Since 1986 I have been helping building owners with their heating and air conditioning systems. During that time, I almost always was asked, “How fast can you respond to emergencies?”.

Most building owners and managers are thinking about service in terms of the traditional contractor’s approach rather than a service provider’s approach.

There is no question that emergencies need to be taken care of as fast as humanly possible. Consider a blood bank with a failed freezer, the results could quite literally be deadly.

For almost every failure the real question should be what caused the failure rather than how do we fix the problem. Of course we are going to fix the problem quickly, but as true service professionals we also need to make a change to the current service plan to account for the failure ensuring it does not happen again.

So the real question that needs to be asked of a service company is not, “How fast can you get here AFTER IT FAILS?”. The real question is “What specific steps are you going to take to assure the system DOES NOT FAIL?”