When does an in house team work best?
When the stores are close together and the work is mostly general: fixtures, minor repairs, shelving, signage changes. The team knows the stores, can be redirected the same day, and there is no contractor margin.
It strains when the fleet spreads across states or the work needs a licence. Electrical, refrigerant and plumbing work cannot be done by a general handyman, and building a licensed team in every state is a second business.
What goes wrong with a different trade at every store?
Nothing, at first. It is how most fleets end up, because it is the path of least resistance: the store manager calls whoever came last time.
The cost shows up later. The ramp at one store is rubber and at the next is steel. The bollards are different heights. Nobody holds a record across the fleet, so when property asks finance for money, the ask is built from memory. And every trade needs inducting, insuring and chasing separately.
What does one contractor across the fleet change?
One party sets the specification, prices it per store, and answers for the result whether the store is in Perth or Penrith. Every store's records sit in one format, so a switchboard, a ramp or a service history at one store can be compared with the same thing at another.
The trade off is real. On any single job, a local trade is often cheaper. The return comes from consistency, from staged capital plans built on comparable numbers, and from not solving the same problem again at every store.
Which model fits your fleet?
| Model | Suits | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| In house team | Stores close together, mostly general work | Licensed trades and interstate coverage as the fleet grows |
| Local trade per store | A handful of stores, no need for a common standard | No shared record, the same fault fixed a different way each time |
| One contractor | Stores in several states that need one standard and staged capital | Higher cost on any single job |
Most fleets mix them: an in house team for daily small jobs, and one contractor for the programs that must match everywhere, such as ramps, bollards, switchboards, screens and energy retrofits.
Where Nextage fits
Nextage is the third model. It works alongside an in house team rather than replacing one, and takes the work that repeats across many stores and has to look the same wherever it happens, with licensed partners for licensed work.
