In-House, Contracted or Franchised

The question of who turns the screwdriver determines what your maintenance function actually manages. For most operators it manages relationships rather than people.

The three models

Fully contracted. Every trade is external. The operator dispatches, approves and pays. This is the standard for groups below roughly thirty sites and remains common well beyond it.

Hybrid. One or two internal technicians handling routine work and diagnostics, contractors for licensed trades — refrigeration with refrigerant handling, gas, electrical, fire suppression. This is where most large groups end up.

Franchise-devolved. Each franchisee manages their own maintenance. The franchisor sets standards and sees very little. The most common arrangement in large branded chains, and the one with the least visibility.

What contracting costs you

Rate premiums, particularly out of hours. Emergency call-out rates are frequently double.

Response times you do not control. A contractor with three emergencies chooses between them, and you may not be first.

Diagnostic incentives that do not align. A contractor paid per visit and per part has no strong interest in a repair that lasts. This is not a claim of dishonesty; it is a structural observation about how the work is priced.

Knowledge that leaves. The technician who understands your building works for someone else.

Record fragmentation. Each vendor's system holds part of the history and none holds all of it. This is the strongest argument for keeping your own work order record regardless of what vendors provide.

What an internal technician buys

Response measured in minutes for the site they are at.

Diagnostic quality, because they know the estate.

Cheap preventive work. Coil cleaning, filter changes, seal replacement, drain clearing — the tasks that prevent expensive failures and that contractors charge a call-out to perform.

A record that is yours.

Better triage. An internal technician who assesses before dispatching a contractor prevents a large share of unnecessary call-outs, and this is frequently where the role pays for itself.

Where the threshold sits

The arithmetic is site density rather than site count.

A technician can realistically cover sites within a reasonable drive — in practice eight to fifteen locations in a metropolitan area, far fewer if they are spread across a region.

The comparison is their fully loaded cost against the contractor spend they displace, plus the failures they prevent, plus the emergency premiums avoided.

Groups with clustered urban sites reach the threshold earlier than groups with the same count spread over three states.

Below the threshold, a strong contractor relationship and a good preventive schedule outperforms a technician stretched too thin.

What an internal technician should not do

Licensed work they are not licensed for. Refrigerant handling requires certification. Gas work and fire suppression require licensed contractors in most jurisdictions. Having an internal technician does not change this, and the liability if something goes wrong is substantial.

Work under warranty. Unauthorised repair voids coverage, routinely.

Anything they lack the tools or the time to do properly.

The franchise problem

Where sites are franchised, the franchisor typically sets equipment standards and has no visibility into whether maintenance happens.

The consequences are real: brand-damaging equipment failures, inconsistent food safety, and no aggregate purchasing power on service.

What franchisors can do: mandate a preventive schedule as a brand standard, negotiate national service agreements that franchisees may opt into, require compliance evidence for the regulated items, and provide the asset register template.

What they generally cannot do is dispatch on the franchisee's behalf or see their work orders, unless the franchise agreement provides for it.

A national service agreement is the highest-value intervention available to a franchisor, because it improves rates for franchisees while creating aggregate visibility that did not exist.

The practical arrangement for most operators

Contract everything, and invest the effort in three things instead of in headcount: a small number of vendors with real agreements rather than a long list of numbers, a preventive schedule for the dozen assets that matter, and your own work order record independent of any vendor's system.

That combination outperforms an under-resourced internal function and costs less.

Questions to ask before hiring internally

The decision is frequently made emotionally after a bad month of contractor response. These questions test it.

How many sites are within a forty-minute drive? Below eight, the utilisation will not justify the role.

What proportion of last year's work orders could this person have handled without a licence they do not hold? Refrigerant, gas, electrical and suppression work will still be contracted.

What would they do between calls? A technician with idle time drifts into general facilities work, which may be valuable and is a different job from the one costed.

Who covers leave and sickness? A single-technician function has no redundancy, and the contractor relationship will have atrophied.

What tools and vehicle are required, and are those costs in the calculation?

Will they document the work? An internal technician who fixes things without recording them destroys the asset history you were building.