I had two calls with business owners last week that gave me the same story from opposite ends.
On the first, the owner told me he lost multiple techs last summer to commission based roles in a completely different field. The techs left because those gigs paid for output, not hours.
The second call was a plumbing company. The owner has a tech in his early 20’s pulling in over $250k in revenue for the first quarter alone. The rest of the team? Some had only just cleared $50k despite having the same tools, the same dispatching, and the same jobs coming in. The difference is the 20-something figured out that performance rewards hustle, and he's hungry. The other guys hit their weekly bonus floor and coast.
These two stories are connected. The first owner is losing his best people because they want to earn based on output. The second owner has proof that output-based pay works, but half his team is treating it like a ceiling instead of a floor.
The Talent Market Has Shifted
Three years ago, performance pay was a competitive advantage. Shops that offered it attracted better techs and kept them longer.
Today, it’s table stakes.
The best techs know performance pay exists. They've talked to friends at other companies and know their friend down the road earns more per hour due to incentives, despite working the same hours.
Your A-players are comparing their hourly rate to what they could earn at a place where the pay is tied to performance. And $2-3 more per hour from a competitor isn't the only threat anymore — we’ve heard stories of tech leaving their trade for anything with uncapped earning potential.
Replacing a tech who leaves costs $15,000 to $25,000 in recruiting, training, and lost productivity. That's real money you're spending to replace someone who left because their paycheck didn't reflect their effort.
📅 Live Webinar: How to Keep Your Best Techs and Stop Subsidizing the Ones Who Coast
The same hourly rate that's keeping your coasters comfortable is the reason your best techs are looking around. On this live call, we'll cover:
How to design a pay plan that gives your best techs a reason to stay — and raises the floor for everyone else
The Shadow Payroll strategy: run the new plan alongside current pay until your techs ask to switch
How to set the payout formula so your performers earn more and your coasters earn what they actually produce
When: April 16th, 12pm ET | 45 minutes
Where: Online
Why Quarterly Bonuses Don't Fix This
The quarterly bonus is an old school approach to performance pay. Techs see it as a gift, not a reward for hard work as the feedback loop is too long
This is the pattern I see over and over.
Owners know they need to share the upside with their team. So they set up a quarterly bonus, hand out checks, and wonder why nothing changed.
The problem isn't generosity. It's timing.
Techs need to see the connection between what they did this week and what they earned this week. That's why the companies seeing the biggest results on ShareWillow are getting their techs set up on our mobile app — so when a tech finishes a job on Wednesday, they can open their phone and see how it moved his next projected payout, the behavior change is immediate.
Book a call to see how our app works.
What the Numbers Look Like
One HVAC company we work with added $1.2 million in additional revenue in six months. They got there by focusing on two things: increasing average ticket and reducing callbacks.
And that’s not a one-off success story.
Across a set of companies on our platform, we're seeing 18% higher tickets, 14% fewer callbacks, and 24% better labor efficiency after implementing performance pay. Those results don't come from hiring new people. They come from paying existing people differently.
I'm walking through exactly how these companies built their plans on a live webinar on next week (April 16). Grab your spot here.
The plumbing owner I spoke with laid it our clearly for me: if three the rest of his techs performed closer to his top guy, he'd add nearly $1m in revenue for the year. Same trucks. Same overhead. Just a different pay structure.
Don’t Wait Until Your Best Tech Leaves
Every month you stay on hourly-only pay, you're making a bet. You're betting that your best techs won’t find somewhere willing to pay them for performance. You're betting that the 21-year-old who's hungry today will still be hungry next year at the same flat rate.
In most cases, that's a losing bet. And it gets more expensive every quarter you wait.
If you've been thinking about this, we’ve worked with 300+ home service companies on performance pay. No contracts, no lock-in. If it doesn't pay for itself, you don’t need to stick around.
If you want to talk through what a plan could look like for your shop, grab 30 minutes with our team. We'll walk through your business and tell you what we'd recommend. No pitch, no commitment.
-Ryan
P.S. I'll be speaking at Gadget Repair Expo 6.0 this May (19–20) at Hard Rock Casino & Resort – Atlantic City, NJ.
Session Topic: Use Incentives to Drive More Revenue — Without Burning Out Technicians
If you’re in the repair industry, this is one event you don’t want to miss. Grab your ticket and come join me: 👉 gadgetrepairexpo.com