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Maintenance/Management: Hiring, training and keeping technicians

June 12, 2007 |

If you are a construction company owner or manager, hiring your first equipment technician is a step not taken lightly. After all, servicing and repairing machinery is not how you make money. And most of today’s equipment dealers offer such comprehensive maintenance and extended warranty packages you could run equipment for years and never have to touch a wrench or change a filter.

But sooner or later most contractors realize they can’t expect the dealer’s technician to do everything they need exactly when they need it. Contractors tell us it’s not the price of the dealer’s labor that drives them to look for their own technicians and it’s not the cost of putting a technician on the staff either. The single most critical factor that motivates contractors to hire their own technicians is uptime – equipment availability.

Why hire?
“Your own guy is available when you need him,” says Dick Kessel, of Kessel Construction, a Pennsylvania-based design-build general contractor. “You can work him overtime. You can say, ‘We absolutely need it by tomorrow morning,’ and it gets done.’”

The extension of the construction season into what used to be the off-season has also affected the way contractors think about uptime and technicians. “We used to have downtime from November to April,” says George Forni, president of Aquatic Environments in Alamo, California. “The operators would come back in and service their own machines at the end of the season. Then we started working through January and had very little downtime, so the equipment was starting to suffer. It was costing more to go out and fix it in the field than it would to service it here.”

Initially Forni says he struggled with having to hire a technician at $25 an hour and outfitting him with a $35,000 service truck. “But once I got over the hump and realized how much it was costing me in downtime by not having that person, then it was a simple decision,” he says. “Once you hit that point when your operators or your off season don’t allow you to do the necessary service, then you need a mechanic.”

Another benefit to having your own technician on hand is that it gives you the ability to fix little things before they turn into big problems. Gregg Perrett, president and owner of Perrett Construction in Valentine, Nebraska, keeps three to four technicians busy working on his fleet of around 40 machines. “I ask our guys to fix everything, even the dash lights, and not just the immediate problem,” he says. And by going over his machines with a fine-tooth comb, Perrett’s technicians keep close track of hours and know well in advance before any major work is needed. “We don’t have many component failures in the field anymore,” he says.

Wages for equipment techs
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2002 the median hourly earnings of mobile heavy equipment mechanics were $17.29. The middle 50 percent earned between $14.13 and $20.88. The highest 10 percent earned more than $24.90 while the lowest 10 percent earned less than $11.54.

Median hourly earnings paid by industry segment were as follows: