Today we’d like to introduce you to Bill Gile.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Bill. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Going back to 1990, I was working as a freelance meteorologist for a Rhode Island TV station and running an independent weather phone line that people could call and listen to a forecast for the south shore of Massachusetts each day. I also was providing a local town with weather forecasts during the winter season. At the time I was also helping meteorologist Rob Gilman cover radio forecasts for stations that he was working with. He also had a couple of towns in which he provided winter storm forecasts for.
During the winter season of 1990-91 we started to combine our efforts and since I was more of a night-owl I didn’t mid covering weather updates for the towns in the overnight hours and answering phone calls from them while he did the daytime forecasts. It seemed like a pretty good fit for us both. Then, during August of 1991 I was trying to figure out a way to make more money and get more work as a meteorologist since I was still just a freelancer for a TV station. As I thought back on that past winter I figured forecasting for towns might be a way to do this so I asked Rob why can’t we do more of that and try to build something? His response was “Well, there’s no reason why we can’t as long as we can provide around the clock coverage”. From there a business was born.
We wanted to strive to be hyper-local and as accurate as possible with our forecasts offering more detail than what was on TV or radio. We had to come up with a name that described that as best as possible and when we talked about how ‘precise’ we wanted to be it seemed like that was it…PRECISION WEATHER FORECASTING.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Essentially our business has run quite smoothly as it continued to grow each year. We decided that we wanted to stay small at first in order to keep our costs down and not over extend ourselves. That way we could concentrate on providing the best local information possible.
The biggest challenge to overcome, at the time, was to educate a lot of the dpw superintendents of the financial benefits of the service while helping to ease much of their pain as to how to plan out attacking storm events. We also had to show that what they would get from us was better than anything on TV or what was coming from the few other more national companies.
As time went by word of mouth helped to spread our reliability and accuracy to other towns and business entities and our reputation began to grow. The first year we were forecasting for 7 towns, the next year 12, then 22 the year after that and we began expanding beyond just dpw’s. We began forecasting for utilities, hospitals, schools, shopping malls and even car dealerships. Today we have over 250 clients throughout southern and central New England including the city of Boston.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Precision Weather Forecasting story. Tell us more about the business.
Precision Weather Forecasting, Inc. private weather forecasting service that provides highly detailed, time specific and location specific weather forecast information. While we provide year round weather forecasts we specialize in snow and ice forecasting.
I’m most proud of the trust and confidence that our clients have in us and our “original 7” are still with us 26 years later! That is a reflection of the excellent work and communication that our staff of meteorologists provide.
What sets us apart from many other companies is that our products are hand prepared for each client vs relying simply on a single computer model that displays a forecast or re-distributing/re-packaging the free information available from regional National Weather Service office forecast products. Too often during winter events you see computer models flip-flopping on solutions and without human intervention the client is left wondering what is going to happen? That just makes their decision making process all that much harder.
A nice story that I love to tell came from a dpw superintendent from a major city in MA. It was during a storm where there were inconsistencies in computer model guidance and all the TV stations were presenting different snow, ice and rain forecast areas that resulted in different snow totals being predicted. So, when the dpw superintendent asked his boss what he wanted to do his boss said, “Precision Weather Forecasting is typically right. Just do what they say!” They did and he told me that we ended up saving the city over $400,000 on that event.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.snowandice.com
- Phone: (844)793-2255
- Email: info@snowandice.com
An Accident waiting to happen, poor visibility,slick roads and lots of traffic.
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