Mike Andes talks to a snow-removal operator who nearly went bankrupt from underpricing jobs. The business scaled too fast without proper contracts, and extreme weather events made it worse. He's sharing what went wrong and how to price correctly.
Social media, everything bad needs to be filtered out and then only the good stuff is shown.
I want to show the bad stuff.
Yeah, and like snow, I know anyone that does snow, there's low moments because it's a tough, tough business. Someone that might be also in this growth phase growing very quickly, for that person, speak to that person, tell us what happened last year and then what you learned from it.
Yeah, I would say that the biggest thing that has changed my entire company around, we were severely underpriced for the service that we were providing. We could have been priced higher. If we were priced higher, we wouldn't have been in a position where we almost went bankrupt. Now there was some other unforeseen seen stuff that happened, Mike. You know, this was the most amount of snow Sault Ste. Marie's ever seen in over 10 years. I learned so much as a man, so much as an individual. It was the best thing that ever happened to me and our company. If I could give any advice to anybody who's scaling very quickly, pricing has became one of the most important things to me, and it could really change a business around. So if your prices aren't right, your contract's not right with your customer, if you're underprepared, especially in the snow business, that's how it goes. And that's what almost happened to me.
