Turn Three Maintenance Bids Into One Five-Year Cost of Ownership

📥 Download the practice file: case-file.txt — the 14-unit equipment schedule, three years of fleet repair data, and all three HVAC maintenance proposals. Paste the whole file into any AI tool to follow along.

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Three vendors bid on fourteen rooftop units across three Denver buildings. The fees: $12,000, $23,900, and $38,750 a year — the top bid more than triple the bottom. Rank them on what the fleet actually costs to own, and the order inverts. Summit's $12,000 fee costs $3,700 per unit to run. FrontRange's $23,900 costs $2,116. The cheapest contract price hides the second-highest cost of ownership.

The spread is not three vendors competing on the same scope. It is three vendors measuring different things and calling them the same name. Summit's fee covers quarterly visits; everything that actually breaks is extra. Alpine's "comprehensive" contract excludes six of your fourteen units in an addendum. FrontRange's hybrid caps parts below what old units cost to fix. Each proposal puts a different share of the real cost inside the fee and the rest in fine print — and a straight fee comparison treats the fine print as if it does not exist.

Sorting this out by hand means reading every addendum, cross-referencing fourteen units across three age brackets, and projecting the fleet forward five years. Your VP asked for one number: cost per unit, five years out, on her desk Thursday.

This lesson does it in two steps. Step 1 — feed: give the AI a brief that forces it to decompose each contract into its real cost components. Step 2 — report: compress the analysis into a single page your VP can sign. Two prompts, one case file, one method you can reuse on any maintenance renewal.

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