- Home
- Several sites
You have four sites and four different contractors
Five shapes an estate can take, crossed with the four ways it is being handled now. What to standardise and what not to, where one contractor genuinely helps, and where it makes things worse.
Three things that apply to every answer below
- One contractor is not automatically better than four
It is better for records, almost always — one format, one history, one person who can compare site to site. It is better for price only if the sites are genuinely similar. And it is worse for response the moment a site is far enough away that getting there takes an hour. The honest arrangement is usually one contractor for the cluster and somebody local for the outliers, with the records kept in one place.
- Sort the sites by what failure costs before you sort them by anything else
A restaurant that cannot trade without cooling and a storage unit that nobody visits are not the same asset and should not be on the same contract terms. Most estates are paying the same attention to both. Half an hour ranking them — what stops, how fast, and what it costs per day — is the single most useful thing an owner can do, and it costs nothing.
- We will tell you where we cannot cover you
We are one contractor in Carrollton. We can serve the north DFW corridor properly and we will say so plainly about anything beyond it. A site we reach in ninety minutes is a site that quietly gets visited less often, by us or by anybody, and you would find that out eventually. You should find it out now, from us, in writing.
Work out what your estate actually needs
Pick the shape of it and pick how it is handled now. Every answer below is on this page whether you pick anything or not — the picker only narrows it down.
This is worth being blunt about because it is almost never explained, and it changes several things you would otherwise assume. They are our client and you are theirs. We are instructed by them, we report to them, and we are paid by them. What you will and will not see: our findings go to the FM company, and whether they reach you, in what form and with what added, is their decision rather than ours. A great many site managers have never seen the actual readings from their own plant. What we will not do is go around them — quietly take instructions from you on a site they hold, or send you a version of a report we have not sent them. That is not loyalty to them, it is the only way a three-party arrangement works without somebody being misled. What you can do: ask the FM company, in writing, for the contractor’s own reports rather than a summary, and for the model and serial numbers of your plant. Both are yours to ask for and both are frequently produced without argument the moment somebody asks. And if you want to work with us directly, that is a conversation to have with them first, not with us.
Standardise the equipment before you standardise the contract.
Identical sites are the one case where the whole idea genuinely pays — one parts shelf, one set of filter sizes, one procedure, one training. But that only works if the equipment is actually the same, and on an estate that grew site by site it usually is not. Get the model numbers first.
What to do with a set of similar sites
- Build the list. Every unit at every site, model and serial, in one spreadsheet. Until that exists, nothing else on this page is possible.
- Find the common parts. Filters, belts, capacitors, contactors. On a matched estate, four or five part numbers cover a great deal of what fails, and holding them centrally turns a two-day outage into an hour.
- Standardise the next replacement, not this one. Replacing working plant to make an estate uniform is rarely worth it. Specifying the same thing every time something does fail gets you there in five years for nothing.
- One maintenance specification, in writing. Same readings, same intervals, same report format at every site. That is what makes them comparable, which is what lets you see the one that is quietly costing you money.
The thing worth resisting: a single contract price across sites that are not actually the same size. It looks tidy and it means the small sites subsidise the large ones.
Do not buy one contract for all of them. Sort them by what failure costs, then decide.
A mixed estate is the case where a single uniform contract does the most harm, because it gives the same attention to a site that cannot afford to stop and a site that nobody would notice for a week. The sorting takes half an hour and changes everything that follows.
How to sort a mixed estate
Three columns, one row per site. What stops if the heating or cooling fails — trading, production, a clinic, or nothing much. How fast it becomes a problem — minutes, hours, days. What a day costs, roughly. You do not need precision; you need the order.
Then three tiers rather than one contract. The top tier gets frequent scheduled visits, critical spares held, and a plan for what happens at two in the morning. The middle gets ordinary planned maintenance. The bottom gets an annual visit and an honest acceptance that if it fails, it waits.
What this saves is not usually money on paper — it is attention. Most mixed estates are spending the same amount everywhere and under-serving the one site that matters, and the owner only discovers which one that was on the day it stops.
The warehouse and the offices need different trades’ worth of attention. Price them separately.
They look like one estate and they are two problems. Office plant is small, numerous, and mostly a zoning and scheduling question. Warehouse plant is large, exposed, harder to reach, and the real question there is usually air movement rather than capacity. Lumping them together produces a contract that fits neither.
What each side actually needs
The offices: zones measured at the hour the complaints happen, sensors where the people are, schedules matched to the hours the building is used, and filters changed on a real interval. Small, frequent, cheap.
The warehouse: the temperature logged at working height for a week before anybody prices capacity, because the number at the roof is not the number your people are standing in. Then destratification, ventilation and spot cooling priced against whole-building cooling, with the figures side by side. Large, infrequent, and much more sensitive to being got right.
