An Elevator Breakdown Cost Us $12,000—and It Wasn't the Elevator's Fault

Friday, 5:45 p.m. The elevator in our four-story building stopped between the first and second floors. Nobody was trapped, but the delivery guy with two 40-pound boxes in the lobby wasn't happy, and the yoga studio manager was less happy: class started in 15 minutes.

The elevator was 22 years old. We'd had small problems for a year—a dragging door, a button that only worked when you pressed it twice—but I kept telling myself it was age. We're a small building, I thought. Small buildings have small problems. That thinking cost me about $12,000.

I've been managing small commercial properties for eleven years. In my first year (2014), I made the classic mistake of assuming an elevator that runs is an elevator that's maintained. So I should have known better by 2023. I called the repair company we used whenever something acted up. The tech came Saturday morning and gave me the news: the motor controller was dead, the model was obsolete, and finding a refurbished part would take time. The quote was $8,600—including $3,900 in after-hours labor and rush sourcing.

Wait—our contract expired when?

I almost approved the quote over the phone. Then I asked a question I should have asked months earlier: “Can you bill this under our maintenance contract?”

Silence. Then: “You don't have a maintenance contract with us. It ended July 31.”

I went back through the inbox and found the renewal notice from June 14. I had read it, planned to review it, and never put it on a calendar. Two months without preventive maintenance. One obsolete part that might have been caught in a scheduled visit.

So the problem wasn't really an old elevator. The problem was an expired contract and no system for tracking it.

The same mistake, three times

If the story ended there, it would just be a reminder to renew contracts. But the elevator stayed down for two weeks, and in that time two other small tasks fell apart for the same reason.

The first was a small thank-you order. We bought 200 glass water bottles printed with our building logo for tenants who'd put up with months of construction noise. The order felt small, so I approved the PDF proof without asking for a physical sample. I wrote “dark blue” in the notes instead of providing a Pantone color number. The bottles arrived with a washed-out sage green logo. The printer had used a standard CMYK conversion, which doesn't always match the original color. Pantone exists because words like “dark blue” aren't specifications. My lack of specification cost $2,800 and left a basement full of bottles we can't use.

The second failure was the check register. I keep our operating account in a spreadsheet, but I only updated it when I sat down to pay bills. Two automatic payments came out that month, and I didn't record either one. My register showed a healthy balance. The bank account said otherwise. The repair company wouldn't order the part until the deposit arrived, and the deposit couldn't be sent until the owners moved money over, which took a week and a few bank fees.

The delivery guy kept hauling boxes up three flights. The yoga studio manager let me know, in a tone that left no room for interpretation, that she had lost two new students that week.

The lapsed contract, the wrong color, the outdated register—all different screwups, same root cause. I treated each one as too small to need a process. A four-story building doesn't have a procurement department. It has me. I had told myself that being small meant I could hold it all in my head. You can't. I've stopped pretending otherwise.

The actual bill

Direct costs: $8,600 for the elevator, $2,800 for the bottles, and about $75 in rushed transfer fees. That's $11,475. Indirect costs: an extra week of a dead elevator, one uncomfortable call with the accountant, and a slow leak of tenant confidence. Call it a $12,000 mistake.

None of it came from one big decision. If someone had asked me to approve a $12,000 contract, I would have read every line. Instead, I lost the money through small decisions that I didn't think mattered. That's the part that still bothers me.

What we changed

After the repair, I called thyssenkrupp. I assumed a global company wouldn't be interested in one four-story building with one elevator. I was wrong—and that assumption was the same small-building excuse in a different suit.

The engineer who came out didn't try to sell us a fancy cab. He inspected the system, pointed out which components were aging, and proposed a preventive maintenance contract. I asked about the thyssenkrupp multi elevator, the ropeless system where cabins move in a loop, because I'd seen a video and thought it was incredible. He smiled and said it was designed for big buildings with heavy traffic. For a four-story building, the right move was simpler: replace the obsolete controller and schedule regular maintenance before parts failed.

The contract includes thyssenkrupp elevator 24 hour service. Whether we ever need it, tenants like knowing help is one phone call away.

The owners approved the contract because I finally wrote a proper pitch. There's a joke in that phrase—“elevator pitch”—because here I was writing one for an actual elevator. If you want to know how to write an elevator pitch for a maintenance budget, it's four sentences: the cost of doing nothing, the cost of doing something, the risk of waiting, and the specific ask. Mine went something like: “The elevator is 23 years old. The emergency cost $8,600 and two weeks of tenant frustration. Preventive maintenance costs less per year, includes regular inspections and 24-hour response, and lets us plan replacements instead of reacting to them. I recommend we sign.” They approved it in one meeting.

We also put every contract renewal date on a shared calendar, 90 days before expiration. Any order with our logo now includes a Pantone color number and a physical proof, no matter how small the quantity. And the check register gets updated every Friday, even when the only entry is “no transactions.” That habit takes five minutes. It would have saved me a month of embarrassment.

I'm not an elevator engineer, so I can't tell you whether your building's controller is near the end of its life. What I can tell you from the property manager side is this: the elevator was never the real problem. The real problem was thinking that small things don't deserve systems. Systems are what keep small stuff small—before it turns into a $12,000 lesson.