Austin Gray: What's going on, OWNERS AND OPERATORS? It's your host, Austin Gray. Welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. Thanks again for listening; I really do appreciate the support from all of you as listeners.

It's kind of crazy—we started this podcast last year around this time. The reason was that I was bored during the winter; we did not offer snow removal services. My plan was to work directly with my partner to understand how to operate the snow removal business before jumping in head first.

We had a good first year last year in the land clearing, forestry, and dirt side of the business in the summer. My plan was to stay small at that point, stay really light on expenses, and market about three hours away from us down on the Front Range, like outside of Denver. I knew that I could use our marketing skills and our marketing team to run some paid ads and get some forestry jobs down there, and that’s what we did.

We did about one or two jobs a month down there. We barely broke even, but I paid for my equipment and kept the bills paid here personally.

Now, we've since grown. Part of this episode, I’m going to talk about building the snow removal business because this year we are bringing on snow services. I want to discuss the thought process behind that, why we are choosing to bring on snow services, and why we are not focusing marketing efforts on the Front Range for this year—at least not for our crew here in Winter Park.

If you listen to this full episode, I’ll dive into my thought process from year one going into winter versus year two going into winter and why the differences are there.

Secondly, we will jump into our approach to building the snow removal business—from how we are getting the customers, to how we are marketing, selling, pricing, and discussing our revenue projections. We’ll dive into all of that in the episode.

If you are a contractor offering the summer side of the business, either in trees or dirt, and you have snow in the winter, then this episode's going to be for you.

Others who might be interested in this episode include those who reach out either on YouTube, Twitter, or through this podcast, asking, "Hey man, I just want to start a business; how do I start?" The reality is that you just have to start.

I will tell you right now: it’s not all peaches and roses starting a business. Everybody thinks it’s like, "Oh, I’m going to get to work on my own time. I get to work less. I get freedom!" Nah, that's a bunch of bull crap. I've never worked more in my life. I was literally up at 2:15 a.m. this morning because I feel like I’m backed up, and I have so much to do.

Now, some of that is self-inflicted, right? I've decided to create a podcast while building a business at the same time. I’d be lying to you if I said I didn’t love what I do. I absolutely love it. I love challenging things; I love the grind.

At the end of the day, it’s like, dude, I'm doing a podcast—not like I’m waking up to do harder jobs. You know what I mean? I get to do this; I’m very thankful.

It's time to dig, baby dig! I'll tell you that. I'm excited, and I’m optimistic about growth.

Trump even mentioned in his podcast with Joe Rogan—go back and listen to that if you haven’t—there was a little plug about wildfire mitigation in there which gets me pretty excited because he mentions the problem that America has: dead wood littered across the forest, which needs to be cleaned up. Guess what? We offer that service here at Bearclaw, so I’m excited about that.

If you are a land clearing, excavation, grading, or snow removal contractor, check out landservmarkers.com.

LSM is the same growth agency I’ve used to grow Bearclaw Land Services from zero to over seven figures in revenue. We've created a seamless process for OWNER OPERATORS to upload photos and videos from the field, and LSM will do all the heavy lifting for you on the backend. They’ll do all the editing, publishing, social media management, and run your paid ads to bring you more leads so you can close more high-ticket jobs.

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If you are listening to this and want to start a business, sometimes you just have to jump off and do it.

I’m back at square one with the snow removal business. I feel like we've gone balls to the wall for the last two years building this business up—building up the forestry and dirt side of Bearclaw—and now here we are. It’s November 12th, and last week we had our first snow event, so we had plows on the ground, and we had four crews shoveling vacation rental properties.

We had about 105 properties for shoveling, and we've got a little less than 25—22 residential snowplow counts as of right now.

Let's dive into that.

First, I told you we were going to start with the strategy from last year. Last year, my approach was to market forestry jobs. The reason for that is that I had already bought about half a million bucks worth of equipment, signed my name on the dotted line, and I knew that equipment had to be paid for.

The reality is, I bought a skid steer with a mulching head, a mini excavator, and a track chipper last year. We had a good year and I had enough cash saved up to feel like I could get through the winter.

