For too long companies have thought about landscaping and snow and ice management (SIM) as two separate topics. In reality, there’s one major similarity that should make you start thinking about them as one: the providers who perform each service.
It’s incredibly common—at least in geographies that experience both a hot summer and cold winter—for a service provider to perform landscaping during one half of the year and SIM services during the other. Having a single provider can lead to major benefits for your business.
Read on for three of the top benefits that come from taking a holistic approach to your exterior maintenance.
1. Cost savings
By providing both landscaping and SIM services, providers are able to maintain their businesses year-round. They don’t have to worry about hiring employees for landscaping, laying them off in the winter, and doing it all again the following spring. They save on costs related to turnover, onboarding, and training. And these savings can be passed on to their customers. This also applies to any potential facilities maintenance partner. At SMS Assist, we have one team that handles all exterior services, year-round. That’s another level of operational savings that can be passed on to you.
2. Dedicated support and accountability
If you’re working with a maintenance partner that offers both landscaping and SIM—like SMS Assist does—you should expect them to have a single dedicated Exteriors team. This would mean for both landscaping and SIM that you have just one point of contact to reach out to. And that dedicated contact would be familiar with the intricacies of each of your sites, leading to more efficient issue resolution.
The same could be said for the individual providers performing the actual services. They know the ins and outs of your landscaping—even if there is snow covering it all—so they can take special care not to cause any damage when snowplowing or de-icing. And at the end of the day, they’re the ones who would need to be accountable for any landscaping fixes needed in the spring. Having a single provider who has that year-round relationship with your site can only lead to more thoughtful outcomes.
3. Smoother seasonal transitions
While we would all love to be able to predict exactly when winter will end, we know that snow can fall even in April. A typical SIM contract goes from October to March, with landscaping starting in April. But what happens when it snows after your SIM contract has ended? Do you reach out to your SIM provider to see if they can service your location outside of the original contract? Or do ask your landscaping provider if they also do snow plowing? Those transitional situations—which aren’t all that uncommon—would be a lot easier to navigate if your SIM provider was also your landscaping provider.
It’s time to stop thinking about landscaping and snow and ice management as separate strategies. When you partner with SMS Assist, you can get a unified solution that delivers better costs, improved quality, and around-the-clock support.
