I hear it from contractors every week. A technician walks into your office, asks for a raise, and leaves you wondering how you're going to protect your margins while keeping your trucks on the road.
If you pay your team strictly for their time, your goals and your technicians' goals are fundamentally opposed. You win when jobs are done efficiently, and technicians win when they log more hours.
Ron Williams, owner of a $5M plumbing and HVAC shop in Maryland, hit a breaking point with this exact dynamic.
“I was just tired of hearing people come and say they needed the dollar raise, or 'I'm worth this,'" Ron told me.
On hourly pay, his plumbers were incentivized to apply band-aid fixes to get to the next call. Many would also ask for additional techs to come help, which artificially inflated Ron’s labor rate. Today, Ron has completely flipped the script, doubling his average ticket size by giving his techs exactly what they asked for.
He moved to a performance pay system. Working directly with our team at ShareWillow, Ron built a pay structure dramatically changed things for his business and the rollout shifted technician behavior immediately.
Watch the full interview with Ron and check out his results below:
1. Average tickets doubled
Previously, Ron's plumbers had an average ticket of around $800 to $1,000. Today, their average ticket is anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000.
Because their pay is tied to revenue, they now spend more time with customers and ensure they deliver a first class experience. Ron explained: "They’re taking their time, they're doing a walkthrough, and they're going over everything with the customer instead of just looking for that one little bandaid fix".
Want our team to design a custom performance plan for your shop? Book a free 1-on-1 consultation here.
2. Labor rates dropped and raise requests vanished
Remember how plumbers used to ask for high-paid helpers? Now, they want to do the work themselves or bring an apprentice, because sharing the job means splitting the back-end commission, helping to boost Ron’s labor rates.
On performance pay, the plumbers are now seeing an effective hourly rate of $55 to $60 and no one asks him for a raise anymore. Top performers control their own upside.
3. Techs bring in new business
Ron didn't stop at just optimizing plumbing tickets. He cross-trained his team to look for aging systems across trades, creating a stream of tech-generated leads.
"They're smart enough to see that the fins are rusted out and there's nothing left to it. That's when they're going to do their cross sale and get the HVAC guy out there."
By offering spiffs on these HVAC leads, Ron aims to pull one tech-generated out of every ten customers.
4. A-Players are knocking
Moving to performance pay didn't just motivate Ron's existing team, it turned his top performers into active recruiters.
Ron just hired a new plumber and a new HVAC installer away from much larger competitors specifically because those competitors didn't offer incentive-based pay.
Ready to try performance pay?
If you’re reading this email, you’ve likely thought about implementing performance pay. But getting it right is notoriously difficult. Ron admitted his early struggles: "I probably spent four or five thousand dollars on other systems trying to make it work. And every time I got to the bottom of it, it was just too complicated," he told me.
If your compensation plan requires a CPA for a tech to understand their pay, they will never buy into it.
We designed ShareWillow to be the exact opposite: a system that makes building and managing performance pay straightforward.
"I will say for everybody out there dealing with ShareWillow, you guys have been super fabulous with tailor-fitting it to my business," Ron said.
Want to see what a tailor-fit performance plan looks like for your business? Book a 1-on-1 call with my team today.