Lots and drive lanes, cleared to your trigger depth.

Plowing is the part everybody pictures when they think about a snow contract. It's also the part that gets bid the loosest — a number on a page with no scope behind it, and then an argument in February about whether the storm "counted."

We do it the other way around. Scope first, in writing, before the season turns.

What gets plowed, and in what order

A commercial property isn't one surface. It's a set of them, and they don't all matter equally at 4 a.m.

• Drive lanes and entrances. Nothing else matters if nobody can turn in off the road. Entrances get opened first, and they get opened wide enough for a delivery truck, not just a sedan.
• Fire lanes. They're marked for a reason. They stay open, and they don't become the place we stack snow.
• Parking stalls. Cleared to pavement where the lot is empty. Where cars sat through the storm, we clear what we can reach and come back for the rest — a good contract says what happens to the stalls that were occupied.
• Loading docks and trash enclosures. The surfaces your tenants complain about last and need most. A dumpster that can't be reached on Monday is a Tuesday phone call.
• ADA stalls and access aisles. These are cleared, not "cleared around." The access aisle is part of the route, every time.

That order gets written into the contract as a priority sequence. When a storm runs long, you know what the crew is doing and in what order — instead of guessing.

Trigger depth: the number the whole contract hangs on

The trigger depth is the accumulation that puts a truck on your property. Below it, we don't push. At or above it, we do — automatically, without a phone call from you.

Common structures we'll write:

• A fixed trigger — a set accumulation, measured on your property, that starts the service. The most common arrangement in commercial work.
• Zero tolerance — the lot and walks are kept clear continuously through an event. Medical campuses, urgent care, senior living, and 24-hour operations usually land here. It costs more because it's more work, and it should.
• A split trigger — a lower trigger on walks and entries than on the open lot. The walk is where people fall; the back of the lot can hold a little longer.

The trigger has to be measured somewhere. We name the measurement point on your property in the contract, so "we got two inches" and "we got an inch" is a fact, not a debate. If you want the deeper version of this, read what trigger depth means in a snow contract.

Routing — the reason we say no to some properties

A snow route is a geography problem. Trucks can only be in one place at a time, and a storm doesn't stagger itself politely across a metro area.

We build routes tight and geographic. Properties that sit near each other go on the same route, run in a sequence that matches when each one opens. A retail center that opens at ten and a medical office that opens at seven do not get treated the same way, and they shouldn't be next to each other in the run order.

The consequence of building routes this way is that we turn work down. If your property is forty minutes off any route we can actually run in a storm, we'll tell you that instead of signing you and then failing you in January. A contractor who says yes to everything in September is a contractor who is somewhere else in February.

Equipment matched to the surface

Different surfaces want different iron.

• Trucks with plows move volume on open lots and long drive lanes.
• Loaders and skid steers with pushers carry snow in a straight line without the spill a straight blade leaves — better on big lots, better on the deep events.
• Backdrag blades pull snow out from against buildings and out of dock wells where a plow can only push.
• Hand crews and walk-behind pushers handle walks, entries, and ramps. See sidewalks and entries — that's a different job with different exposure.

The mix that shows up on your property gets decided when we walk it, not when the storm starts.

Where the snow goes

Every push has to end somewhere. Pile placement is a design decision, and a bad one floods your lot in the melt or blinds a sight line at an exit. Piles go where they drain away from the building and away from the drive aisle, and where they don't swallow the parking you're paying to keep. When the property runs out of room, we haul it off.

Every push, on the record

A plow visit that isn't documented is a plow visit you can't prove. Arrival, departure, what was cleared, what the storm was doing — logged and timestamped, every time. That's how the service record works, and it's the reason a claim eighteen months from now is a paperwork exercise instead of a problem.