AIR CONDITIONING
s mall and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), air conditioning, which they still look at from the cooling aspect only, is nowhere near the top of their shopping list.
The £3,000+ they may have to spend on a standard conventional air conditioning system m ay come at the cost of an extra second-hand vehicle, new shelving, upgraded IT, a million and one other business costs or even a family holiday. What we consider a low price may not be read as such by the customer.
T he same is true for the lower end of the h ard-pressed public sector too, such as schools, d octors’ surgeries, dental practices and so on. You can tell these types of potential customers about all the advantages an air conditioning system can bring – such as higher productivity, more relaxed c ustomers, improved performance of fridges and I T, even reduced heating costs – but the key issue i s always going to be the installation costs. So, then, the answer is simple: contractors just need to bring installation costs down and advertise the fact that air conditioning can be installed for a lot less than people think.
This is a simple thing to say, but not so simple to do. There are only two ways to achieve this: lower margins or lower costs.
Most contractors are already operating on tight margins, so that is unlikely to be an option.
As far as lowering costs is concerned, if you do obtain extra business from this customer sector, lowering staff costs is probably going to be counterproductive, so that leaves lowering the costs of the equipment itself, which we believe is an often overlooked option. In my experience, contractors are
conservative creatures, often very loyal to one or two brands.
This is not for sentimental reasons, but
because all brands are different when it comes to such things as programming, addressing, and maintenance, so they keep the number of manufacturers to just a few, as it saves training engineers on multiple systems.
They are also keen to install equipment that is going to work first time, as no one wants to see their profit eroded by numerous follow-up v isits to sort out problems.
These are the reasons we hear all the time for installers not using ‘non-mainstream’ manufacturers. Chinese brands in particular have been on the receiving end of a ‘give a dog a bad name and hang him’ mentality. However,
there are a number of much lower cost systems that are just as good and will provide end users with the same reliability and performance as well-known brands – sometimes even better. Their lower cost can also offer the installing contractor the chance to win a tender or expand his customer base without squeezing margins. Depending on the contract, hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds can often be shaved off quotations.
Certainly, these newer, less familiar names may be different, but that does not make them worse. Many of the manufacturers of these different brands are just as keen on quality and as proud of their reputation as the better- known brand names – and some of them are not small at all.
Gree, for example, is considered a ‘different’ brand in this country, but it manufactures one in three of all the air conditioning units sold throughout the world, turns over more than US$24bn and has an 8,000-person -strong research and development department. All air conditioning units have similar
functions, performance and controls – do not miss the opportunity to expand your customer base.
ACREX
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