Have you Recovered Yet?

Contractors should educate owners and facility managers on how they can recover costs.

By Greg Hayne

“Recovery” is the term a professional building manager uses when he takes the invoice you send him for a leak repair and “recovers” your fees by passing them along to others to pay. Perhaps the best example of this is where a property manager takes your invoice for a “leak” that turned out to be an HVAC issue, not the roof, and back charges the tenant, because HVAC maintenance is the tenant’s responsibility, thus making you “free” and making him/her (and you) look good with their boss!

Everyone can do recovery. Think about your local bowling alley, they can do recovery. When the HVAC tech punches a hole in his roof and you get out there quickly and inform the owner, quickly, of what caused the leak, he can deduct your charges off what he owes the HVAC guy before he sends in his payment. And while the bowling alley owner may not be a professional facility manager, we are still pretty sure he will be happy you helped him recover the charges.

Now, here is the thing about professionally property managers, not all of them are doing recovery. There may be a variety of reasons for this, but I want to focus on just one of them. Many property managers are not doing recovery because the invoices you send them are poorly documented. They are annotated in roof speak. Your property manager doesn’t have the technical skills to recognize what you have sent them as an opportunity for recovery.

Further, in many organizations, if your invoice is below a certain dollar amount, nobody even reads the invoice’s documentation, they just pay it! So, what you need to do is educate them! When your service department sees an opportunity for recovery, notify somebody. Tell them! Have a conversation with them about recovery. Find out what their policies and procedures are for recovery and then educate and equip them to start recovering your fees. This is called “service.”

The auto dealer calls you and tells you that even though the problem you are having with your car is not technically covered by the warranty, he thinks it should be. So, he called the manufacturer and has gotten the repair approved at no cost to you. How would that make you feel? (Made me feel great!)   He has, in essence, recovered your costs for you from the manufacturer. Why don’t you do the equivalent for your customers?

Everybody can do recovery. Including you. To learn more about recovery, visit http://haynecoachinggroup.com/