Efficiency Wins

It’s 4:30 PM on a Friday.

You’re staring at your weekly reports, but you know you left money on the table this week. You see callbacks that shouldn't have happened. You see a 4-hour job that took 6 hours.

Meanwhile, your technicians are watching the clock, waiting to punch out.

This is the fundamental disconnect in the trades: You’re playing for profit. They’re playing for a paycheck.

Incentive pay can fix this but I talk to owners every day — from commercial maintenance to garage door repair — who tell me, "I don't want to turn my guys into sharks. I just want them to be efficient."

Here is the truth: Performance pay isn't about upselling. It’s about alignment. It’s about teaching your team that we are in the business of selling time, and giving them a reason to treat that inventory as precious as you do.

Here is how the best companies use scoreboard psychology to fix labor efficiency, eliminate callbacks, and retain their best people.

There is a fear that performance pay means turning your service technicians into used car salesmen. You picture them pushing unnecessary spring replacements or condemning perfectly good units just to hit a commission tier.

The most profitable plans we see at ShareWillow are based on labor efficiency and quality control.

Instead of paying a commission on the ticket price, you incentivize the time:

This doesn't encourage them to sell a customer something they don’t need. It encourages them to prep their truck the night before. It encourages them to get off their phones. It encourages them to drive efficiently.

It aligns their wallet with your clock.

Imagine watching a football game where there is no scoreboard, and the players don't know the score until three weeks after the game ends.

How hard would they play in the 4th quarter?

Yet, that is how most service businesses run. The owner knows the score (the P&L), but the technicians don't know if they won or lost until a review or a quarterly meeting, if ever.

A-Players want to know the score.

When you display a real-time leaderboard (or scoreboard) showing metrics like callback rate, labor efficiency, or first-time fix rate, the psychology of your shop changes.

We’ve seen install crews start holding each other accountable because they don't want to be the reason the team missed a bonus. 

It’s easy to focus on your superstar tech who does $200k a year in maintenance revenue. But your superstar is likely already maxed out. You can’t squeeze more out of them.

The massive, untapped well of profit in your business is the Middle 60% — the technicians who are doing well but not ripping up trees. They show up, they do the work, they go home.

If you can use a scorecard to get your middle 60% to improve their efficiency by just 10%, the impact on your bottom line is exponential.

Example:

That 10% jump is pure gross profit. You aren't adding trucks. You aren't adding overhead. You are just getting more revenue out of the payroll you are already funding.

Your best employees are constantly being recruited. Competitors are offering them an extra $2 an hour to jump ship. Or worse, they are thinking about buying a truck and becoming your competitor.

How do you stop them?

You give them an uncapped path to earn.

If a technician knows that at your company, "If I do X, I make Y," and that Y is significantly higher than the market rate, they become impossible to poach.

Competitors can offer them a higher base hourly rate, but they can’t offer the opportunity that you can. When a tech is making $80k or $100k because they are crushing their efficiency bonuses, a competitor offering a $2/hour raise is a pay cut.

You don't need to choose between being a good, ethical company and being a highly profitable company.

By shifting your incentives away from raw sales and toward efficiency, quality, and execution, you build a culture of owners.

Stop paying for attendance. Start paying for the score.