But I also made a decision to keep our office manager on through the winter because she had done such a good job for us and I knew that she could help in other ways. When she was involved, she helped build the initial community for OWNR OPS.

We were trying some things on school—we even tried a Slack group, things like that. Long story short, the building blocks of the podcast were started last year because, well, one, I was a little bored.

We weren't working every day out in the field. I would travel down to the Front Range, to Denver, to do the forestry jobs, and then Josh, who’s now my business partner, was going down there as well. We were banging out these forestry jobs or fire mitigation jobs down on the Front Range.

Looking back at the numbers, we barely broke even on that, and it was just a pain in the ass driving down to Denver—it ended up being three hours because some days were snowy on the pass.

Long story short, we came out of last year saying, "You know what? I would rather live and work here," and I wanted to have that option for our guys.

If you live and work in our ski town, we wanted to provide services and job opportunities where they could live and work here and stay in their own beds, rather than having to get hotels when traveling.

So this year, the plan was to build a snow removal business.

That leads us to this year. Building a snow removal business, I heard so many people tell me not to do it. It's like, "Why are you doing that?" I'll tell you why: One, it’s because most people don’t want to do it; therefore, there’s opportunity there. Snow screams opportunity in my mind.

The reason being is that the major competitors in most of our markets—go check it out—at least in my market, the two biggest players are in their mid-60s. Guess what? Time is not on their side.

It's just the harsh reality. I know one guy better than I know the other—I have respect for both of them and the businesses they have built—but I wanted to position myself as the preferred acquisition for whenever they are ready to retire.

I've already put the seed in both of their ears: "You guys let me know when you're ready to retire, and we'll talk about buying your business."

What I mean by that is I’ll buy your recurring accounts. I'm going to put a new fleet of equipment together so we can recruit top-notch operators for these jobs.

Much easier said than done, right? I've been working on this plan for the last three years. Before I ever started Bearclaw, I approached a snowplowing business owner here and told him, "I’m interested in buying your business. I know you're on your way out, and I know you're at retirement age."

At the time, I think I was approaching 30, and I said, “I've got like 30 years left in me—maybe 40, maybe 50. Who knows—knock on wood, right? Every day is a blessing."

What I do know is that time and energy, if you look at the statistics, are on my side. So I wanted to position and plant the seed.

If you've ever made a big deal before, you know that you have to plant the seed first. You need to let that seed germinate and grow.

But every year when snow starts, I make a phone call to one of these owners and say, "Hey, how you doing? How’s this year looking?"

"Good! Okay, great. You still in it for another year? Yep? All right sweet! Let’s talk next year."

Great!

So this year, I'm focusing on building the business as much as possible to put ourselves in a position to be ready for an acquisition.

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Okay, let’s talk about why you wouldn’t do snow. Why is snow a crappy business? Bad hours, right?

To most people, I was up at 2:15 this morning. Anyway, that’s when most of these snowplow guys get up.

I’m an early morning riser and would much rather work in the dark when most people are asleep. I think I was just destined to be a snowplow business OWNER.

I like being up early; I like it when most people are… There’s something about it, and I think it comes from football.

The only way I got to anywhere that I did in playing football was because I was willing to get up earlier than most people and put in the work when most people were sleeping.

It’s a simple concept: if you want to get ahead in life or if you want to do something or be good at something, just wake up early or stay up late—one of the two—and be willing to work harder and longer than your competition.

There’s a piece of me that just freaking loves that thought process. When most of the world is sleeping, I’m up working.

That’s a weird personal thing for me, but it drives and motivates me. I love thinking about it—not to say one person is better than another; it’s literally a personal challenge for me: can you do things that most people are not willing to do?

I like that—I like the challenging aspect of it. So if that’s you, start a business right or jump into something headfirst.

The reason I like that in regard to the snowplow business is that most people don’t want to wake up that early. Most people don't want to deal with 600 different customers, right?

But if you can, it can be very lucrative. There are plenty of people who have built snow removal businesses, especially as OWNER OPERATORS.

I don’t know if private equity might be interested—maybe if you rolled it up; okay, you built a snow removal business across every mountain town in Colorado where it's going to snow or every mountain town in the Western United States.

