Most field service businesses run on reactive work. A call comes in, you send an engineer, you invoice, you move on. It works. Until it doesn’t.
Your revenue is only ever as good as your phone calls last week. One quiet month, one bad winter, one customer who decides to switch, and the gap appears fast. You’re always starting from zero.
Service agreements — maintenance contracts, PPM contracts, recurring plans, whatever you want to call them — are how you change that. Instead of waiting for something to break, you schedule regular visits in advance. The customer pays upfront or on a cycle. You show up whether they called or not.
Most businesses either don’t offer them, offer them half-heartedly, or set them up in a way that quietly drains profit. This piece covers what goes into an agreement, how to price it, how to have the conversation, and how to make sure delivery doesn’t become a drain.
Why reactive-only businesses plateau
If you’ve been running on reactive work for a while, you’ll recognise the pattern. Busy periods are great: the phone doesn’t stop, engineers are stretched, you’re turning work away. Then it goes quiet. Summer, January, school holidays, a stretch of good weather when nobody’s boiler breaks down. The vans are still out. The wages still go out. The invoices dry up.
This isn’t a cashflow problem you can price your way out of. You’ve built a business that depends entirely on customers deciding to call you. Some months they do. Some months they don’t. The 2025 GoCardless and FSB late payments report found that 45% of UK small businesses are experiencing more late payments than the year before, and the structural volatility of reactive-only work makes that exposure worse, not better.
When a customer is under contract, the visit is already in the diary. The invoice goes out on time. You already know those hours are filled for the next twelve months.
What’s less obvious is how agreements change your capacity across the year. When contracted customers are properly maintained their systems tend to hold, so they stop calling reactively during peak periods. Your engineers are free at exactly the moment demand from new customers is highest. The slow months get filled with planned visits rather than quiet vans.
The relationship that builds over regular visits also pays off when a customer’s kit eventually needs replacing. They don’t go to a comparison website. They call the person who’s been out twice a year for four years, who knows the site, who they trust. That job comes in at a better margin than anything you’d win cold, and often without a competing quote.
If you ever want to sell the business: a list of customers is worth something, but a book of recurring contracts is worth considerably more. In contracting, a pound of profit from one-off work gets valued at roughly two to three times on exit. A pound of profit from recurring maintenance agreements gets valued at six to seven times, because a buyer is acquiring future income, not just past performance. Recurring revenue is widely cited as the single biggest lever on exit valuation, and it’s one reason service agreements sit at the heart of any serious revenue diversification strategy.
What goes in a service agreement
A service agreement sets out what you’ll do, when you’ll do it, what it costs, and what happens if something goes wrong. The last part is where most businesses underestimate the work involved.
Scope of works is where most vagueness lives. “Annual service” is not scope. What your engineer will check, test, clean and document on each visit — that’s scope. It matters for pricing, and it matters when a customer thinks you should have covered something you didn’t quote for.
Frequency depends on the asset and the trade. HVAC runs spring and autumn. Fire and security may need quarterly visits. Whatever the schedule, be clear about when visits happen and how much notice you’ll give. Build the reminder into your system rather than leaving it to the customer to chase.
On SLAs: will contracted customers get priority on reactive callouts? If so, nail down what that means: four hours, next working day, best endeavours. Priority access is a real selling point but it comes with a real operational cost. Only promise what you can consistently deliver.
Exclusions matter as much as inclusions. Parts beyond a certain value, travel beyond a certain radius, emergency callouts outside normal hours, repairs from misuse: anything not covered needs spelling out. Vague agreements become contentious ones.
Escalation is the clause most people skip. If your labour rates go up or parts costs spike, do you have the right to adjust pricing at renewal? Build it in from the start. Over a multi-year contract, the difference adds up.
Fieldmotion Brochure
See how Fieldmotion helps field service teams manage jobs, schedule staff, create invoices, and communicate with customers — all from one easy-to-use system.
Pricing it properly
Most businesses price agreements based on the cost of the visit, add a thin margin, then wonder why contracts feel like more trouble than they’re worth. Usually it’s because they’ve priced the labour without accounting for everything else, and they’ve undercharged for the value the customer is actually getting.
Start from the customer’s side. They’re getting the scheduled visit, your labour, priority access, compliance documentation, and the avoided cost of an emergency callout. For commercial customers you can often put a concrete number on what unplanned downtime costs them. That’s what you’re pricing against, not just your hours.
On your cost side, the obvious items are labour including travel, parts or consumables included as standard, and the scheduling and admin overhead. The less obvious ones trip people up.
Repair discounts are one. If you’re giving agreement holders 15% off parts and labour, that comes straight off margin on every job they book. Run the numbers properly. Our margin calculator makes this straightforward. A lot of businesses discover their agreement programme is running at a loss once the discount is factored in across the year.
Priority service is another. When contracted customers jump the queue in peak season, every slot they take is a slot not going to a new customer. That’s a real cost, even if it doesn’t show up on an invoice.
Annual upfront payment works better for cashflow than monthly billing. It lands when you need it most, typically through the slow months, and cuts admin to one invoice and one renewal per year. Monthly billing is easier to sell because the number is smaller, but it creates more friction: failed payments, lapsed cards, customers who want to cancel after month three. If you go monthly, automate the billing through your software. Chasing missed payments manually defeats the point.
On discounts: Lowe’s, one of the world’s largest home improvement retailers, runs its customer loyalty programme at 5%. If a business operating at that scale has decided 5% is sufficient, the 15–20% discounts common in service agreements deserve scrutiny. What retains customers is reliable service and the fact that you’re already there, not how steep the percentage is.
