Employee Incentive Programs That Drive Team Performance and Profitability with Ryan Shank

Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Home Services Podcast. I'm your host, Diane Gardner, and I'm so happy that you chose to spend part of your day with us again today. My guest today is Ryan Shank from Sharewillow, and I know that in this episode we're going to be unpacking many different profit leaks for you, so please listen close get out a pencil and some paper, be willing and ready to take notes because I know you're going to want to capture this information and start implementing it in your own business. Because I know that your— some of your biggest profit leaks are sitting in your team. Because I see that as we coach with home service businesses all across the U.S., I see it time and time and time again. Teams that are not running efficiently, teams that have not bought into the company's vision or the company's goal, they're just there to do a job, and we need to change that. And so, um, based on what I've seen and heard from Ryan, I know he's got some wonderful answers for you. So with that, I'd like to welcome Ryan Shank from ShareWello.

Thank you so much, Diane. Um, I am, uh, incredibly excited to chat with you today about, you know, some of the profit leaks that we see. You know, I— it's funny, I, uh, I didn't initially think of them like that, but as we create incentive plans and, you know, um, capture, uh, additional efficiencies. We really do see how there's, uh, leaky buckets in a lot of these businesses. So I'm super excited to, to chat about that and, you know, what we're seeing out there in the field.

Yes, I always say picture a bucket that's got great big holes in it, and then maybe it's got some medium-sized holes, and then some maybe small holes. I see some of those biggest holes are in their team. It's in the way that they approach their team, in the way that their team, uh, works with their customers or their clients as they're out in the field, how they do their job, how well, how quickly, how efficiently. All that stuff comes into play. And I know it's an area that so many home service business owners struggle with, and they can't be out there to monitor and oversee every job. So Ryan, tell us a little bit about what's the difference— I'm going clear back to basics on you— what's the difference between just paying your guys a salary or an hourly rate with a bonus incentive at some point in the year versus your incentive pay program?

So yeah, I mean, I think— let me just kind of back up. Um, I think it's pretty clear that if you just pay your technicians hourly, um, incentives are misaligned, right? You know, we hear time and time again, if, you know, if you're— they're incentivized for hours, they're going to clock hours, right? And they're going to run into overtime, and jobs are going to take a little bit longer. Um, and I, I think it's pretty clear that everyone agrees there needs to be some form of incentive pay, whether it's 100%, and that's like performance pay that you see companies like Tommy Mello's A1 Garage Door, or whether that's just, you know, a 20% of the total comp. However the makeup is, I think it's, it's pretty clear that there needs to be incentives that align the technicians with not only the company's goals but also the customer's goals. Because look, the customers don't want the job to take longer or to be more expensive or all of these things, right? The customers want it diagnosed quickly if it's a break-fix type job. And, you know, they want it done correct the first time. They don't want the guy to have to come back. So it's pretty clear you need to align incentives with the company and the technicians and the customer. And so I think, you know, the first thing is how and why do you do that? And I think like, you know, just to answer your question without going, you know, down a rabbit hole really quickly is The incentives have to be tied to performance metrics that the technician does. I think when it's too detached, if it's just a random Christmas bonus, like that has nothing to do with their day-to-day. It's what we call found money. It doesn't impact, it doesn't incentivize, it doesn't motivate necessarily. If it's phantom equity or even stock, like these guys do not care day-to-day about that. Like, let's be honest, it's like they want the cash. I talked to a really big landscaping company today, and, you know, they do weekly pay, and the guys like almost want real time, like, hey, I finished this job now in less hours than it should have taken, you know, how does that, uh, impact my pay, my effective hourly rate? So to answer your question, um, you need to structure it so that the incentives are tied to things that the technician can control today, right? And whether that is average ticket, or it's just labor efficiency. If, you know, if the job should have taken 10 hours, could you do it in 8 hours and without having a callback? Because if you do it within 8 hours but you did a bad job and you have to go back to the job, that defeats the purpose. So it's really creating a structure that incentivizes on the right behavior that's fully aligned with the company.

