Jon, you kind of made me think about a subject…prolly belongs in the snowplowing thread, but it’s more of a “business” thing than actual snowplowing.
So I have this long-term customer 10+ years. I mow all their common areas-about 20 acres of zero-turn work. Also cut hay off their 12 acre hay field, and mow some smaller fields they have with a rotary mower, and clean up fallen trees. All in all probably $30,000/year in gross income from them.
Their long-term snowplowing contractor was a guy who lived in the community. He just sold his home and is no longer going to snowplow. Turns out, he traded snowplowing for HOA dues, which are VERY high. Like $250/month.
Anyway, they approached me late summer with this and requested a bid for snowplowing. I gave them a bid probably 2 months ago. HOA peeps were shocked by price. Probably because they were only being charged about 1/2 of what the work was really worth because a resident of the community was doing it cheap and getting to skip on some monthly HOA payments.
So they have been shopping my price around for months. An insider tells me “everyone we ask is booked, and the ones that aren’t want more money than you are asking for plowing”.
Now we are at crunch time. It could snow in a few weeks (unlikely, but it’s pretty risky to not have a contract this late when 75 homes could be snowed-in). I’m aggravated with them, but keeping my powder dry because they are my single largest property maintenance account.
If given the account, I would likely purchase a 20K pickup with snowplow rather than do it with farm tractor. There’s many reasons for this, one being the homes are very tightly packed in spots and the noise from tractor would be too much.
Now I am looking at buying a plow truck when prices for plow trucks have gone up 20% because it’s so close to snowplowing season.
I like my customers, but this one is forcing me into a corner, just to shave off $100 bucks per plowing.
Circling back to the resident who used to plow the community: Now you can see why professional contractors dislike “beer money” contractors. They work so cheap that when they decide to quit, their customers expect professionals to come in and do it for beer money, too.
