In 2012 I quit my job with $8,120 to my name.
I wanted to go full time at a startup called mHelpDesk, which at that point was two other guys and no money for a third salary. So before I gave notice I sat down and worked out what my life cost to run. Rent, car, groceries, the gym membership. It came to $2,530 a month, which gave me four months before I was out of money.
Four months wasn't enough, so I went after the biggest line on the list. I posted my bedroom on Craigslist, packaged it with utilities for $850, and moved myself up to the loft. That dropped my burn to $1,680 and bought me the runway I needed.
I've thought about that math for years. I knew the number I had to clear to keep going. Under it I was done, and everything over it was mine. It made every decision for me for months while I helped mHelpDesk scale in its early days without me having to think about it.
Last week I wrote about the floor, the revenue a tech has to clear before there's anything to share in a performance pay plan. I didn't get there from theory. I got there from living on my own version of it.
Everything above that floor is the crux of performance pay. Techs earn on what they produce instead of the hours they log, and you fund it out of revenue that didn't exist until they cleared the floor. Their checks go up and your labor rate improves.
If you want to see where your pay sits before you build a performance pay plan, we pulled pay data for 18 trades across all 50 states into the 2026 Technician Pay Benchmark Report. It breaks down median tech pay by trade and state, what performance plans are paying out per tech, and the structures that get someone past $100K a year. Look up your trade here.
And if you want to talk through your team or your numbers, just hit reply. It comes straight to me.
Best,
Ryan
P.S. Want to get on a call instead? We'll pull look at your numbers and show you what each tech's floor is and what a plan would pay out. Grab a time here.