Schill Blog

Winter is coming, and the Schill team is busy getting prepared for whatever may come. Part of that preparation means partnering with other great companies in the area to make sure that we have the equipment and labor force to tackle winter weather the right way.

Here at Schill, we’ve worked on hundreds of properties that are visually breathtaking. There are countless factors that are involved in making a landscape look great, from plant choice to hardscapes and architectural features. But why should the best parts of your landscape be visible to potential customers, and tenants only half of the day?

The Schill team loves perennials, and it’s no wonder why. The flowering plants and leafy shrubs make great additions to any landscape by adding pops of color, texture, or differences in height. And because they last year after year and typically require less water than annuals do, they make great investments for any property.

When most people think about commercial snow removal, the plowing of open spaces like parking lots and garages is often the first thing that comes to mind. But we like to remind all our potential customers that outdoor areas like sidewalks, ramps, stairs, and loading docks are just as much (if not more) of a liability.

Over the past 25 years, the team at Schill Grounds Management has spent hundreds of hours meticulously training our staff how to care for all walkable and drivable areas on our customer’s properties. Because we want winter to be safer for everyone, we wrote this article to help you make sure your property’s sidewalks get the attention they deserve.

Every year, the Schill team plows, shovels, and melts snow from thousands of parking spaces and hundreds of streets and walkways. Interestingly, because we service so many properties all over Northeast Ohio, many potential clients are surprised when they discover that we only take on a limited number of clients during the winter. We do this because maintaining the highest levels of safety on our clients’ properties is always our highest priority.

In fact, every snow removal company, no matter the size, is limited by their available labor and equipment. These resources must be very carefully allotted in order to make sure our customers get the highest level of service.

Moreover, we intentionally keep the routes that our crews follow small so that they can circle back around to plow the same sites again within a few hours in case snow fall is exceedingly heavy. This helps us make sure that when it snows, our crews can service every property as quickly and as safely as possible.

In addition to the numerous site audits that we conduct throughout the year, the Schill Grounds Management team also makes sure to perform larger, more comprehensive site audits twice per year on every property we manage.  This allows our customers to get a snapshot of their property’s health, get any issues fixed quickly, get a head start on the next year’s landscaping work, and get the best service.

In fact, we believe so strongly in the benefits of pre-season inspections that we wrote this article explaining their benefits so that property managers and owners can take full advantage of them.

In the 25 years that we’ve been doing commercial snow removal and landscaping work, we’ve prided ourselves on being stewards of the environment.

But while sustainable landscaping practices are easy to define and put in place (in part due to the vast amount of research on how certain methods affect the earth and laws that restrict usage of certain chemicals), achieving sustainable snow removal is something that the industry is still navigating. For environmentally-conscious companies like Schill Grounds Management, this means having to set our own guidelines in determining what’s best for our customers, our company, and the planet.

Unfortunately, the practice of removing snow and ice overall isn’t the best for the earth. Ice melt products like salt and liquid deicers are essential to keeping pavement safe for walking and driving on, and each type of product has a different level of impact on the water, soil, as well as plant and animal life.

Each year the Schill team goes through thousands of pounds of bulk salt and many gallons of liquid deicer in the battle against snow and ice. It’s a truly vital commodity that helps us keep streets and parking lots drivable and walkways traversable.

Nevertheless, every property is different and therefore requires different attention when it comes to applying deicing materials, and that can be confusing for property managers trying to predict and manage their seasonal expenses. We service some retail properties and hospitals literally 24 hours per day to make sure that they never have ice on the ground. This is important because they potentially have foot traffic around the clock. On the other hand, some other properties are only treated before, after, and/or during a snow event.

While our customers trust us to make sound judgements on when to apply deicers, we understand that that it’s important to be able to anticipate when you might be charged. So, because we at Schill Grounds Management value transparency in our pricing and procedures, we wrote this article answer the most common questions we receive in order to demystify this process.

When we first started Schill Grounds Management 25 years ago, the industry looked very different than what it is today. Search engines Google and Yahoo didn’t exist, so potential customers had to find us in the phone book or by word of mouth, and we received weather our reports via fax and by phone. Now our website receives thousands of visitors each month (most of which come through social media) and we can monitor weather in real time online by looking at traffic cameras and doppler radar.

Innovation within the landscaping industry is something that we’re always looking out for, but it’s also good to take a look back at how things have developed in order to understand what future trends will be. So, we wrote this article to help our readers understand how advances in software, communication, and equipment have changed the commercial landscaping industry for the better.

Corporate sustainability is something that our clients are increasingly concerned about as more and more organizations seek to minimize their impact on the environment by being intentional about their grounds maintenance solution.

Fortunately, sustainability is one of our main goals here at Schill Grounds Management, and we love to educate others about how they can do more to protect the planet’s resources. So, it’s no surprise that we’re intentional about the efficiency of the equipment we use.

Furthermore, because our crews are out mowing over 10,000 times from spring through fall and because mowers use a lot of fuel, we wrote this article on why we choose to use propane mowers over ones powered by electricity and gasoline, as well as the benefits of each.