You're Babysitting

Holding people accountable is part of running a business. When you first start out, nobody warns you how taxing that gets, or how much of your week it's going to eat.

It isn't fun. You hired these guys. You like most of them. And you're still the one who has to drive out, look at a job, and tell a technician he took too long or didn't finish to the standard you expect. Do that enough times and you start hearing yourself from the outside. You hired grown men. Now you're babysitting them. 

A tech on $30 an hour picks up a service call that even your junior techs should be close in an hour. He takes a whole afternoon to close it out.

Nothing about it is fireable. He showed up. He did the work. The customer is happy. But he made sure the work lasted until 4:30, because the only number that moves his paycheck is the one on his timecard, and he hit it.

So somebody has to catch it. Somebody has to drive out, work out what the job should have taken, and have the conversation. As a business owner, nine times out of ten that somebody is you. 

Hourly pay puts you and your tech on opposite sides of the table. You need the job done in the hours you bid it. He needs hours. You're both acting rationally and you want opposite things.

Which leaves you as the only person in the building with a reason to care how long anything takes. Your techs don't. Your apprentice doesn't. Your office doesn't. That concern lives in exactly one head, and it's yours.

So every conversation about pace starts from a losing position. You're not asking him to hit a number you both agreed to. You're asking him to work against his own paycheck.

The part that costs you money is what happens next…

Every hour you spend riding along and auditing timecards is an hour you're not quoting, not selling, not running your own calls. Police the business hard enough and you're a one man show again, doing the work of the guys you hired so you could stop doing the work.

And the calls stack up while you do it. Most service businesses aren't short on demand these days. They're short on people who move without being watched. That revenue is sitting right there, and you can't reach it because you're busy supervising pace instead of capturing it.

The guys leave anyway. Replacing a tech runs $15,000 to $25,000 once you count recruiting, training, and the months he's slow.

One of our partners, Clog Busters, put a deduction on callbacks. Chris McDowell, its operations manager, says the impact landed the same week: "Everybody straightened up right away. Everybody fell in." Their callbacks have run below the industry average ever since, and Chris never had to give a speech about craftsmanship to get there. The deduction said it for him. It says it again every week, to everybody at once, so nobody has to pull a tech aside and be the bad guy about it.

"It even just takes the pressure off the leadership, too,” Chris told me. 

Every business has a few techs who set the standard. They wrap jobs on time. They don't generate callbacks. They coach the apprentices without being asked, and they run their truck like they own it. You know exactly who they are, and so does everybody else on the crew.

Under hourly, all of that earns them a few dollars an hour more than your worst tech.

Performance pay pays them for what they produce instead. Your best techs already bring in more revenue than everybody else, every week, and a plan puts that money in their paycheck.

Then it pulls the rest of the crew up behind them. Everybody can see the number. Everybody's measured against the same standard. And the guys in the middle work out fast that your top techs aren't lucky, they're doing the things that pay.

Want to discuss how performance pay could raise the floor for your team? Book a demo here. 

Best,
Ryan