My former-carpenter brother has a saying that he learned from hard experience: “If you go somewhere to drive a nail, take your whole toolbox.”
The obvious lesson: You never know what you’re going to find when you get to a job. And it’s a whole lot easier to carry more than you think you need than to go back to the shop and get the tool you don’t have.
People in service businesses know that lesson well. Any drain cleaner has seen time lost on a job because of a spare part or a tool that didn’t make the trip on the truck. There’s hardly anything more wasteful than that windshield time on the way back to the office or supply house.
So, indeed, bring your whole toolbox. But that adage is a little harder to observe when the toolbox is a truck and the tools are expensive items like inspection cameras, cable machines, waterjetters and line locators.
Finding the balance
This month’s Cleaner looks at a couple of contractors who run fairly large service fleets and, obviously, try to do it efficiently. Their experience, and that of others we have profiled in this magazine, seems to dictate erring on the side of more equipment and more onboard inventory — not less.
Perhaps the best example of the “more is better” approach is Zoom Plumbing and Drain Service Inc., in Norristown, Pa., subject of our Money Machines feature. They’ve outfitted eight service trucks with high-powered 3,000 psi/10 gpm waterjetters, in addition to cabling, inspection and locating equipment and other assorted tools.
For them, it’s better to spend money to make sure technicians arrive at the job equipped for almost anything than to risk that dreaded, unproductive, unbillable drive time — multiplied by two because it’s a roundtrip between the job and the shop.
Intangibles come into play, too: Think of how much happier customers are when the job is done, from start to finish, with no interruption. The homeowner doesn’t face extra hours of a job in progress, with all the clutter and disruption that entails. The technician looks like a true professional. The company looks like a class operation.
That’s the sort of thing that makes it into the word-of-mouth mill when people talk (as they may from time to time) about their experience with plumbers. Good word- of-mouth means more business.
No perfect world
In an ideal world, you’d send every truck out equipped with exactly what the customer’s job required. In practice, that’s absurd to contemplate. Your service vans need a certain common denominator of equipment to be ready for the routine as well as the unexpected. So, where to draw the line?
Cable machine? Obviously. More than one size to handle bigger or smaller jobs? Not a bad idea. Inspection camera? Not only is this handy, but it’s a great selling tool. It should pay for itself quickly in repair work sold because the technician was able to sell the customer on the lasting fix instead of the stopgap service.
Beyond that, experience is probably the best teacher when it comes to what to carry onboard. Parts and supplies inventory is another issue, still. You certainly want to avoid the horror of losing an hour or two of billable labor because of a 50-cent part that should have been stocked, but wasn’t.
Bottom line: You should be able to build yourself a business case for what to carry, or not carry, in your service vehicles. Think beyond the cost of buying the equipment. Amortize each device across its expected useful life. Estimate based on experience the annual dollar volume each type of device generates. Take all the information and build the cost of equipment and inventory into the hourly rates.
Meeting competition
Of course, there are competitors to worry about. You have to price competitively; you can’t just carry every device imaginable and charge customers what you will. The interesting thing, though, is what happens when you are better equipped.
When you’re more efficient (fewer delays on the job, less drive time), and when you solve customers’ problems fast and with no interruptions, you demonstrate that your service has value. And when you demonstrate superior value, customers (it’s proven) are willing to pay for it. Meeting the competition matters less — you can justify higher rates. So in the end, your investment to equip and stock your trucks pays off nicely.
Maybe that’s why many successful contractors argue convincingly that more is better. Or that a good contractor should do what they tried (with limited success) to teach me in Boy Scouts: Be prepared!
