Growing a Service Department

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spicey dirt

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Location
Huntsville,AL
Occupation
Project Manager for Commercial Electrical Contractor
My employer has given me the additional duty of running our Commercial/Industrial Electrical Service Department. I have been handling all calls that have come in for several months. My Branch Manager came to my office and mentioned that we really need to grow this dept. Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to grow this department?
 
where are you at now? Do you have the employees, facilities, trucks, equipment? Are you just looking for marketing advise?
 
I am in Huntsville, Al. I have employees, Vans & Trucks, Facilitys and equipment. Our other branches seem to have all the service work they can handle, just this location is not doing great. Only about $12,000 this year.
 
Do you do all kinds of electrical contracting, or do you sell some kind of specialty equipment? For example I sold large wastewater treatment drives. We were the manufacturer's rep in our area. So of course I targeted municipal and large industrial customers with wastewater treatment plants. I got a lot of customers just by bidding jobs. Even if I didn't win the bid, I got to show my face. That way I wasn't running around making cold calls
 
We are an Electrical Construction firm doing a lot of Hospitals, Schools, Parking Garages and Multi Story retail and office complexes, we only sell our Contracting Services....The service Dept is just a side venture for the company.

How do y'all get pictures above your name?
 
The people I have are just electricans, I wish I had some all around Techs, Moters, PLC's, ect. Its just hard to find those people.
 
ActionDave said:
There's a lot of good money in service work if you have someone who knows how to work on motors.
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There’s more liability too though, can get expensive if a tech screws up a machine that he’s not familiar with troubleshooting on. The company I was previously with, wanted to get into the more technical troubleshooting stuff, but we just didn’t have enough qualified people. It just made my job harder putting out fires! LOL!
 
Finding people is impossible. I was just through a situation with a deaerator tank and feedwater pumps for a 2000 HP boiler installation that shut a whole plant down for almost 12 hours and had about 300 people standing around with their thumbs up their butts. Long story short somebody thought it'd be a good idea to shut off the deaerator tank vent, and when problems started somebody else started f ing with the VFDs that ran the feedwater pumps, That's when they started randomly opening/closing valves.

So the next night I walk through the boiler house, just to check and I see the deaerator tank is at 35 PSI and about 275 degrees (normal is like 3PSI and 220 something). Would you believe someone closed the vent again? Leaks where there never were leaks before, condensate water drenching the cabinet full of controls, HMI screen showing all kinds of wacky S***.

I think the qualified help thing is going to eventually put everyone out of business
 
My previous employer had a maintenance contract with a call center, the guy got paid 40 hours a week for pretty much doing nothing all day, one day, he decided to see what a chiller dump button did. He found out. Dumped thousands of gallons of water shutting down the A/C, and losing that contract.
 
We used to have an exam that maintenance personnel had to pass before they got hired, then they decided that they had to pass the exam within a year of being hired, Still can't get enough people. Corporate's solution is to dumb down the test
 
Yeah, I do the hiring for our branch, it is really hard to find qualified people and when you do find them they want so much money you cant afford to hire them.
 
I designed a test board for my previous employer to have at each branch. Makes it easy to weed out those that want a lot of money, but don’t know what they are doing. Went up to the Midwest office to train the trainers, first day let one new hire go, he lied on his application, and admitted he was just a helper, and another that claimed to be top notch couldn’t bend conduit, and adjusted his pay scale down as a new offer. He accepted.
 
spicey dirt said:
Yeah, I do the hiring for our branch, it is really hard to find qualified people and when you do find them they want so much money you cant afford to hire them.
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You can't get them you need to make them. Start to finish their apprenticeship in the service department. If you do loan them out just have them do a year in the construction side.
 
letgomywago said:
You can't get them you need to make them. Start to finish their apprenticeship in the service department. If you do loan them out just have them do a year in the construction side.
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That is the best way to start out, if you know how a building goes together, it makes it much easier to troubleshoot. The journeyman I started with had a saying that when troubleshooting, “ If I was an idiot electrician, what would I do?” LOL!
 
spicey dirt said:
The people I have are just electricans, I wish I had some all around Techs, Moters, PLC's, ect. Its just hard to find those people.
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spicey dirt said:
Yeah, I do the hiring for our branch, it is really hard to find qualified people and when you do find them they want so much money you cant afford to hire them.
Click to expand...



These two posts highlight your problem.


You cannot build a service dept without commitments on labor and marketing. We do a lot of work in Huntsville. $12k/yr may as well be $0. There is tremendous growth in that area right now. Most of the areas we are building in right now show up as cotton fields on Google maps still. Your “manager” either makes the investment or they don’t. And if they won’t give you the funds needed, I wouldn’t waste the energy to keep trying.


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