest things is making sure you are set up to handle new work (the increase of sales, different types of jobs, specialty types of jobs) before you take it on," Akehurst says. "It’s always easier to say, ‘Well, we’ll get the job and make it work.’ Sometimes you have to have planning in place first to take on that new work."

Akehurst says contractors who are getting requests they can’t handle from clients should keep a short list of qualified companies in their area.

"I would tell them to try to network with some other trades, to come up with a good subcontractor network they can draw off of," he says. "The main thing is you can count on the subcontractors and they do the quality work you’re expecting and your clients expect. I would not step into something if I wasn’t comfortable with that subcontractor."

Akehurst says a blizzard and plow truck are a great tool for proving the mettle of potential subcontractors. "If they can perform in the worst elements that Mother Nature can throw at you ... then you know whatever they do as the mainstay of their work, you know they’re going to do it," he explains.

In the end, Akehurst says, his company made the big snow removal contract work, but it was tough. He advises contractors to think hard about why they want to add on another service or sign on for a new job before they do it.

"It’s all about quality work and customer satisfaction. Because if you lose a customer, it’s that much harder to gain their trust back. The customers you have, you need to keep them happy and satisfied," he says. "The biggest negative of that would be to lose focus on customer satisfaction. If you take on work just for the money standpoint, it’s going to tarnish your reputation with your customer – it’s going to be a disaster."