And I think that's, that's a very important point because so often it seems like owners will throw a certain amount of money in a pot for a bonus, and then everybody on the team gets part of that bonus, but not everybody on the team really earned that bonus. And so then you end up with your top performers starting to feel resentful of the ones that they might be carrying, and the owner may not know that they're carrying other members on the team. And correct, and I see that with the attitudes start to slip, and then pretty soon over time you lose your top performer, or your top performers' performance starts slipping because they're not feeling appreciated or cared for or anything in the company.

Exactly. And I think also, um, you know, look, at the end of the day, I think A-players are competitive. They want to see how they rank, even beyond the money. The money definitely, obviously, right? But even just, you know, having a leaderboard, having a scoreboard, the competition, seeing what other, other, you know, their peers are doing, how they're performing, who's, you know, doing jobs fastest. Like, it's funny, I actually follow— or there was some Twitter account or X account now, and it was like, this is probably a bad thing to do, but it was like pilots. And the pilots would like try to beat the other pilots' time. Like, I did New York to Atlanta in like this amount of time. I beat, you know, how fast it was. And I think they just take pride in it. They're competitive amongst each other. They're not even incentivized for it. So I think there's a few things. It's like tracking it, showing it, and, you know, your top performers really want that. It's going to weed out the bad people or it's going to make that force them to step up. But you're right, you know, it's like if it's just a pool and it's funny, that's how we started ShareWillow. We actually started like profit sharing and we thought, you know, we'll bucket a pool of money based on profits and we'll allocate it based on, you know, your role or level. And that's when we kind of realized that it's got to be, you know, individual performance metrics that these guys can impact on a day-to-day basis and not just, you know, again, if you're doing a group project and like 2 people do all the work and you have like 5 slackers that kind of also get credit, you know, you start to get resentful. It's like, why am I splitting my money with you when I basically did everything? So there's a lot of things that you need to consider, right, when designing these plans and, you know, why or why not they will be received well.

Yes. And that's one of the things I love about your dashboard is they can see their performance almost, it looks like, in real time from what I've seen with your—

Oh, yeah. So we think of it like this. You know, there's obviously the field service softwares, or which are effectively like the CRMs, right, for the trades. You have obviously ServiceTitan, but then you have Jobber, Housecall Pro, FieldEdge, Service Fusion, you know, in landscaping you have Aspire, tons of these big, tons of these companies, right? We think of that as the data source, right? Those almost like if you think about it for other companies, kind of like a Salesforce or a HubSpot, right? They're heavy, there's a lot in there, but that's like your kind of your, your data source where everything is. Um, and then what we're doing is we're essentially, you know, creating— you're taking that data and we're pulling it into Sharewillow to, to then draw, to create the incentives around that data. So as long as we're getting that data updated, it is in real time, right? We're able to know when a job gets closed out, when, you know, if you're using time tracking in one of these platforms, we're able to apply, you know, a billable efficiency or a labor efficiency using that data. Um, and so, you know, we're able to have a feed coming into, to Sharewillow from these other platforms and show the guys in an easy KPI leaderboard dashboard, um, tied to their money, uh, in real time versus, you know, logging in. I don't know if you've logged into— we love ServiceSite, we're partners with them, um, we exhibited at their conference, but they do a lot, you know, like it's, you know, scheduling and work orders and estimates and invoices, the marketing hub, and like it's, it's a lot, which is powerful and all of that. Maybe not the easiest to quickly log in on an app from a technician and just see what are your like super high-level 3 KPIs. What's my average ticket, my, you know, number of jobs completed, number of memberships sold, like probably not easiest to just super quickly glance at it, see where you're at. That's what we're doing. We're kind of pulling the data in and we're feeding it to them, um, so that it's easy to digest and they understand, you know, where they're at.

