Starting a Service and Maintenance Division Requires the Right Infrastructure

RCS Influencer Mike Pickel says that his company’s rapid growth has made focusing on service and maintenance a challenge.

We just celebrated our fifth anniversary at Texas Traditions roofing. We’ve established ourselves in our community as a trusted, reliable roofing contractor for residential replacements, repairs and new commercial installations.  We’ve excelled at this and are experiencing exponential growth year over year. You’d think that’s a good thing, but it’s been a struggle for us to keep up with the infrastructure our business needs to function efficiently at this pace of growth.

About a year ago, we knew we wanted to try to open a service and maintenance division, but we weren’t up to speed with our infrastructure and we haven’t been financially able to get a dedicated service and maintenance roof adviser hired to focus on selling the services. Currently we have a residential roof adviser who is dedicated to repair and maintenance, but his role is more responsive, answering when we receive calls from a customer experiencing a problem.

When we receive a call, our roof adviser goes out to the property to see what the problem is, what the customer is looking for and determines how we can meet their needs. We then follow up with the appropriate response team based on whether it’s a shingle repair or a low-slope or metal repair. Ideally, we’d like to have it be a one trip visit where the problem can be diagnosed and repaired on the spot. We just aren’t there yet.

Our business is almost over that next financial hill that we need to surpass before we think we can successfully implement a service and maintenance program. We excel at residential replacements, repairs and new commercial installations so service and maintenance is a new realm for us . We feel like we are about to go out onto the football field, but we don’t have the right game plan in place.

We know that a service and maintenance division is going to bring a higher profit margin than new commercial installations, so we are committed to making it work. How? We’ve joined a peer group and are meeting next week so that we can learn from other contractors who aren’t in our market how they started their divisions and what worked and what didn’t.

Service and maintenance is the place we need to go. Especially in our market. New construction is great, but you’ve got to be lean and can’t miss a dime in our market. Maintenance will be the future.

Mike Pickel is co-founder of Texas Traditions Roofing. See his full bio here.