The agreement is a sales tool, not just a maintenance schedule
Most businesses pitch agreements as a maintenance product: here’s what we’ll do, here’s how often, here’s the cost. The assumption is that customers want the maintenance. Most don’t, or at least, that’s not the reason they say yes.
People sign up for the savings, or because they want priority access when something breaks, or because the reassurance of having someone they already know on call is worth the fee. The maintenance is what they tell themselves justifies it. It’s valuable, but it rarely drives the decision.
The more useful way to think about an agreement is that it’s a structured reason to be in front of the customer twice a year. The visit is a scheduled opportunity to inspect the asset, pick up what’s changed, and have a genuine conversation about what you’re finding. The repair you spot before it fails. The replacement that goes to you rather than a competitor because you’ve been on site every six months for three years. That’s where the return is.
The fee has to cover costs and make the programme worthwhile, but it doesn’t have to be where you make your margin. Don’t squeeze the agreement itself trying to extract profit from the fee, and don’t underprice it so visits become a loss. Get the fee right, deliver the service properly, and let the downstream work take care of the margin.
Which customers to approach first
Your existing customer base is the starting point. You’re looking for people with assets worth maintaining, something to lose from a breakdown, and enough of a relationship with you that the conversation isn’t starting cold.
New installation customers are the easiest entry point. The moment you finish an installation is when the customer is most invested in protecting what they’ve just bought. If you’re not raising maintenance at that point, you’re missing the most natural window there is. Some businesses include the first year of maintenance in the installation price. It takes the decision off the table and starts the relationship on a contracted footing from day one.
Commercial and multi-site customers often want planned maintenance for reasons that go beyond cost: compliance documentation, asset registers, audit trails. Facility managers deal with contracts regularly. One agreement covering multiple assets over several years is worth the effort of putting together properly.
Customers who ring two or three times a year with the same type of problem are worth a direct conversation. “We’ve been out for this a couple of times now — there’s a better way to manage it” is a natural way in, and it’s accurate.
Customers coming off manufacturer warranty are more open to the conversation than they were when the asset was new. Their exposure has changed and they know it.
Start with ten candidates. Get the pricing and process right on those before rolling it further.
Having the conversation
Most businesses don’t sell more agreements because they raise it once, at the end of a job, when the customer has already moved on. The offer lands in dead air and gets a polite no.
Raise it earlier — when you’re diagnosing the problem, not after you’ve fixed it. “This is the kind of thing that usually shows up on a routine check. If we’d been out six months ago we’d probably have caught it before it became a callout.” That’s not a pitch, it’s true, and it makes the case for prevention while the evidence is sitting right in front of them.
At the close, when you’re getting a signature anyway: “We do a maintenance plan — covers your annual service and puts you at the front of the queue if something comes up. Works out at about X a year. Want me to leave the details?” They might say no. When the next callout comes in, you raise it again.
Customers who’ve just had a breakdown are the most receptive. The cost and inconvenience are fresh. Prevention has a price they can actually feel.
Handling objections
“I’ll pay for it when I need it.” Don’t argue. Reframe it. An emergency callout costs more than a scheduled visit before you factor in any downtime. An agreement isn’t paying for something you don’t need, it’s locking in a lower cost for something you will need, on your own schedule rather than during a crisis.
“We’ve never had any problems.” That’s the right time to start. Equipment that’s never been serviced isn’t problem-free — it’s problem-deferred.
“It’s too expensive upfront.” Monthly payments? Reduced scope? A smaller agreement — one annual visit, no reactive cover — at a number they’re comfortable with gets the relationship started. Renewing a small contract every year beats starting from nothing every time something breaks.
“We already have someone.” Ask how that’s going. Satisfied customers aren’t your target. Vague, unenthusiastic ones are.
Delivering on it
An agreement that doesn’t get delivered properly costs more than no agreement. A customer who can’t get their visit scheduled, or gets a rushed job because reactive work took priority, won’t renew. And they’ll tell you exactly why.
Don’t wait for the customer to initiate. You know when each visit is due. Contact them a few weeks out. The customers who don’t chase you aren’t happy with a lapse, they just take their renewal somewhere else.
Document every visit. For commercial customers it may be a compliance record. For domestic customers it’s proof of service and a prompt for any follow-on work. An engineer who does the checks and leaves without leaving anything in writing hasn’t finished the job.
Track profitability per contract. Not all agreements make the same money: some take longer to service than you priced, some customers use reactive callout far more than you expected. Without that data you’re repricing renewals on gut feel, which usually means you keep undercharging the same customers year after year.
Set a renewal reminder at 60 days. If the service has been solid, most customers renew with little friction. If there have been problems, address them before the meeting, not in it.
Book Your Free Demo
Discover how our job management software can streamline your operations, reduce paperwork, and keep your field teams on track.
Where Fieldmotion fits in
Managing agreements manually works up to a point. Visit dates in a spreadsheet, renewals tracked by memory, reports on paper: once you’re past 15 or 20 contracts, things start getting missed.
Fieldmotion’s planned maintenance tools create recurring job schedules against specific assets, so work lands in the system automatically when it’s due. Engineers see the full asset and service history on their mobile before they arrive. Visit reports are captured digitally and stored against the customer record, so when renewal comes around you’re having that conversation backed by a complete history rather than trying to remember how the last visit went.
All contract renewal dates visible in one place. Billing automated. The programme running in the background rather than relying on someone to keep track.
If you want to see how it works with your setup, book a free demo and we’ll walk you through it.