I love that because I— if all the clients that I've ever worked with in our coaching programs, I have never ever heard any of them say that their technicians have ever logged into their CRM. That's just not something I ever hear. So this is cool that you've given them their own place that they can go to get their numbers, because any of those platforms are overwhelming when you're not in them daily. That's why technicians definitely going to feel overwhelmed if they try to log in and pull anything. But putting it off in their own separate area makes it easier because now they just hit one spot and there's their numbers. And, and I love that about your dashboard.

Yeah. And I think, look, here's the other thing. It's really not even about ShareWillow. What we're trying to do is help these companies. So I would say this, you know, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is help these companies generate more revenue and profit from their existing team. You know, here's just like a super basic example. If one guy, you know, is doing a job that should take 10 hours, and he does it in 10 hours, that's great, right? If he's able to do that job in 5 hours and he can do another— you can do 2 jobs for the same that it should have taken him 1 job, that business now is able to, uh, have twice the amount of revenue for the same labor that they're paying. And now maybe they're paying the guy more, a little bit more, because they're incentivizing him to do the first job more efficiently, faster. Again, and it's offset if there's a callback, there's a deduction, things like that. So You know, you want— what we're trying to do is really get the most out of the technicians, out of the employees, and not even just get the most, like squeeze the most, let them participate in the upside. You know what I mean? If a guy's making $25 an hour but you say, hey, we want you to do these things and you can make $50 an hour, like, that's awesome. It's like, hey, I'm going to share the upside. I'm not just going to ask you to do it faster and it's harder and, you know, work harder for the same. It's like, I'm going to give you a piece of that upside and that we're fully aligned. And I think that's at the end of the day what we're trying to do. And the reason we want to pull that data out of ServiceTitan, display it to the technicians, because it has to be easy to understand. I think like, again, if you're trying to extract profit from the business, from things that you already have going on and everything I'm talking about, by the way, doesn't require additional employees, additional marketing, spend, you know, anything. Um, it's like, hey, how do we just get the team running, you know, more efficiently? How do we get them presenting a good, better, best? A lot of times there's all these sales training programs, right? And they all train, you know, the technicians what to say— good, better, best, blah, blah, blah— and then they don't incentivize on it. And so it's like, you're all this training, you flew out trainers, but then they're still getting paid hourly. It's like Okay, why would you not make the incentives around the things that you want as a business that you're training on? Um, so it's like, again, if you present a good, better, best to the customer, it's proven that you can increase average ticket size. You know, if you present the membership or, you know, the maintenance plan, you know, it's proven that you'll attach it at 20% to your visits, right? If you you know, incentivize them or even just tell them how many hours it should take and have a leaderboard and there's accountability and visibility, it's like they will start to do the jobs in less time, right? When you don't say how much it should take, you don't incentivize on it. You know, I hear every single day they're like, my guys just like the job will roll over to the next day. They won't complete— they could have completed it, they could have completed it, but they just left and I'll come back tomorrow. And then they go back tomorrow. It's like, you could have gotten it done, then the next day go into a new job. And by not being able to go to a new job the next day and having to go back, that's like 4 or 5 hours by the time you go there in the morning, blah blah blah, get it, and then you travel to the next job. It's like, that's another half a day, right? And if you think of— if you think of months as 20 working days, you know, one day is 5%. Half a day, like, that's a pretty significant piece of time for that month, you know what I mean? Half a day out of 20 days, that's pretty material. So anyway, that's kind of what we think about as we're not only just building the plans, but also, again, this is like our goal at the end of the day is, hey, let me show you what you're doing today. Here's state of the union, state of the land today. And here's where if you improve just a few core metrics where your business can be and how you're able to, you know, have— you have this much money that you're essentially leaving on the table, profit that you're leaving on the table. And it's like, hey, how do— if we improve a few core metrics and then it's like, okay, so to improve those metrics, do we just train around them or do we incentivize on them? And the answer is you do both. Um, and, uh, so yeah, so I think that's, you know, as much as— and the reason I say that is because like we were talking a lot about, you know, Sharewillow and stuff, but really it's not, it's not about us. It's like, how do we, how do we package this so that you're able to get the most out of your team? And how we feel is if we can make it so the technicians win, everyone wins. Like, our goal initially, honestly, was like, all right, let's— this is for the business owner. And like, it is for the business owner because they want the efficiency from their team. But if the technicians— if you get buy-in, if you get them to be like, oh, okay, like, this actually makes me more money, like, if we can win the technicians, then everyone wins. The business wins that way, the customer wins that way. So a lot of our focus, again, or even on product, is, um, is building so that, you know, we win the technicians, right? Because we want them to make more money and to have buy-in and to see you know, the, the big picture here. Um, and to be honest, look, they, they would rather that. It's like if a guy right now is incentivized to just clock more hours and go into overtime, he's doing it because that's where the incentives are. He's like incentivized essentially to drag his feet a little bit, right? But if he's like, I'm incentivized— but it's like if I show a guy, hey, you can drag your feet, you can go into overtime and get overtime pay, or you could do it faster, get to the second job, and then get the upside from the second job, they'll actually choose this option. But you have to make this have a bigger upside than this right now, because right now there's— this isn't on the table. So they're like, I'm just going to drag my feet, go into overtime, get like 5 hours of overtime. I'm good because they don't have this second option. But if they had it, they would do that. And then that's when everyone wins. So that's why I feel like, you know, we're just so laser-focused on, on like winning the technicians right now.

