In our latest blog we ask the question: Is it wise to cut costs on your commercial property maintenance?
The simple answer is yes, cutting your maintenance costs is a very sensible and wise move.
In our experience, most customers tend to wait until their maintenance is either affecting their business or an actual emergency before getting it sorted out. This sort of reactive maintenance is normally the most expensive that a company will offer, because the customer tends to need the work completed immediately and with very little notice.
What does this mean for you? Maintaining your commercial property is always going to be expensive if you leave the work until the last minute, it really is that simple.
There are some very effective ways to cut your maintenance costs and save money for your business in the long term.
Firstly, and we really can’t stress this enough… You have to plan ahead. Planned preventative maintenance (PPM) on your commercial property is a proven way of saving money and keeping your building safe. Introducing a planned maintenance program will allow any issues to be dealt with in a timely and effective manner.
Planned works can be tailored to your property and carried out on a regular basis to ensure any maintenance works are treated before they potentially become a major issue. Planning works ahead also allows you to factor in your entire legal maintenance as well, making sure you really are covered thoroughly.
To save more money we suggest finding one contractor who can carry out all off the work for you. This wastes less of your time and money, giving you peace of mind that all of your maintenance needs will be covered.
To then save even more money you could try to negotiate lower prices in return for longer lead times. So instead of calling with one job and getting it fixed within a day or two. You could possibly save the work (depending on it’s severity of course) until you have a couple of jobs and also give your maintenance company longer to complete the work, say up to 14 days from raising the work. This then moves the work from reactive to planned, in turn reducing your costs even more.
It is important to take a look back over the last few years and see how much you spend on maintenance. Look at the work that’s been done and then see if that would work could have been prevented or made cheaper by planning it ahead, as opposed to reacting to it. If you notice a trend, things like dealing with issues at the last minute or maybe more underlying problems that keep reappearing, then planned maintenance is definitely for you.
We do understand it is sometimes hard to go down the route of planned maintenance. More often than not people in our experience take the risk and deal with the consequences of their maintenance problems when it’s too late.
Take that step, plan your maintenance activities with a reputable building maintenance company and reap the rewards of forward planning.
Do you have any other tips or advice on saving money on your building maintenance?
Here at The Building Maintenance Company we offer bespoke planned maintenance packages taking care of all your building maintenance needs. Contact us on 0845 601 3684 or bmc@bmc-ltd.co.uk
Planned Property Maintenance
Originally posted in March 2014.