Of course, private equity would be interested if you built a business big enough. I think they would.

Maybe some of those of you out there who are listening to this might disagree—who cares? I’m starting a business right now; I don’t really care.

My goal is not to sell this thing right now—maybe one day. My goal is to build the business.

I think way too many people think about the sale event way too early or think, "I’m going to build this thing, then sell it."

It’s like no, man—I’m having so much fun building this thing! We’ve got a great team in place, and we built a really good summer business.

I think we’re going to hit... well, we’ll wrap up the year just crossing the million mark on the summer side. Now I want to go build the winter side of the business to the seven-figure mark, right?

Why a million? I don't know; it's just a number, a target.

I’m a goal-oriented person, right? And those of you listening to this are probably goal-oriented as well.

It’s not all about the money. If it were all about the money, trust me, I would be selling real estate or in private equity or in finance. If it was all about the money for me, that’s what it would be.

Some level of satisfaction comes from building something from nothing. That, to me, is incredibly satisfying.

I specifically remember talking with my mother-in-law. She was in town when I was building the business; we had just had our first kid.

I remember her saying, "I remember when you were like creating the logo and the website, up super early." I can specifically remember the day she was talking about when we were in this little apartment down in Denver, and I had identified this need up here in the mountains. And I just went for it, right?

That’s what I want to encourage you, listeners, to do. If you want to start a business, don’t overthink it. Just freaking go for it.

That’s all I’m saying. If you sit here and overthink it, you can talk yourself out of anything.

I could have talked myself out of not building a snow removal business very easily.

Because, like, we're going to travel to see my wife’s parents over Thanksgiving, and I’ve put that on the calendar. I’ve said to our field crew, “Hey, I’m going to be out of town.” I’ve made it very clear that I will be available if anything is needed on the back end or if any help is required.

I will be available over Thanksgiving. The same will be true for Christmas.

But you know what? I think with great reward comes sacrifice. Am I going to prioritize this over my family? No, I’m not.

But I'm still going to make myself available and do some things that are probably unideal in a lot of people's minds, right?

But I care a lot about building this thing—my name is on it, and I’ve got other people’s names on it as well.

We have a team, and to me, that is the satisfying piece: can we start something from nothing and build a team around it, solve some problems, generate some revenue, and create some jobs for people?

That’s what we’re doing right now, and that’s what gets me jacked up about building a snow removal business.

It’s not about this being the best business model in the world.

Right now, I’ll tell you why we're building it: one, we’ve got people on the team who want to work year-round, so we’re going to do our absolute best to provide that work to our crew year-round.

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Now, let’s jump into how we went about building it. For me, it was very simple.

We've got a team on the backend we’ve been working with for the last couple of years on the marketing side. They're incredible!

We just launch paid ads; that's all we do. We run paid ads to get customers for the jobs we want to do. We’ve done this with fire mitigation, land clearing, excavation, driveway repair, and road grading.

We kept two crews busy all year just by running Facebook ads. I believe we had 52 leads this summer before we shut our ads off, and Josiah, our sales manager, booked up two crews from those leads.

So to me, snow is a very simple acquisition process. You run an ad to a geo-targeted location, so you figure out what locations you want to be plowing in.

For us, we needed to optimize around accounts we already had from last year or previously had leads on.

We optimized for a very specific area, ran ads to those neighborhoods, and it was very simple: “Need snow removal? We’re accepting new clients.”

As I said, it’s not like contractors are banging down the doors to get into this industry. Competition or supply is low on contractors, right?

Even the contractors who are in it are not doing any sort of digital marketing—I can tell you that for a fact right now.

We ran ads, and our sales manager is calling the leads. Very simple, just like we do in the summer.

We get the lead, call as soon as we can, book a site visit, go out there, meet the customer, shake their hand, take a video of the driveway, add the photos in Jobber, give the customer a price, and send them a quote.

They sign the quote via Jobber and then boom! Once they sign, we send them a contract, collect their payment information to put on file, and then we’re ready to roll.

