Finding top talent is harder than ever. Retaining your best technicians often feels like you're constantly buying their loyalty.
Most trades businesses try to solve this by throwing random cash at the team or copying a competitor's commission structure. It usually fails. The only way to build highly profitable techs is to transition from buying hours to rewarding specific behaviors.
Last week, we hosted a webinar breaking down exactly how top service businesses are restructuring pay to kill inefficiency. Today, we're recapping it here in the newsletter.
📹 How to Stop Buying Hours, Modernize Your Pay, and Drive More Revenue Per Tech: Full Recording
Thanks to everyone who joined us live last week! It was great to see so many of you sticking around for the whole session and asking questions. During the call, we discussed:
How to attract (and keep) the best techs in town
How to replace vague bonuses with clear, trackable targets.
How to reward speed without causing callbacks.
If you want a recording of the full session, just hit reply and I'll send it over.
Stop Winging It With Ad Hoc Bonuses
Handing out random cash or taking the crew to a ballgame does not create behavioral change. It is a sunk cost that usually shows zero trackable ROI.
Why are ad hoc bonuses ineffective? Ad hoc bonuses are ineffective because they lack clear performance targets.
When technicians don't understand what specific actions earn the reward, they don’t change their daily behavior to improve your margins.
Right now, an hourly tech’s clearest path to making more money is to get overtime. You need to present a transparent Option B. The way to do this is through a clear, predictable scorecard.
When you outline types of incentives explicitly — such as earning a specific percentage for an upsell or a flat fee for zero callbacks in 30 days — technicians adapt their workflow to hit those targets. Relying on a discretionary bonus leaves your team guessing what actually matters.
Fixing Turnover
Churn is not just a recruitment cost. It kills your company momentum and burns your incoming leads.
Complex bonus structures or no incentives at all will drive A-players away. Use performance-based pay to show how incentives can increase their effective hourly rate. This metric combines their base pay with their earned incentives. Top performers stay when they see a direct correlation between their hustle and their paycheck.
Attack Labor Inefficiency and Callbacks
If your price book estimates a job takes 10 hours and your crew takes 14, your profit margins are gone. If they rush the work in eight hours but you have to roll a truck for a callback, you lose a net-new job entirely.
Labor efficiency and callbacks are the silent killers of service businesses.
Bake labor efficiency directly into your compensation plan. Reward your crews for beating estimated hours, but implement strict deductions for callbacks to ensure quality never drops.
Put the Scoreboard in Their Pocket
The new generation of tradespeople wants a scoreboard. They want to compete and they want to know the score in real-time.
Take Max at Clogbusters. He is a 19-year-old technician annualizing $180,000 while working standard 40-hour weeks. Max delivers a great customer experience, works efficiently, and refuses to cut corners.
What is a real-time leaderboard? A real-time leaderboard is a digital dashboard that ranks employee performance against specific KPIs immediately as jobs are completed, fostering healthy competition and accountability.
The ShareWillow Mobile App.
Do not wait until the end of the month to reveal the numbers. Give your team access so they can track their earnings daily. The transparency of our ShareWillow mobile app drives technicians to hold each other accountable.
Want to see the mobile app in action and learn how incentives can help grow your business? Book a call with me here: 👇
How to Model Your ROI Effectively
Trying to track all these metrics manually will slow down your operations.
By using ShareWillow, you can pull this data seamlessly and run an ROI simulator. We ingest your data from tools like ServiceTitan or Jobber and identify the metrics that actually move the needle, like labor rate and average ticket.
ShareWillow helps you calculate bonuses for employees accurately without the spreadsheet chaos. We model exactly how much net profit you stand to gain before you pay out a single dollar in incentives.
Final Thoughts
Stop buying hours and start rewarding outcomes. When your technicians know exactly how to win, they will bring your profit margins up with them.