First - Any work related to any Comcast Upgrade initiatives must go through either Dycomm or Mastec. From what I understand these two have sewed up exclusivity on the Upgrade front. However, if it's day-to-day business that you're interested in you need to be persistent, persistent, and persistent in developing your relationships with the operators. From what I've already read in your original thread plus what Petergunn has contributed, your loyalties to your crews are honorable but they just don't put the bacon on the table. You have to be creative in the ways of acquiring that first opportunity.
If you are able to offer a free sample of work to the operator, say for example a sampling of MDU work, maybe you can demonstrate your quality, speed, customer service, attention to the minute details, and accuracies of your "Sample Invoice" to the operator's department manager. Say for instance you take the risk and wire up a small MDU, Tri, or Quad unit. Demonstrate your ability to make the necessary contacts to set up and deliver the product on behalf of the company. Also, I'm sure that your crews will be outfitted with all respectable trucks, tools, and equipment to satisfy the needs of the project with zero tolerance exceptions. That's a must. You must remember, that QUALITY is job #1 and the more anguish that you can shoulder on behalf of the operator the more they will like you and keep you around, especially if you’re able to right the wrongs and make the company’s life a lot easier. Remember, not all of the MDU owners or managers like having the operators come in again and re-wire their units because it causes additional stresses and burdens on the tenants or unit owners. And this generates negative phone calls to the rental agencies as well as the operators.
On a different subject, where are you located and where are you looking for work? At my location we're wrapping up our tremendous upgrade and pairing down all of our contractors to see who will be retained for life after the project. My best guestimate is that we're going to scale down from nine or so primary vendors to about three or four depending upon all of our day to day needs which is still considerable. One thing for sure is that when we wrote next year's budget we provisioned for 99% outside/contract labor for the obvious economic and quality reasons. Still, between our new telephony/data/video and special projects we plan on deploying well over 100 miles of new HFC/Fiber plant. I can't speak about the MDU piece but it must be considerable since we've just upgraded a dual 450 HFC to a single 862 STD platform where we're pumping 87VDC out to the NIU.
So, there's plenty of work to go round. You just have to be "In all of our faces" and get the attention that you feel you deserve. Also, since we've rid of holding back Retainage from invoicing we've migrated to a Letter of Credit (LOC) to be posted for the annual value of labor that your company may perform.
Good luck on your venture,
Zoots
