A 3-day heat pump install closes Wednesday at 4:30 PM. The crew bonus on the job is $600.
Your lead set up the equipment and ran the install. Your apprentice hauled duct, pulled wire, and learned a lot.
Who gets what?
Often, that's one of the biggest challenges facing business owners who run incentive plans.
The Even-Split Tax
Hour-long service calls are easy to bonus. One tech, one ticket, clean math. Multi-day installs never were. You've got 3 days, 2 or 3 guys on site, different roles, different hours. The math gets messy, so most shops pick one of 2 bad options.
Skip the install crew. Your service techs cash bonuses on 1-hour calls while the guys running your biggest tickets get nothing. Your installers notice.
Split it down the middle. 50/50 sounds fair until you say it out loud. The lead who ran the job and passed the inspection earns the same bonus as the second-year apprentice who carried equipment. Your best installer notices within 2 jobs.
Neither works, and neither motivates your top techs.
The 70/30 Conversation
Job splits are something I talk about with multiple business owners every week. Last month I was on a call with the owner of an electrical and HVAC company in Virginia. He's been running incentives for years. His biggest challenge?
"One thing that's on my mind is how helpers might be tied in."
His installs run a lead and a helper. He'd even done the math on what felt fair: "For an install, I would think like a 70/30 type of split."
The challenge is making it work without payroll taking a huge amount of time. Another owner described what running incentive pay by hand costs her: "When I do payroll every week, it takes me hours and hours and hours."
Incentive-pay job splits computed by hand, every week, forever. That's a lot. And it shouldn't be this way.
Set the Split Once
That's why we built Job-Based Plans directly into ShareWillow.
You set the split one time, by role and by hours worked. Then ShareWillow tracks the whole job, respects the job splits you already maintain in ServiceTitan, and when the job closes, pays every crew member their share.
At a 70/30 split, a $600 crew bonus lands as $420 for your lead and $180 for your apprentice.
And every tech sees their share live in the app. Not a mystery number on a pay stub 3 weeks later. Their jobs, their split, their share this month, updating as work closes.
Chris McDowell at Clogbusters described what hand-run performance pay used to cost him: "It used to take a whole day, Monday, sometimes into Tuesday. Now it takes less than an hour." Job-Based Plans bring that same automation to the messiest part of the problem: the multi-day, multi-tech job.
Techs Talk
The Virginia owner said one more thing that stuck with me: "Nobody talks like technicians."
He's right. Your lead knows what they earned on the last install, and on Friday night at the bar, they're comparing numbers with techs from every shop in town. You can't stop that talk. You can only decide what it says about you.
Make the split right and the numbers visible, and the talk starts recruiting for you. Yours becomes the shop the good ones want to join.
Want us to look at how your crews get paid today and show you where the gaps are? Let's hop on a call and chat. No commitment, no pitch, just your numbers.
Best,
Ryan