List all your equipment out on an Excel spreadsheet and break it down by what you need to do for each piece of equipment in the spring, coil cleanings, operating inspections, fall shutdowns if needed and Winter service. You have to list how long it will take someone to do each task. Include parts needed for Winter service on your large chillers. It will all come together and give you hours and parts. Depending on what the customer wants, normally anything you find wrong while doing the PM work, you will quote separately. Add your markup to the hours and parts and you’ve got a price. Now put it in writing as to what your scope of work will be for each PM task so the customer knows what they are getting.

I like to give customers options and let them decide what makes the most sense for their budget.

As a general rule, I usually estimate around 4 hours for quarterly maintenance and 8 hours for an annual. If a site has multiple machines, or a bunch of small stuff, you can often reduce that a bit since you’re not losing time to travel, setup, and cleanup between jobs. If the annual includes tube cleaning, I’d bump that to around 16 hours. Cooling tower and sump cleaning really depend on the size of the system, water quality, and overall condition.

We’ve always broken proposals down into two parts:

* Scope of work (based on the OEM’s recommended maintenance)

* Maintenance schedule (quarterly, annual, etc.)

From there, you can remove or adjust tasks based on the customer’s budget. A lot of facilities don’t have unlimited maintenance dollars. I don’t like seeing customers cut corners on the annual service since that’s where you catch and prevent the big issues, but if they need to save money, there’s usually more flexibility in trimming the quarterly visits.

I’d present it like this:

* Option 1: Full OEM-recommended maintenance – here’s the price and everything that’s included.

* Option 2: Bare-minimum maintenance – here’s what’s included and what’s being left out.

* Option 3: A customized scope that fits their budget.

People appreciate transparency. They want to know what they’re paying for. Nobody likes getting a $150,000 quote that says, “Preventive maintenance on plant.” Breaking the scope down builds trust and makes it much easier for them to justify the investment to upper management. Especially if they have had a bunch of issues.

Let me know if you need any help getting the scope of work put together.