When the snow began to fall in Des Moines on January 14, it came fast. And it didn’t let up. Just 24 hours later, metro snow totals ranged from 11 to 14 inches. Everywhere you looked, there were plows and snowblowers as people started to dig out. Storms like this make snow removal companies wish for a magic wand that they could wave and instantly multiply their plowing teams tenfold so that every customer can have a clean, safe property just as soon as the flakes stop falling.
At Perficut, we have something better than a magic wand. We have service partners. There’s no magic involved, but these partners do help us pull off the impossible. In January, that meant that our client sites were all cleared within just a few hours instead of a few days. This is especially important for the 24/7 businesses we maintain like hospitals and distribution centers.
Finding a Match
While contracting with service partners isn’t unique in our industry, we do things a little bit differently at Perficut, with an intense focus on relationships and our core values. Team Perficut lives and breathes our core values of PRIDE—passion, respect, integrity, dedication to teamwork, and excellence—and we look for those same values when choosing service partners. These businesses are literally an extension of us. They are representing Perficut out in the world, and we want to make sure we’re working with the best.
The most important aspect of choosing a service partner is the relationship. As with our customers and each other, our work is rooted in relationships. It all starts and grows from there. We work with businesses that share our core values and our commitment to excellence. These partnerships allow us to honor the commitments we have made with our customers by adding more equipment and more employees to the mix. It’s literally the only way to achieve what we want to achieve.
Our core values are very, very aligned and there’s a high level of trust between J. Pettiecord and Perficut. It’s very easy to do business with people who share your core values. … This partnership has been really good to keep a lot of our guys busy and a lot of our equipment moving during the winter. It keeps us going.
– Nick Wylie
CEO of J. Pettiecord
Working Both Ways
Working with service partners helps Perficut continue to grow our business and maintain a consistently high level of service for our clients. It also gives us flexibility, allowing us to be more nimble in scheduling and responding to a major snow and ice events. Our snow teams do all of the prep work up front—from site visits to snow mitigation plans to mapping the site. It’s all hammered out long before the season starts, so that our partners are set up for success when the snow falls. We’ve done the work ahead of time to allow them to do what they do best, which is bring in their people and equipment and get the work done.
But working as a service partner with Perficut has some pretty great benefits, too. In addition to great pay and ongoing training, we also offer a QuickPay program, which allows partners to be paid within five days of billing. This allows them to put that money back into their business and keep growing. Our service partners also have access to a 24/7 help desk for support. We’re also completely digital, so they have all of their information—weather forecasts, site maps, event documentation forms, and invoices—at the tip of their fingertips when they are at the job site.
We also offer the opportunity for tremendous growth. Perficut is a leader in commercial site services in Iowa and Nebraska, and our snow and ice management program is the fastest growing area of our portfolio of services. We are constantly adding new clients in all markets, and the opportunity for growth is absolutely there for our Service Partners. We do our best to take good care of them so that they keep coming back and building their business with us. As we grow, we want them to grow as well.
