I was on a call last week with a business owner out west.
He told me he video called one of his crew leads to check on a job and in the background, he could see one tech sat down scrolling his phone.
Nothing in their pay structure penalizes sitting around, so sitting around is exactly what they do when they think they can get away with it.
He knew it. His guys knew it. And everyone kept playing the game because the pay structure rewarded it.
The Quarterly Surprise
The owner already had profit sharing in place. But most of his guys would average an extra couple of hundred bucks per month. They got excited the day the bonus payment landed, but it’s not enough to change their motivation on an average Tuesday morning.
The techs also didn’t know what drives the number. They can't connect anything they did on a Wednesday in February to a check they get in April. So they treat it like a surprise gift, not something they earned.
The gap between the action and reward is too wide for the reward to change their actions day-to-day.
That's what we fix at ShareWillow. If you're curious what this might look like for your business, book a free audit and we'll show you.
Thinking About Performance Pay
He told me something I hear from owners constantly… He’d been thinking about implementing performance pay for a long time.
On the delivery side of the business, everyone is on hourly pay. Same rate whether a job takes three days or seven. Whether they're working hard or scrolling TikTok.
His biggest worry was another objection I hear all the time — if you make the switch and it doesn’t work, you can't go back. You can't tell a crew "you're hourly again" without losing everyone.
That fear kept him stuck. And losing some of his best techs to competitors or other industries.
Show, Don’t Tell
At ShareWillow, we run a shadow payroll before anything goes live. Your techs see exactly how performance pay would have boosted their last few checks, and we’ll show you how to launch it. Learn how it works here.
What Changed?
The cost of not implementing performance pay was higher than the risk of switching. His techs were leaving — often for roles offering commission or some form of performance incentives. The same guys who'd been clocking hours at his shop were betting on themselves somewhere else.
Performance pay isn't about squeezing more out of people. It's about giving your best techs a reason to stay and a way to earn what they're worth.
If you've been kicking this around in your head for years, here's the thing: the longer you wait, the more overtime you're paying for work that should have been done at 3pm.
At ShareWillow, we'll pull your data, show you your benchmarks, and build a custom performance pay plan just for your business.
Want to see how it works? Book Your Free Audit here. There’s no commitment and you’ll walk away knowing exactly what performance pay would look like for your business.
— Ryan
P.S. We’re onboarding a ton of new partners at ShareWillow right now – a lot of them are owners who've been reading this newsletter for months and finally made the switch. If you've been thinking about performance pay, all we need is 30 minutes to show you what it looks like for your business. Grab a time with my team here.