Build a Pay Plan That Works

This was one of the most engaged webinar audiences we’ve had. There were dozens of service business owners in the chat sharing their current bonus plan setups, talking shop, and asking me questions about how to build a plan that works. 

Today, I wanted to share some of the questions that came up during the webinar and give you my best advice on how to make performance pay work for your trades business.

This is the first thing every owner asks, and it should be. Before we ever talk about a plan, we run an audit on your data. We pull from whatever you're using (ServiceTitan, Housecall, Jobber, ServiceFusion, whatever it is) and we model the lift against the payout against our cost. 

Generally, our plans unlock huge opportunities for revenue and profit growth. One partner in Iowa saw its total sales jump 21% and its total revenue increase by 19% after implementing ShareWillow. 

I get it, changing the way you pay your techs is a big deal. But incentive pay should be a win for both your techs and your business. The only techs that may take home less on performance pay are the ones you already know are holding your business back. 

Your A players will almost certainly see a pay increase. 

And before we go live we run the new plan in the background and show each tech what they would have earned under it. So there’s no payroll change yet until your techs can see the data for themselves. By the time you flip the switch, they're asking when it goes live. 

Before he implemented performance pay Ron Williams’ plumbers would constantly bug him for pay rises. Now, on performance pay, the plumbers are now seeing an effective hourly rate of $55-60. And no one asks him for a raise anymore. 

It’s normal for businesses not to have perfect data on day one. We can work with what you have, flag any gaps, and tell you exactly what needs to be cleaned or added. 

But here’s another unexpected consequence of incentive pay… once techs realize their pay is tied to data being closed out properly, the data gets clean fast. I had one shop where techs never clocked in on time. The week after we went live, time tracking was tight, because clock-in time now affected the paycheck.

We don't guess. We run the data based on what we’ve learned over the last three years working with hundreds of businesses like yours. We can also steer KPIs based on where you want see performance improvements like on-time arrivals, labor rate, or callbacks.

Performance pay isn't a sales commission. For non-customer-facing roles, the plan is built around checklists, shop standards, truck restocks, time on task. For CSRs, it's booking rate, dispatch accuracy, average call handle time. Every role gets its own plan. Installers, repair techs, project managers, CSRs, shop staff all need different metrics because their jobs are different.

Change them. The plan isn't a contract carved in stone. If techs aren't responding to a metric, we adjust it, and publish a new plan. The goal is metrics that move your business but that techs also feel help them win. If they think the metric is out of reach, you won’t get the performance you desire. Generally, we say you should crawl, walk, run with these plans. Start with one or two metrics they can absolutely move, then layer in more.

Best,
Ryan

P.S. Want the recording? Reply with "video" and I'll send the full webinar. 

If you'd rather skip straight into discussing numbers for your own shop, book a call here and our team will show you how incentive pay could help your business.