Multi-Site Service Contracts: Pricing Work Across 40 Kitchens

One rate across 40 sites is 40 different jobs priced as if they were 1. The 4 things that vary between sites are drive time, equipment age, site access and site behavior, and any of the 4 can move the real cost of a visit by half.

The short version

A group asks for a price to cover their portfolio. The instinct is to take your hourly rate, add something for the inconvenience, and send it.

What that misses is that the portfolio is not uniform. Some of those kitchens are twelve minutes away with equipment installed last year. Some are ninety minutes away with fryers from 2011 and a loading bay you cannot park in. Priced identically, the good sites subsidize the bad ones, and you find out which is which in month eight.

The fix is not to price every site separately, which nobody will accept. It is to know the spread before you average it, so the average is chosen rather than guessed.

The 4 things that vary, in order of how much they cost

Variable	What it changes	How to find it before signing
Drive time	Unbillable hours per visit, both directions	Measure from your base at dispatch hours, not miles on a map
Equipment age and mix	Visit frequency, parts spend, first-time fix rate	Ask for an asset list, or survey a sample of sites
Site access	Time on site before work starts	Ask about parking, hours, security and who holds keys
Site behavior	Call volume for things that are not faults	Ask how many calls each site logged last year

The last row is the one service companies never ask about and it has the widest spread. Two identical kitchens with identical equipment can generate very different call volumes depending on whether the staff know how to clean a condenser coil. That is a training difference showing up as a service cost, and it is entirely invisible at quoting time unless you ask.

Get the asset list before you price

Equipment age is the largest driver of cost after drive time, and it is knowable.

Ask for a list of what is in each kitchen. Some groups have one, most do not, and the answer tells you something either way. A group that cannot say what equipment it owns is a group whose maintenance spend has never been managed, which is both a risk and an opportunity.

Where no list exists, price a survey as a separate piece of work before the contract starts. Manufacturer, model, serial and approximate age on every unit at every site. It takes a technician a couple of hours per kitchen and it converts the largest unknown in the pricing into a number.

It also gives you something to hold. An asset list you built and maintain is the reason the group renews, because the alternative supplier starts from nothing.

3 pricing structures and what each one does to you

The structure matters more than the rate, because it decides who carries the variance.

Time and materials at an agreed rate. You carry no volume risk and no equipment risk. Simple, honest, and the group has no cost certainty, which is usually why they came to you. Fine as a starting arrangement and rarely what a multi-site buyer wants.

Planned maintenance fixed, break-fix at rate. The common middle. You get a predictable revenue floor and a schedule you control, they get budgetable prevention and a known rate for the rest. This is the structure that works for most service companies and most groups.

Fully comprehensive per site. One monthly figure covering everything. The group loves it and you have taken on the equipment risk for an portfolio you did not choose, where a single walk-in compressor can consume a year of margin on a site. Viable only when you know the assets, have history on them, and have priced the tail of large failures explicitly.

The middle structure is where most multi-site contracts should land, and the mistake is jumping to the third because it wins the deal.

Build the number from a visit, not from an hour

The unit that predicts your cost is a visit, and an hourly rate hides everything around it.

A visit costs you: travel out, time getting to the equipment, the work, the closeout, and travel back. On a site ninety minutes away, an hour of work is a four hour visit. Priced hourly, you have invoiced one hour.

What to do instead:

1. Estimate visits per site per year from equipment count, age and the site's call history
2. Cost a visit at each site, or in drive-time bands, including both directions and site access time
3. Add parts at your realized margin, not your list margin, and check whether the contract sets parts terms
4. Add the administrative load, since multi-site work carries reporting and consolidated invoicing that single-site work does not
5. Then divide by whatever unit the customer wants to buy in

The fifth step is the point. The customer can buy per site per month, per kitchen, or as one portfolio fee. What they must not do is set the unit before you have built the cost.

Banding beats a single average

A single rate across a mixed portfolio is the structure that fails quietly.

Group the sites into two or three bands by drive time and equipment age, and price the bands. Most groups accept this readily, because they know perfectly well that their airport location is harder to service than their high street one.

What banding gives you beyond the margin: it makes the conversation about the outlying sites explicit at the start. Either they pay for the harder sites, or those sites are excluded, or a local subcontractor covers them. All three are better outcomes than absorbing them silently for two years.

Where a group insists on one number, band internally anyway. You still need to know which sites are carrying the contract and which are eating it, and that information only exists if you built it.

Write in the terms that let you correct it

You are pricing a year of work you have not seen. The contract should assume you got something wrong.

• Annual review with named triggers, such as visit volume exceeding the estimate by a stated margin
• What is excluded, in writing: major component replacement, damage, misuse, equipment past a stated age
• Site changes, since a group that opens six locations has changed the contract and a group that closes six has too
• A parts clause you have read, because a nominated supplier or a capped markup replaces your normal parts margin on every job

The first is the one service companies omit and it is the cheapest protection available. A review clause turns a bad price into a twelve month problem rather than a three year one.

Then measure it per site, because that is where the answer is

An portfolio contract that looks profitable in total is usually four sites losing money inside thirty-six that are not.

What to track, and each comes from records you already generate: visits, realized hours including travel, parts spend and repeat visits, per site rather than per contract.

That report needs every job attached to a site and every part attached to a job, with the cost coming from the purchase order rather than an assumed markup. Where purchase orders sit outside the job it cannot be built, which is why so many multi-site contracts are renewed on impression.

Roopairs holds equipment records per site with purchase orders attached to work orders, which is what makes the per-site view available at renewal rather than the per-contract one.

Take that report into the review. A group shown that four of its sites cost twice the rest will usually engage with why, and the answer is frequently something they can fix.

Roopairs runs a product tour where you can see per-site equipment records and job costing behind a multi-site contract.

What service companies in the trade say

“The estimate and invoice reminders are a lifesaver, ensuring I stay on top of payments from my customers without a hassle.” — Lester Altman

Also worth reading

• Raising Rates Without Losing Accounts
• Pricing a PM Contract Without Guessing
• Why field service technician productivity starts on the job site

Frequently asked questions

How do you price a multi-site service contract?

Build the cost from a visit rather than an hour: visits per site per year, cost of a visit at each site including travel both ways and site access, parts at realized margin, plus the administrative load. Then divide into whatever unit the customer buys in, rather than starting from that unit.

Should every site have the same rate?

No. Group sites into two or three bands by drive time and equipment age. Groups accept this because they already know their difficult sites are difficult, and banding makes the conversation about outlying sites happen at the start rather than in year two.

What drives cost differences between sites?

Drive time, equipment age and mix, site access, and site behavior. The last is the widest spread and the least asked about: two identical kitchens can generate very different call volumes depending on how the staff treat the equipment.

Do we need an asset list before quoting?

It converts the largest unknown into a number, so yes where possible. Where the group has no list, price a survey as separate work before the contract starts. An asset list you built and maintain is also a large part of why the contract renews.

Is a fully comprehensive price a good idea?

Only when you know the assets, have history on them, and have priced large failures explicitly. It transfers equipment risk on an portfolio you did not choose, and one walk-in compressor can consume a year of margin on a site. Fixed planned maintenance with break-fix at rate is the safer middle.

What should be in the contract to protect the price?

An annual review with named triggers, written exclusions, a clause covering sites opening and closing, and a parts clause you have actually read. The review clause is the cheapest protection available and turns a mispriced contract into a twelve month problem.