Snow Operations Guide - Read

SECTION 1:

Five Questions to Prepare Your Snow Removal Operations Before the First Flake

A Simple Framework to Move from Reactive Scrambling to Strategic Control During Winter Storms

It's 4 AM. Six inches of snow have blanketed your Midwest locations. Your phone lights up with store managers reporting unplowed lots, customers slipping on ice, and vendors who aren't answering. Do you know which vendor covers which site? What triggers emergency dispatch? Who can approve premium rates when your primary contractor doesn't show?

Season after season, most multi-location operators scramble to find last year's vendor contracts, argue about what "plowed" actually means, and discover that the person who "handled snow stuff" left the company in July.

The best-run operations managing hundreds of locations for brands like Cumberland Farms and Marathon have answered five critical questions before the first forecast. The difference isn't budget size or vendor network. It's clarity.

Question 1: Do You Have a Documented Process for Snow Removal Dispatch?

When snow starts falling across your territory, does your team know:

Which vendors cover which locations?
What triggers dispatch—1 inch? 2 inches? Ice accumulation?
Who authorizes the vendor call?
What information you must collect and log before, during, and after service?
Who receives notification when a vendor doesn't respond or complete service?
What escalation path to follow when your primary vendor is unavailable?

If these answers live in someone's head or in an email thread from last February, you're improvising every storm. When vendors face hundreds of service calls during the same weather event, they prioritize operations with clear expectations. The ones calling around confused get put at the back of the line.

Question 2: Can You Define What "Plowed and Salted" Actually Means for Each Location?

"Get the lot cleared" sounds straightforward until you realize ten different people have ten different definitions. Does "cleared" mean:

Plowed to the curbs or just main traffic lanes?
All pedestrian walkways from parking to entrance?
Fuel islands and areas around dispensers?
Salt or ice melt applied to all walking surfaces?
Snow pushed to designated areas only (avoiding no-plow zones)?

Gas stations and convenience stores have unique layouts that make generic snow contracts dangerous, creating real safety risks if executed incorrectly. Fuel islands sit over underground tanks. Canopies have support columns. Tank fill ports and utility access points can't be buried under snow piles. Without site-specific plow maps showing no-plow zones, approved snow dump areas, and priority pathways, you leave a plow operator at 5 AM to make those calls. And if they guess wrong, you're dealing with damaged infrastructure, inaccessible fuel systems, or worse, safety incidents.

Question 3: Who Owns What When Weather Hits?

When a regional snow event hits dozens of locations simultaneously, role clarity separates coordinated response from expensive chaos. When vendors are running behind, stores are calling corporate, and routine maintenance still needs attention, your team needs to know:

Who monitors weather forecasts and triggers pre-storm preparation?
Who has authority to approve emergency vendor calls at premium rates?
Who communicates with store operations about delays or closures?
Who decides to defer non-emergency maintenance during active storms?
Who tracks vendor no-shows and initiates backup vendor dispatch?
Who documents storm response for post-season vendor performance reviews?

The most expensive decisions in snow management are the ones nobody realizes they're supposed to make, until three stores are closed because nobody approved the emergency vendor at double rate.

Question 4: How Do You Onboard Someone Into Your Snow Operations?

Here's the real test: If you hired someone today, how long would it take them to manage snow removal across your locations independently? A week? A month? "They'd have to go through a winter first"?

Snow season lasts only a few months in most regions. You can't afford a full season of apprenticeship. If your answer involves phrases like "they'll learn as they go" or "they'll shadow during the first few storms," you don't have a process, you have tribal knowledge. Turnover is brutal in facilities management, and snow season comes just once a year. You can't spend three months getting someone productive.

The best-run operations can hand someone a snow response playbook and have them managing storms within days, not seasons.

Question 5: What Does "Completed Successfully" Look Like Specifically?

When a vendor marks a snow removal work order as complete, what should be documented? What photos are required? What follow-up happens if quality doesn't meet standards? How do you track patterns of late service or incomplete work across vendors and locations?

Vague expectations create vague results and impossible accountability. You can't hold vendors to standards that were never defined. Operations holding contractors accountable "like never before" don't rely on forceful phone calls, they enforce documented standards, photo requirements, and completion criteria that everyone understood before the first storm.

And when spring comes and you're deciding whether to renew contracts or rebid services, you need performance data, not opinions about who 'seemed pretty good this year.' Your documentation determines whether a seasonal contract or per-push pricing makes sense for next year.

From Questions to Action

If you found yourself hedging on any of these questions, you're not alone. Most maintenance departments enter snow season the same way they've always done it: "we'll figure it out when it snows." Until the person who "always handled it" is gone, or a major storm exposes that nobody actually knows who's supposed to do what.

Winter is coming. The question isn't whether you'll face storms, it's whether your team will handle them with confidence and clarity, or with the same scrambling and confusion as every year before.

The operators who answer these five questions before the first forecast don't just survive snow season. They control it.