I believe certain customers will stick with full maintenance national account type agreements but the market will correct when only current contract holder or no one shows up to bid the contract. The extras like testing, OT, obsolescence, free # of vandalism callbacks, etc. will be the negation points. True full maintenance customers don't want any extra billable items, they want static/predictable costs but they will need to pay the premium for that. I also believe this is very old school baby boomer style management of costs in large organizations.
I think full maintenance for smaller clients is on the way out. The current pricing/margins will remain but service companies will exclude major components. This in turn will setup a lot more alterations/mods of major components which makes the public safer and the units more reliable.
I avoid customers who shop for low maintenance pricing and have all original 25+ year old equipment without any upgrades or alterations. It is a good sign they will fight/ignore every dollar we propose and runs a higher risk of safety hazards to the public which means legal costs for us. It really sucks to have some LS customer paying almost nothing and we have to fork out 20k in legal cost to protect ourselves from our own client who has neglected their equipment and public safety.
I focus as much as we can on the current customers, growth is good but the price has to make sense.
