Sneller Snow & Grounds is a commercial snow plowing company located in West Michigan.
Founded over 35 years ago, Sneller provides snow services in the winter and landscaping and lawn maintenance in the spring, summer and fall. With over 100 full time employees, 200 seasonal employees, and 70 partner subcontractor companies, Sneller relies heavily on Tadabase to efficiently manage employees, tasks, and equipment and to ensure all services are performed smoothly.
Sneller’s Slippery Slope
Being a seasonal business, Sneller offers varying services depending on the weather conditions. Due to this, the business model is complex and requires different crew and equipment year-round. During the winter months, Sneller provides snow removal services for over 500 locations. Each location chooses a specific tier of service that may include shoveling and salting sidewalks, sometimes multiple times a day. As no one can accurately predict the weather, Sneller must always be prepared to quickly and efficiently deploy crew and equipment to each location on command.
For many years, Sneller used connected Google sheets and spreadsheets to organize the mountains of data they needed to track. But as the company grew, Henry Gysen, Systems Analyst at Sneller, understood that the company was fast outgrowing connected sheets and that there was only so far that a “pseudo database” could take them. Henry began to search for a robust database platform that could easily manage Sneller’s entire operations, workflow, and dataset and scale alongside Sneller as they expanded to even more locations.
A Season for Change
After an unsuccessful attempt at making Airtable work for Sneller, Henry discovered Tadabase and felt an immediate click with the platform’s ease of use and performance.
Tadabase: the solution no matter the season
Since migrating Sneller on to Tadabase in May 2020, Henry has built a complex database that manages all Sneller day to day operations and tracks all data including purchase orders, invoices, receipts, employees, crew, subcontractors, and more. The application also tracks equipment, assigning certain equipment to specific locations and overseeing what is available and where each piece of equipment is being used.
‘Tis the season to scale with Tadabase
As a dynamic company, operational requirements are always evolving and with Tadabase’s ease of use, Henry is able to expand the app and make necessary changes on the fly.
“Sometimes I can make something happen that is requested in 5 minutes,” says Henry.
For instance, Henry recently built out a Human Resources portal within the application that is now used by over 300 employees. With this new portal, the company’s entire onboarding process is now seamlessly streamlined, including tracking of all employees, applications, contracts, signatures, proof of insurance, compensation, and more. The app internally connects with Signwell for signing documents and allows the company to send batches of signatures to new hires, freeing up a significant amount of time and manual effort.
“I’m really pleased with the extensibility of Tadabase. The fact that even with the amount of growth we’ve had, we were able to hold everything together and scale… without Tadabase it wouldn’t have been possible at this rate.”
Snow May Fall, But Tadabase Won’t
While Henry admits there was a slight learning curve in getting started with Tadabase, he says that he “always understood it would be worth the effort.” He adds that it would likely have taken him much less time today as Tadabase now provides many resources to help new users get started. Henry finds Tadabase’s Academy course videos and Tadabase’s community interactions especially helpful.
Henry is highly impressed by what Tadabase is able to achieve for Sneller. Even with their rapid growth in recent years, Tadabase has always been able to keep up and reliably scale with the company. Henry finds that this is partly due to how intuitive the platform is to use for everyone at the company. He shares that without Tadabase, this rate of growth “would not have been possible.”
