The 60% Trap

Many business owners operate under the assumption that scaling requires capital expenditure.

To grow revenue by 20%, the logic goes, you need 20% more vans or 20% more techs. And while that may drive revenue growth, it likely doesn’t budge profitability too drastically. 

But there’s a way to drastically increase your top line without adding a single new crew to your roster. 

Before you sign the lease on five new vans, look at the utilization of your current fleet.

If you have 10 trucks running at 60% efficiency, buying 5 more trucks doesn't solve your problem. It simply scales your inefficiency. You just have more overhead that’s generating the same margins. 

A better strategy could be to focus on getting those initial 10 trucks to 75% or 80% efficiency before you consider expanding the fleet.

In a recent newsletter, we broke down the concept of selling time twice — the idea that if you quote 20 hours for a job and complete it in 15, you create 5 hours of inventory out of thin air that you can resell.

But how do you execute it in the field?

You can’t just walk into a shop meeting and ask your technicians you’re going to sell their time twice. To them, efficiency often just looks like working harder for the same paycheck.

To bridge the gap between actual hours and expected hours, you have to change the incentives. You have to build a system where efficiency puts money in their pocket, not just yours.

Why do trucks run at 60% efficiency? Usually, it’s because the person behind the wheel is paid to be present, not efficient.

When you pay hourly, you are incentivizing time. When you move to performance-based pay, you incentivize results.

We recently sat down with Jarod from Clog Busters from Des Moines, Iowa. His philosophy is simple: "Whatever gets tracked, gets measured. What gets measured, gets improved."

Jarod believes that if you are a professional, you "deserve to be paid what you're worth." By moving to a performance pay model (specifically a commission structure with spiffs for things like memberships and 5-star reviews), he completely changed the output of his existing trucks.

The results?

Jarod isn't forcing them to work double shifts.He’s incentivizing his team to unlock the potential of the trucks he already has on the road.

When you pay for performance, your technicians stop acting like hourly laborers and start caring about the same business metrics that you do.

They stop letting jobs roll over to the next day unnecessarily. They stop taking long routes. They start looking for ethical add-ons and upsells because they know exactly how it impacts their take-home pay.

You don't need more trucks. You need your existing trucks to be driven by people who are financially motivated to be efficient.

To execute this strategy, you can't wait for a quarterly review. Efficiency happens in real-time, daily decisions.

As Jarod puts it, "Winners want to know where they stand every day." They want to know if they are on top or on the bottom.

That’s why we just reimagined the Plan Performance tab in the ShareWillow mobile app. With new leaderboards and simplified earning breakdowns, your team gets an instant answer to the only question that matters: "How am I doing?"

When the score is visible and your techs can see exactly where they stand every day, motivation and results become automatic.

Want to see how ShareWillow (and how our new mobile app) can help your business unlock growth in 2026? ⬇️