I’ve spent years working with service business owners, and I see the same incentive anxiety creep in all the time. Owners want to reward their teams, but they’re worried about two things:
Killing their margins or paying bonuses on jobs that actually lost money
Paying the slacker on their team the same bonus as the superstar tech
But with the right structure, you can solve both challenges. If you’re tired of vibes-based bonuses and want a performance-based pay system that actually drives revenue, this is the blueprint.
🚀 Join Our Webinar: How Performance Pay Drove $1.16M in Revenue Growth
Learn how one HVAC company increased average tickets by 10% and slashed callbacks in six months using these exact strategies.
When: Today at 12pm ET | Where: Online | Cost: FREE
⚠️ Only 10 spaces left! Register now to avoid missing out: 👇
How to Build a High-Growth Incentive Plan
To drive revenue and increase your tech’s take home pay simultaneously, your plan needs two incentive engines working together: One protects your company's bottom line, while the other drives the individual's top-line performance.
1. The Project Pool: Protecting Your Gross Profit
The first mistake owners make is paying bonuses on revenue. As the old saying goes: Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity.
Instead, you need a Project Threshold. This means you set a target gross profit margin (often around 40%). The company keeps everything up to that 40% to cover overhead and its own profit. Then an Award Pool is created from the actual profit that exceeds that target.
If the team finds a way to work more efficiently and brings the job in at 50% profit, they just created a margin increase. You split that extra profit with them. If they hit 39%? There is no Award Pool. This protects your profit margins and turns your technicians into partners who care about job costing.
How to distribute it fairly: Don't just split the pool equally. Here’s how we recently set up an award pool for a ShareWillow partner:
60% by Role: Senior Lead Techs get a larger slice because they carry the liability.
40% by Hours: The reward is tied to the actual "sweat equity" put into that specific project.
2. The Individual Scorecard: Driving Revenue and Quality
The Project Threshold on its own can lead to techs rushing jobs to save hours which risks leaving a trail of unhappy customers. To counter this, balance the Award Pool with an Individual Scorecard.
This Scorecard is designed to incentivize the behaviors that lead to happy customers, increased revenue, and profit growth for your business:
Sales Commissions: Offer a percentage (typically 3–5%) for any upsells or quotes written in the field. This changes the tech's mindset from fixing a part to providing a full solution.
Lead Generation: Pay a flat fee (e.g., $40) for any tech-generated leads that turn into jobs.
5-Star Reviews: Reward the intangibles that build your brand ($10 per review).
The Callback Deduction: To maintain quality, include a penalty (e.g. a $50 deduction) for at-fault callbacks or a bonus for months where a tech has zero callbacks.
➡️ We’ll be discussing how to build effective scorecards in our webinar today. Register here to save your spot.
Back-Test for Confidence
Before you announce any new incentive system to your team, we always suggest you back-test it using historical data. Take your Q4 data from last year and run it using your new Award Pools and Individual Scorecards. Pay attention to:
What would the lead tech have made? How about any junior techs?
Did the company's net profit stay protected or even grow?
This review gives you the confidence to stand in front of your team and say, "If you do X, you will make Y." The goal should be for your incentives plan to be so simple that a tech can explain their paycheck to their spouse in 10 seconds.
By using ShareWillow, you can plug into your existing systems — from QuickBooks to ServiceTitan and Jobber — and automate your incentive plans so you can focus on growing your business, not spreadsheets.
Want to see how ShareWillow works? Register for our webinar later today or book a 1:1 strategy call with our team here: 👇