A spiff is a reward right up until the day it becomes expected.
Here's how it goes… You want your crew closing jobs on time, so you put a spiff on every install. The first month, the guys love it.
By month three, nobody mentions it.
By month six, a crew knocks out an install a bit slower than usual, the spiff doesn't land, and now it's a problem, you hear about it.
Somewhere it stopped being a reward and turned into an allowance. The techs budget around it. It's part of the paycheck now, and the extra effort it was supposed to buy went back to normal months ago.
Then you run the numbers, and it gets worse.
The spiffs never made you money. You were paying more per job, and the revenue didn't move to match. So you do the only thing left. You kill the program.
And killing it feels like a pay cut to every tech, over a bonus that never worked.
Two things turned that reward into an allowance:
It was flat. Same amount every install, disconnected from the size of the job. A flat handout becomes a baseline. People stop seeing the reason for it and only notice when it's gone.
It wasn't tied to you making money. Techs earned the spiff whether the job was profitable or not, so your labor cost climbed and your margin didn't.
You don't hand out a flat amount. You give techs a cut of what they generate. The reward only grows when their work grows, so it never drifts into expected. It stays earned.
And the house wins first. We lock in your labor rate, so a tech earns more only after they've brought in more. You never pay extra for the same output. You share growth that wasn't there before.
One more piece matters… Techs have to see it. When the dollars show up on their phone next to the job they just finished, they connect the money to the behavior. That's what keeps it a reward.
If you've got spiffs that tend to go unnoticed, there's a better way to pay for the effort you actually want.
Want to see it on your numbers? We'll rebuild your spiffs as a plan where every payout is tied to a dollar you made first.
Best,
Ryan