The calls we sent down the street

The business

A maintenance crew. Trucks, techs, a back office, and a phone that rings all day.

This one is ours too.

What it already has

Some of those calls weren’t for us.

The crew started in 2011 as the repair side of our property management company. When a fridge, a stove or a dishwasher quit in one of our buildings, the call came to our office. Our techs didn’t do appliances. So we passed it to a repairman.

One man, one truck. We were loyal to our vendors, and he’d been one for years.

The business hiding in it

Each of those calls ended the same way on our side. We gave out his number.

It wasn’t a phone number we were giving out. It was an appliance repair business.

The customers were already ours.

Once that work ran through us, it kept one technician and one van busy with five to ten calls a day.

The unfair start

Our phone was already ringing. Our first customers were the clients on his list and the people already phoning our office. The back office was already there.

We didn’t have to find the work. We had to stop sending it down the street.

In 2018 the repairman was ready to retire. We bought what he’d built: the truck, the client list, and three months of him training one of our techs.

The honest filter

Here’s what would make it a bad idea. We found out the hard way.

About a year in, the tech he’d trained quit, bought his own van and started competing with us. The skill had lived in one man, and it left in that van.

We sent two of our maintenance techs to get certified. From then on, appliance repair was built into the maintenance crew.

So don’t start with one person who can do the work. Start when you can train two.