Supply chain struggles this winter

It’s all hands on deck getting ready for snow season at Trump Lawn and Land Company in York, Pa.

The company’s President, Mike Trump, says they’ll be ready in time for the first major snowfall.

“We’re doing the last of our snow prep stuff right now,” he says. “We do a little bit of the work over the summer to try and keep everything maintained. We use the offseason of snow and ice to work on that equipment and the offseason for landscaping to work on our landscape equipment.”

Trump adds they are preparing for anything, as snow season in his market is notoriously unpredictable.

“The last few seasons we’ve had light snow, but ice control has been pretty busy for us,” he says. “We maybe plowed one time last year…I hear every year it’ll be a bad year, but with the way the weather has been so far this fall, I don’t think it’s going to be that bad of a winter. We’ll see what happens.”

Despite not knowing what Mother Natures going to do this winter, Trump says one of his biggest challenges will be having enough labor to respond timely during snow events.

“I think everyone has the challenge of finding employees and not having enough help,” he notes.

Trump says he tries his best to keep summertime employees busy during the downtime before snow season really picks up, but that can be difficult.

And with less help available, Trump is turning to adding more equipment to get the work done faster.

“We’ve added more equipment mechanize as much as possible and take some of the labor out of it — especially for sidewalks,” he says. “We’re utilizing more compact tractors…I’ve invested in four of those machines in the past year.”

While making the investment in more equipment is nice, Trump says supply chain issues have caused some hiccups along the way.

“We’ve ordered a bunch of new equipment and it hasn’t come in yet,” he says. “That’s a bit of an issue. Hopefully that doesn’t become a really big issue. For some reason, landscape equipment hasn’t been held up too much, but snow and ice equipment has been more of a challenge.”

Trump adds that getting trucks has also been a challenge. He says he ordered two new trucks over six months ago and still hasn’t received them.

In order to combat some of these supply chain issues, Trump’s turned to renting equipment. But he says getting those rentals lined up early is key.

“We rent a lot of loaders during the winter season, and I made sure we secured those in July,” Trump says. “The dealers we’ve rented from have told us that they hold them for us specifically because we contact them so early.”