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Five years ago, the MSCA introduced the Everyday Hero award to recognize a member employee who in their own way gives their time and skills to benefit others.  These individuals lend a hand solely out of the goodness of their hearts, without looking for recognition, which can often make them hard to find.

This year the MSCA received many nominations for people in our industry that are doing extraordinary things in their communities. We are so proud to have so many people doing such great things. This year’s recipient, Michelle Collier, office manager for Warwick Mechanical Group in Newport News, VA, was truly deserving.

Michelle spends her Wednesday evenings volunteering at Nations Church, providing meals to the homeless. She also gives her time to the Butterfly House, a faith-based organization that helps minor girls who have been rescued from sex trafficking.

MSCA presented Michelle with a check for $5,000 to the All Nations Outreach Program.

Last year, Michelle went to North Carolina to help rebuild homes that were destroyed by Hurricane Florence.

Ron Clark, Vice President of Warwick Mechanical, nominated Michelle saying “her drive to help people and get the work done is a real inspiration. You can see the true character of a person when they’re in a crawl space of a recently flooded house removing insulation and duct work under conditions that are hard to describe.”

He went on to add “there is no hesitation when something needs to be done, she is there until the job is completed. She brings that same drive and service to the company and others on the team. Selfless, sacrifice, caring, empathy, and all that packaged into an extremely capable manager.”

Michelle thanked Warwick Mechanical, saying that she is blessed “to work for a company that truly believes in investing in the community and giving back and providing lots of opportunities for their employees to do so.”

Congratulations Michelle for this much deserved award.

MSCA conducted a comprehensive benchmark survey to obtain data on key performance indicators (KPIs) in the HVACR and plumbing service industry. The results were very insightful and sure to be beneficial to all MSCA members. The full report is now available, results are presented in two formats, one is overall results and the second is broken down by company size which can provide specific insight relevant to your company. In addition, the findings have been summarized below.

Features of BEST in CLASS Contractors

• Provide primarily air conditioning, heating, plumbing & controls services
• Focused on growing their service agreement base
• Have a separate P/L for service and construction
• Have dedicated service agreement sales personnel
• Bill service agreements in advance
• “Auto Increase” service agreements at renewal (1-3% most common)
• Service Agreement (PM) retention rate of 96% or greater
• Bill quickly – Average is 4–7 days (upon completion of work)
• Track monthly sales to monthly sales goals
• 66% of contractors average $300,000 or more revenue per service vehicle
• Allow service technicians to quote work in the field (average limit is approximately $6,000)
• Hire salespeople from the field
• Annual scheduled preventative maintenance hours per service technician between 300 and 800
• Provide 1 to 50 hours of technical and safety training per year per technician
• Provide training for new service sales reps
• Have an average ratio of 2 to 3 field techs to one office staff
• Total non-billable technician time between 5-10% annually
• Truck inventory tracked using a software system
• Replace service vans based on mileage (100K-150K miles most common)
• Use some form of social media (most common are LinkedIn #1, Facebook #2, Twitter #3)
• Have deployed a mobile field solution
• Have implemented measures to avoid a data breach

AH-HA Revelations from 2019 MSCA Benchmark Survey

• 32% of companies have not deployed a mobile solution
• Over 50% of contractors do not have automatic renewal of PMs
• 37% of companies auto-renewing at an increase of 1% – 3% – are they keeping up with costs?
• 52% of companies missing out on a cash flow opportunity by not advance billing their service contracts
• 33% of companies do not track truck inventory
• 30% of contractors do not have a separate P/L for service – how do they know how they are performing?
• 56% of companies allow service techs to quote jobs in the field (from $500 – $25,000)
• Since 2015, 4% increase in those companies offering plumbing service, 5% increase in those performing refrigeration work and 7% increase in residential work
• Since 2015, there was a 10% decline in the number of companies performing controls work, building controls systems integration work, building operations and testing and balancing
• Annual service projects revenue grew from $1 – $3 million to over $5 million
• 88% of contractors have less than 20% non-billable time
• Contractors replacing vans more frequently than in 2015 – 72% replace every five years or less
• 41% of companies with dedicated maintenance sales personnel sell over $300,000 new service agreements annually compared to all other companies where only 24% average over $300,000 in service agreement sales per rep
• 75% of companies still tracking tools manually or not at all
• 25% of companies have experienced a cyber-security breach
• 27% of companies use SEO and have seen a 5 – 10% increase in traffic
• 72% of contractors do not have a sales training program
• 20% of companies take more than 15 days to bill once job complete
• 40% of companies do NOT track monthly sales against monthly sales goals
• 68% of companies do not employ dedicated maintenance sales personnel
• 30% of companies use no social media