I do have some more content that I've already created from videos on how to set up snow plowing jobs in Jobber, so if you are building a snow removal business and want to use Jobber, reach out to me directly or place a comment below like “Jobber help” or “How to set up Jobber”—something like that.

I have recorded Loom videos because I wanted to standardize a process.

Jobber is like 95% there for a snow removal management business. I love Jobber, don’t get me wrong—I’m a big Jobber advocate. They still haven’t sponsored me yet, so if you guys are listening, we’d take a sponsorship because I talk about you guys almost in every episode.

We will get you guys as a sponsor. My sales manager from Bearclaw is joining me in December; we're going after podcast sponsorships.

Jobber, if you’re listening to this, you're top of the list, so we might as well work a deal right now!

In all reality, I do love Jobber. I think it’s a great Swiss Army knife that's applicable to many different service industries.

We use it for our excavation business; we use it for land clearing and forestry. I know a ton of lawn service companies use it. Landscaping is great; snow removal is good; it is solid for snow removal.

I didn’t want to go get snow-specific software yet. I wanted to try using Jobber to manage our snow removal business, and the reality is it’s about 95% of the way there, but I’ve created a workaround.

I actually reached out to Marina from G&M Outdoor Services—she’s been on the podcast. For those of you who haven’t listened to that episode, they’re doing about 5 million in between excavation, landscaping, and snow removal up in Minnesota. She is a Jobber—I'd call her a Jobber power user.

She’s incredible, so go back and listen to her episode. It’s called "Office Operations 101." She goes through various ways they use Jobber on their website.

But I texted her this weekend: "Hey, I’m building out snow removal."

Because here’s what happened: We had our first plow event on Saturday. I had everything set up the way I thought it should be set up, and everything.

I got a text from Josh, my business partner, and he said, "Hey, Zach can’t access any of his accounts on his app."

Basically, the way we had it set up was like he was supposed to open his app and mark the jobs as complete as he went through his route.

Well, long story short, you have to do a little workaround. You can’t just set the job and then assign it to the user. You have to create the job as recurring, and then mark a specific setting as "recurring" in the app as needed.

There are a couple of other settings that I’ve created videos on, so if you need that, let me know.

Then, you have to manually create visits on the days of snowplow. So, that’s what I was saying: over Thanksgiving, if we get plows, my responsibility is to run the backend.

I’m fully planning to be working, and I’ve let the team know I will be available.

You have to manually create the visits on the day of the plow, which creates a little bit of operational inefficiency that you have to think through if you're using Jobber for this.

I would love to be able to create a way where the user or driver, the snowplow operator, could just click on their app after they have a route built for them. They could click "snow day," and then it would auto-populate the visits for their route.

But that’s not the case. You have to manually go into the backend: you have to go to the schedule, create new visits, select all the visits you want to create, and then enter it.

The second piece where it's not ideal: Zach, our snowplow operator, cannot mark a visit as incomplete.

I like that in Jobber, you can tally the completed visits toward an end-of-month invoice for the client associated with their account. But there’s no way to mark the job as incomplete.

We’re so close to being a snow removal software, but we need to be able to mark that as incomplete.

The reason being is that I want the guy to take a photo if we have a no-plow day. For example, two of our accounts were already shoveled, but a month from now when that customer reaches out to me and says, "Hey, why didn’t you guys plow on November 9th? My neighbor did!"

I want to have documentation of that. I want to be able to go back and look at their account and say, "Oh, Zach took a picture of the account; it was already shoveled, and he has the notes here."

That’s a much easier conversation. Or how about this one: "Three cars parked in the driveway—hey, why didn’t you guys plow?"

In my notes, when our driver showed up, I noted there were three cars parked. This allows me to have a conversation with the customer.

Whereas right now, we have to go into Jobber and delete the visit so it doesn’t get tallied toward the monthly invoice, but then it deletes all the notes and photos as well.

Jobber, if you're listening to this, come on—let’s get this 100% of the way there. There’s some feedback for you.

Anyways, that was a rant about Jobber.

If you want help with setting that up, put in the comments below "Jobber help." I’m happy to send you those Loom videos I’ve already recorded.