I know when I'm coaching with these home service businesses and we dig into their payroll costs and look at what they spend on overtime every year, it's a significant number. And if we could cut that overtime off, or almost all of it to be gone, and turn part of that into an incentive pay situation, they actually come out many thousands of dollars to the good when you sit down and actually look at those hard numbers. And I know people look at that and go, but there's a cost to your program. How, you know, I don't have— I can't afford to pay for this program. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm strapped as it is. So how, how many months does it normally take before somebody starts recouping the investment into a program like this and they start becoming profitable from using it?

We always say within 90 days, actually. But to be honest, if you're doing weekly pay, you see it way faster. Because here's what happens, um, we work with the company and we build out a plan Right? We're like, all right, we're going to build the plan. We're going to integrate all your stuff. Then you go live and you train your employees. Say, hey guys, this is the new comp plan that we have and we're going to have incentives as part of it. They're going to have to be paying attention. Like, let's be honest, you're going to have a training meeting. It's like a meeting. You know, imagine they get a, hey guys, we got a team meeting. It's like this other thing, new training thing. They're going to like have to be paying attention. Okay, there's this upside. There's this thing, ShareWillow. Do the jobs faster, yada yada. Then that first payout happens. They start looking at their own pay. Whoa, I got $400. You got $1,800? Like, whoa, let me see it. They talk, like, let's be honest, right? They talk. So it's like, yo, how'd you get $1,800? It's like, because I did my jobs. I guess I did them half as, you know, it took me half as long as you. I got 5 5-star reviews. I sold 3 memberships and my average ticket was like twice as yours. They're like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up, hold up. Now they start paying attention. So I really feel like you roll it out, you get half paying attention, then you're in the first period, then you get the first payout. Now they're paying attention. Then that second payout period is when, like, you start to really see the behavior change. So again, if you're doing it weekly, it could really have— you could really see the behavior change and then the upside on that within, like, again, if you're doing it weekly, within like 3 to 4 weeks. Otherwise, we would say, you know, 90 days if you're doing it biweekly or monthly, just 'cause again, like just human nature. I would love like everyone to pay attention and you get behavior change from day zero, day one. Like I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that happens, but it does happen once they, you know, you start to realize like everyone says like follow the money, you'll, you'll see, you know, follow the incentives even like whatever, even in other stuff, it's like when there's like incentives and little like, like you can kind of see, you know, where things happen because, you know, follow the money. So if that happens, it's like you get it fast. So anyway, the behavior change starts to happen. Call it, call it 90 days. And when that happens, again, you're doing jobs faster. Your average ticket size is going up. They're selling more memberships. They're doing less callbacks, which means more net new jobs. You could do 40 jobs, by the way, but if you have 10 callbacks of those 40, you're only doing 30 net new jobs. If you reduce that to 5 callbacks, you're not doing 5 additional net new jobs times a $1,000 average ticket, it's $5,000, times 10 techs, it's $50,000 in that month. You know what I mean? Like, it adds up quickly. Um, so, you know, we see within 90 days you can completely recoup everything. And not only recoup everything, but see a return. See a return, right?

