How to Control the Hidden Costs of Repairs & Maintenance

Did you know that repairs and maintenance costs are up 31% since the pandemic and up over 8% just in the first half of 2024? The upward trend of R&M costs can be easy to miss with inflation, restaurant labor shortages, and rising food costs dominating the conversation about macro pressures on the industry.

Savvy operators are paying attention to this category. Repairs and maintenance is the largest controllable cost on a restaurant’s P&L.

Repairs are more expensive. Why?

Two primary factors are driving the rising cost of R&M: a shortage of skilled technicians, and higher cost of equipment replacement parts.

Where skilled labor is concerned, the shortage of technicians has been developing for years. As baby boomers are retiring, generations entering the workforce aren’t pursuing careers in skilled trades at the same rate. Aftershocks from the COVID-19 pandemic also resulted in technicians exiting their jobs, with some opting for more remote work and others choosing to leave the workforce earlier than planned. These trends are leaving a widening gap.

As for the rising cost of parts, lingering impacts of supply chain disruptions from the pandemic, widespread inflation, and more complex equipment design all factor into higher costs and limited supply.

How to get ahead of rising repair costs

Reactive repairs are significantly more expensive than preventative maintenance. And emergency repairs are significantly more expensive than non-emergency repairs, because they’re often done on overtime rates. Perhaps the greatest way to combat rising R&M costs is to get ahead of them with a proactive approach to ongoing preventative maintenance.

As highlighted above, service providers have no shortage of work; what they really need are more technicians. When a restaurant calls in an emergency after hours to fix a walk-in freezer, service companies can essentially name their price to immediately dispatch a repair professional. This means that operators have lost some of the buying power they used to have with service companies.

If a forecasted, ongoing preventative maintenance schedule doesn’t flag issues with the walk-in before it’s an emergency during dinner rush, operators can also find savings through equipment warranties and basic troubleshooting.

When a new piece of equipment fails, a warranty often covers all or most of the repair work to fix it. As for troubleshooting, questions like, “is the power on?” or “did you reset the circuit breaker” elicit jokes, but they are often genuine solutions for getting equipment up-and-running again. What is not funny is paying hundreds of dollars for a service dispatch just to find that someone accidentally unplugged a power cord.

For 86 Repairs customers, troubleshooting and warranty coverage saved a collective $5.4 million on dispatch avoidance in a single year.  Taking time to catalog warranty details for major restaurant equipment and outline a troubleshooting process for common equipment issues quickly pays dividends.

For ​​help proactively managing your R&M, consider 86 Repairs, the only end-to-end solution that empowers restaurant operators to increase margins. Request a demo today to learn more.

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