Want to stop flushing money down the toilet on preventable repairs?
Believe it or not, small business owners make the same facility maintenance mistakes year after year. Avoidable errors that quietly bleed their business dry by up to thousands of dollars annually.
Let’s break this down.
The biggest issue with facility maintenance mistakes? Most of them can be avoided.
Preventative maintenance and timely repairs can cut your expenses significantly. All it takes is a little know-how and some common sense.
Here’s what you’re going to learn:
- Preventative Maintenance vs. Reactive Maintenance
- Why Ignoring Your Parking Lot Will Cost You
- Simple Maintenance Tips To Save You Money
Preventative Maintenance vs. Reactive Maintenance
When it comes to maintaining your business facilities, most entrepreneurs take the “wait and see” approach.
When money is tight, repairing things that aren’t broken is the last thing on your mind. However, that type of thinking can end up costing you.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, corrective maintenance costs businesses 40% more than facilities who took the preventative route. Yikes.
Think about that.
If you wait for something to break before you address the problem, you’re playing a game of repair roulette. Emergency repairs = premium costs for parts and labour = smaller profits.
And most small businesses don’t realize how much money they lose until it’s too late.
Why Ignoring Your Parking Lot Will Cost You
Your parking lot is one of the most important things to maintain correctly.
Why?
Because when parking lots are left to degrade, they go from expensive to insanely expensive. Fast.
It happens more times than most people realize.
Business owners neglect their parking lot until it’s swarmed with cracks. Then the cracks turn into potholes. Before you know it, you’ve got unhappy customers parking elsewhere and a huge repair bill on your hands.
Asphalt Coatings Company can help you get your parking lot back into top shape with their professional asphalt paving services. Resurfacing is the process of laying down a new layer of asphalt over your existing lot.
Timing is everything when it comes to parking lot repair and maintenance.
When done at the right time, asphalt resurfacing can prevent you from having to completely replace your pavement. Complete replacement is never fun on the wallet.
Did you know that the National Asphalt Pavement Association found pavement can last an additional 25 years with regular maintenance and care? That’s right.
25 more years of using the same parking lot.
Most small businesses do not sealcoat their parking lot asphalt. They don’t take care of small cracks when they see them. They wait until their parking lot is falling apart before they think about resurfacing.
Then they wonder why maintenance costs so much money.
Here are the average costs for parking lot maintenance:
- Sealcoating: $0.14 – $0.25 per square foot
- Crack filling: $0.50 – $3.00 per linear foot
- Asphalt resurfacing: $2 – $7 per square foot
- Asphalt replacement: $7 – $13 per square foot
As you can see, preventive maintenance is significantly cheaper than replacing your entire parking lot.
Simple Maintenance Tips To Save You Money
Asphalt maintenance isn’t the only place businesses make costly mistakes.
Here are a few others:
Monthly walk-throughs.
Somehow people feel inspections take up too much time. Inspections don’t. It takes all of 15-minutes to walk through your business and spot any areas of concern.
You’d be surprised how many small issues you can detect early by doing regular inspections.
HVAC maintenance.
This includes cleaning out your filters and having your vents inspected yearly. Dirty filters make your HVAC work harder which equals higher energy bills. Not to mention, dirty filters don’t last as long as clean ones.
HVAC units should be inspected Quarterly. That prevents the need for any major (and expensive) repairs.
The last thing you want is to find out your HVAC is busted in the middle of summer or winter. Units tend to charge double if they know you’re running on a time crunch.
Attend to roofing issues ASAP.
Again with the waiting. If you see a roofing issue, tend to it right away.
Water leaks can turn into major structural issues very quickly. And make no mistake, fixing water damage is EXPENSIVE.
You can typically patch a small roof leak for a few hundred dollars. Fixing water damaged drywall, ceiling tiles, and inventory will cost you five figures.
Exterior of your building.
This includes making sure your gutters aren’t clogged, sidewalks are intact, and signs are easy to read.
Neglected exteriors are large safety and liability risks. One lawsuit from someone slipping and falling is all it takes to destroy your business.
Budget For Regular Maintenance
You don’t have to let maintenance eat away at your bottom line.
Implement a maintenance calendar and schedule regular inspections of your facility. Mark your calendar when seasonal maintenance is required and DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.
Simple, right?
Go one step further and prioritize maintenance and repairs that need to get done. Certain repairs can wait while others should be addressed immediately.
Water damage, electrical issues, and safety should always be tended to ASAP.
It also helps to have a list of trusted contractors you can call if needed. Wait until you NEED something done and you’ll be left begging contractors to come to your rescue.
Lastly, start budgeting for maintenance and repairs on a monthly basis. It’s much easier to save a little here and there than try and come up with a lot all at once.
The problem with most businesses is they wait too long to maintain their facilities.
The businesses who “got it” know that maintenance is a requirement for long-term success. They budget for repairs, replacement, and regular checkups.
And they thrive because of it.
Recap
Are you noticing a trend here?
Maintenance is incredibly important to the success of your business.
By allowing your facilities to fall into disrepair, you’re losing money on a grand scale.
Here’s your quick reminder:
- Stop waiting until something breaks to get it repaired.
- Do regular parking lot maintenance and sealcoating.
- Create a maintenance calendar.
- Budget for maintenance costs.
- Find reliable contractors.
The businesses who have trouble with maintenance costs are the ones who fail to plan.
Plan your maintenance and inspections out like your business depends on it. Because it does.