And the thing they share: access. Rooftop plant on a warehouse is frequently the least-maintained equipment on any estate, not because anybody decided that but because getting to it is awkward. Ask when each unit was last physically opened, and be ready for the answer.
Find out what the lease actually says about the plant before you spend anything on it.
On a leased site the equipment is usually the landlord’s and the obligation to maintain it is usually the tenant’s, and the gap between those two sentences is where a great deal of money goes. Read the clause before you commission anything, not after.
The three questions to settle in writing
- Who maintains it and to what standard? Many leases require maintenance without specifying it, which means the standard is whatever you can show at the end.
- Who replaces it when it reaches the end of its life? This is the expensive one and the one most often left vague. A tenant who maintains plant for ten years and is then asked to replace it has usually not read this clause.
- What condition is it in now? A dated survey at the start of a lease is the cheapest insurance available to a tenant, and almost nobody does one. We will produce it, and it is equally useful to a landlord.
What we will not do is tell you what your lease means. That is a surveyor’s or a solicitor’s job. What we will do is describe the plant precisely enough that whoever does read it has something real to work from.
Write the mechanical requirement into the fit-out specification now. It is the only moment it is free.
Every problem on this page is cheaper to prevent at fit-out than to fix afterwards, and at fit-out it usually costs nothing at all — it is a paragraph in a document rather than a job. Almost nobody does it, which is why every estate ends up mixed.
What to put in the specification
- Named equipment, or at least a named standard. If the next four sites take the same filters and the same capacitors, you have a spares shelf for nothing.
- Access. A fixed ladder or a hatch, a walkway, edge protection, a light and a socket at the plant. Specified at fit-out this is trivial. Retrofitted it is a project, and until it exists the plant is maintained badly.
- Commissioning records handed over. Airflow, static pressure and charge measured at handover and given to you on paper. Without them you never know whether a site started life correct.
- A drawing of what serves what. Produced once, at the point when somebody actually knows.
We will write that paragraph for you and it does not commit you to using us. It is four lines and it is worth more than anything else on this page.
A different contractor at each site
The usual starting point, and not a mistake. Local contractors get there faster and know their own building. What it costs you is comparability: four different report formats, four different opinions, and no way to tell which site is quietly expensive.
The cheap improvement is not to replace them. It is to standardise what you ask for. Send every contractor the same one-page specification of what a visit must record — the readings, the part numbers, the dates — and ask for it in the same format. Most will do it without changing the price.
Then, after a year, you can actually see the estate. And at that point consolidating is a decision based on evidence rather than a hope.
One contractor for all of them
Then the question is whether the geography genuinely works, and it is worth testing rather than assuming. Ask for the visit dates and the travel times for the last twelve months at your furthest site, and compare them with your nearest. The pattern is usually visible immediately.
What one contractor should be giving you that four cannot: a single format, a comparison across sites, a view on which equipment is failing early across the estate rather than at one building, and one person who can tell you where next year’s money should go.
If you are not getting those, you are paying for consolidation and receiving four contractors with one invoice. That is worth raising, and it is a reasonable thing to ask for.
A facilities management company in between
Read the note above, because that is the substance of it. The practical points beyond it are short.
Ask for the underlying reports. Not the summary, the contractor’s own sheets with the readings and the part numbers. They exist and they are yours to ask for.
Ask for an asset list with model and serial numbers for every unit on every site. If nobody can produce one, that is the finding, and it is a large one.
And be clear about what you are buying. An FM company sells co-ordination, one invoice and a single point of contact, which are real things with real value. What it does not automatically buy is better mechanical work, and the two get conflated in almost every conversation about it.
Nobody — it is reactive
Extremely common, and not irrational: for a small estate of low-consequence sites, calling somebody when it breaks genuinely is the cheapest policy. The question is whether that is true of all of your sites, and it almost never is.
Start with one site, not with a contract. Take whichever site would hurt most if it stopped, get it surveyed properly, and put it on planned maintenance for a year. Leave the others reactive. You will know within twelve months whether it was worth it, at a fraction of the cost of committing the whole estate.
The one thing worth doing everywhere immediately, and it is nearly free: get an asset list. Model and serial numbers for every unit, photographed. When something does fail, that list is the difference between a same-day part and a week of guessing.
Where this page stops
We will survey your sites, produce one folder per site in the same format, sort them with you by what failure costs, and tell you honestly which ones we can serve properly. We will write the fit-out paragraph for a site we are not building, and we will produce a lease-start condition survey for either party.
We will not claim coverage we do not have, promise a response time, interpret your lease, or go around a facilities management company that holds the contract.