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Here we are: snow removal.

We had three snow events last week: one 6-inch snow and a couple of 5-inch snows.

One of the exciting pieces about the business is we landed a property management company, bringing on 105 properties to be shoveled.

I love this business model because it's just an hourly T&M (time and materials) rate.

We are billing hourly for everyone shoveling, and I love it. It’s just like, you know, you’ve got your labor costs; you don’t have any huge major equipment costs, and then you bill a certain rate and pay your labor a certain rate.

It's a very simple business model.

I’m very bullish on the fact that this is going to be a good opportunity for us, especially when you land volume at the beginning.

On that note, we have subcontracted crews that I’ve built relationships with through building the summer side of the business.

We tap into labor from subcontractors on an as-needed basis whenever we have a project that requires more labor.

We’ve built a good relationship with some subcontractors. I just went to them and said, “Hey, if I go land these shovel accounts, do you guys want wintertime work?”

It was an enthusiastic "yes." They do construction work in the winter, so up here in the snow, it’s not super ideal to be hanging siding on the side of a house in the middle of a snowstorm.

So it gives them wintertime work, revenue for us, and it’s a win-win all around.

It’s also a win-win-win because for property managers, one of their biggest pains is finding labor to shovel walkways for vacation rentals.

Think about it: you have a vacation rental in a highly trafficked winter area because we live in a ski town, right? Those guests need access to the door, the hot tub, and the grill—those types of things.

So we’re really just shoveling front walkways and back patios, things like that.

We just track our time on each of those and submit our time cards to property management.

That has created some operational tasks on the backend, but it’s a straightforward and simple business model.

I would encourage you: if you’re in a snowy area and in a vacation rental hotspot, go reach out to property management companies and put a bid together for snow shoveling.

It’s a very simple business model and a way to generate revenue.

So those are our two strategies: we’re doing residential plow snow shoveling. You can pick up the phone, call property managers, and get residential accounts by running simple Facebook ads.

If you need help with Facebook ads, reach out to us. We do this all the time; we do it for other people as well.

Check out landservmarkers.com. We specialize in running Facebook ads for anyone in land clearing, forestry, dirt, excavation, grading, and in the winter, if you want snow leads.

It’s working for us; I know it can work for you. It’s very simple and straightforward.

So go reach out to landservmarkers.com—make sure you get in touch with Josh.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you are thinking about starting your business and it’s a burning desire inside you, remember nobody's going to have the answer; it’s got to come from you.

Just start—don’t overanalyze. You can talk yourself out of it in a million ways.

I’ll report back; maybe I’ll do another episode halfway through the season to let you know where we’re at.

The most exciting thing I’ve got is we just got a plow on my truck!

Josh was kind enough to hook up the wiring on that, so I’m excited. I asked Josiah to sell another 50/50 because I'm ready to go plow!

I’m kind of tired of sitting behind the computer, to be honest. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

I love being in the field; I love operating the equipment. I need a little change of pace, and I secretly hope we sell more accounts than our first operator can handle because that means I just get to put the plow on and go OWNER OPERATOR style and get back in the game.

But that’s what you got to do, building the business.

Some of you out there—private equity guys or finance guys, or more seasoned entrepreneurs—probably disagree with me on that, but it’s my style; it’s how I like doing it.

I’ll report back halfway through the season. Hopefully, you’ll see some photos or videos on YouTube about some plowing.

Anyways, go check out—I'm doing Shameless plugs here—go check out the Bearclaw Land Services YouTube. We did a bunch of YouTube videos this summer from our forestry and dirt side of things, and I fully plan to implement something on the snow side.

I want to get some videos of Josh on the grater because he’s got a sweet snowplow route with his grater for managing HOA roads. That’s a side of the business I want to grow: going and finding more HOA roads that only a grater is suited for, or a loader, because not everybody can do that.

Most people can go buy a truck and buy a plow to offer residential plowing, but not everyone’s going to go buy a road grater.

Since we have access to that, that’s another avenue I’m looking to grow.

Anyways, I’m going to wrap this one up here. Thanks again for listening, you guys, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, and never settle for less!