Today, lots of contracting companies view maintenance agreements as an effective way to earn ongoing business from customers. While the jobs generated by these agreements aren’t generally significant bread-winners, they can involve steady profit, which is important.
In our contractor company training, we teach that the key to a successful maintenance agreement is coming up with correct pricing and sticking to it.
With that in mind, here are three quick tips for establishing your maintenance agreement pricing.
1. Make it a team effort.
First things first: Pull your team together.
Whatever you do, don’t make decisions about your maintenance agreement pricing on your own. For best results, you need to involve your team on decisions.
Ask for their thoughts on:
• What you’re going to offer
• What tasks you’re going to perform (including preventative maintenance agreements)
• If you’re going to provide a maintenance agreement
• And more
To decide on these things, get the team together and ask for their input. After all, these are the people with boots on the ground. They have a right to toss their two cents into the pot.
Getting team buy-in here is going to do a couple of things
First, it gets everybody on the same page, and it ensures that your entire team is going to perform the same maintenance agreement, regardless of who’s doing the work.
Second, it means your team will be doing the job the way they should, and that customers will be happy with the services rendered.
2. Decide how much time it’s going to take.
Next, you need to establish a timeframe for your maintenance agreement pricing. Remember, you have to be realistic about this. You want to think about how long it will actually take to perform each of these tasks, not how long you wish it would take.
This step is critical.
If your team determines that the maintenance agreement should take an hour of wrench time on the job, and techs are getting it done in 45 minutes, you have to ask what the techs are skipping. While it might seem like saving time is smart, keeping your promises is the most important thing. If you agree that your team will perform specific tasks, coming up with a timeframe in which to complete them is a necessary accountability metric.
Since this metric may change over time, don’t hesitate to revisit this conversation routinely.
3. Order the tasks.
Finally, look at the list of tasks that you developed and decide if there is a proper order in which to do them. This is important for many reasons. Mainly, it helps create an order for your techs so that everyone does the jobs in the order that makes sense. It also helps avoid mistakes and errors born from rushing through things.
In some cases, certain parts of the work agreement have to be completed before the others. Make sure your team agrees on what order to complete the tasks in. It may take some time to finalize the order of the tasks, but you have to take the time to get it right from the start. This is especially important in preventative maintenance settings.
Ensuring Maximum Profits for Your Team
In our contractor company training courses, we focus on helping contractors run profitable, reliable companies. One big part of that is coming up with accurate and intelligent maintenance agreement pricing. Even if you’ve struggled with this in the past, it doesn’t have to be as tricky as it sounds. By following the three tips in this post, you can develop maintenance agreement pricing that truly works for your team, your customers, and your business.
To learn more about contractor company training, contact us today. We’ll be happy to help you find the courses you need to run a profitable contracting business!
