Schill Blog

As the weather turns colder and the days grow shorter, holiday lighting and decorations will soon start popping up on commercial properties throughout Cleveland and beyond.

Here at Schill Grounds Management, we’ve installed holiday décor everywhere from major retail parks to senior living facilities, so we know what it takes to make landscapes and buildings look their best in a safe and festive manner. Because we love to spread holiday cheer, we wrote this article to help you avoid some common mistakes that people make when decorating for the holidays and to let you know what you might be missing if you decide not to use professionals for your installation.

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.

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.

Here on the Schill blog, we’ve written a lot about what makes a great landscape maintenance provider, and what makes an exceptional snow removal contractor, but we’ve rarely talk about how the two interact with one another.

We’re happy to work just as your landscaping contractor, or as the guys who remove your snow and ice, but we firmly believe that there are benefits for property managers and owners in keeping one contractor to handle your landscaping and snow removal needs all year round.

One of the most popular questions we hear from potential clients is: what happens during a snow storm? How do we communicate with crews and monitor storms?

What that tells us is that people are often familiar with what snow and ice removal involves, but they’re curious to know how it gets done.

We get it. You’re investing a lot into whatever snow management solution you choose, and you want to know how it works. It’s important to note that even though every snow and ice management contractor is going to do things a bit differently, our ISO certification requires that we’re constantly reviewing and improving how we do things to maximize performance, service, and efficiency. What that said, this article is going to be very Schill focused, but we hope that it sheds some light on how your property might be serviced during a typical snow storm.

We like to have fun throughout the year, but here at Schill Grounds Management, we take snow and ice very seriously. During the winter, we know that safety is your primary concern for the HOA, apartment, or commercial property you manage.

Ice that is removed too late or incorrectly can cause injury to people and possessions, whether it’s cars skidding in a parking lot or shoppers slipping on sidewalks. Fortunately, as one of the few ISO certified snow removal companies in Ohio, the Schill team knows all about the best practices and procedures for combating winter weather in a safe and timely matter.

But over the years, discussing winter weather solutions with hundreds of property managers has made us realize how difficult snow removal contracts can be for the average person to understand. So, because we like to provide answers, we wrote this outline to help property managers make sense of them.