I love that. That's fairly— that's pretty quick, because I know when you, when you sign on to one of the CRM-type softwares, it's more than 90 days before you actually start seeing returns, because it takes a while to get it all set up, get your people using it, understanding it. And so those are a much slower return on investments. I love that this is a fairly quick return on investment for people.

Yeah, and I would say, um, look, I think, you know, there's a lot of, uh, I would say foundational things that I'm, um, assuming are already happening. I'm already assuming you're on a CRM. I'm already assuming, you know, there's, uh I'm already assuming there's some baselines here and that we're like, we're introducing incentives on top of it and that then, then they're going to all improve. And look, at the end of the day, most of these guys are on— I mean, maybe you deal with other people, but from what I've seen, they're on something. They have some type of CRM, right? Whether it's Housecall or Jobber, and they all are like thinking about switching always, right? They're like, I'm thinking about switching and they don't like a piece of it and all of that. Like, that's fine. But yeah, I mean, I think for us, again, when you move to a CRM, I think it is hard to like really see it because look, if you're not on a CRM, like these guys probably have, I mean, it's probably super manual and I think the return on investment there is more like I was spending time here versus time there, right? So it's kind of this time ROI versus ours. It's like very much like, again, another assumption is a lot of the companies that we work with, they already have probably more business than they can handle. So, you know, I'm not talking about the guys that like don't have leads. I'm talking like, you know, the customers that we work with. Again, if you're on ServiceTitan, you're probably not like starving for leads right now. Most of them are like booked out, and it's more of a people problem. So there are a few assumptions I'm making that I just want to like be clear. I'm not trying to say like any company in the trades instantly sees it, but like in who, you know, we work with that want— you know, look, if you're thinking about incentives, you already have a business. Otherwise, you're not really caring about that. You're like, I need business to survive. But yeah, I think within 90 days, honestly, some way faster.

Okay. Does the business have to be at a certain annual revenue to make this work, or is it more important that they have a CRM?

We say 5 technicians, not employees, but technicians. I think below 5 technicians Um, I did— I, I— look, you can do it below 5. I think it's just the way that we're, we're— how we work, and, um, it's better for, for us. Uh, we're gonna have, I think, a lower— but anyway, we say 5 technicians. I think over 5 technicians you start to really see ROI because the things compound, right? If you only have 1 or 2 and you increase average ticket, you know, 10%, it just might not compound like, you know, if you have 5 and, you know, versus the cost of software to manage it. Like you might be able to get away with managing it with 1 or 2 on your own, although I would argue you shouldn't. But 5 technicians is kind of like where we see, start to see value.

Right. Okay. That's good to know because those are the kinds of questions that come up as our listeners are listening to this. And they're like, yeah, do I qualify? Um, you know, should I wait a while? You know, those kinds of things. I could just hear them going, you know, those, those unspoken objections sitting up there already. So I thought we might as well just pull them right in here.

Yeah, yeah.

So in the businesses that you've been working with, I'm sure you've seen some transformational stories. Do you have one with us?

Yeah, I mean, I would say, um, trans— I, I don't want to take credit because they are an incredible company, but I'll give you an example. And, and, you know, if you subscribe, I think you subscribe to the newsletter, you might have heard us talk about, but, uh, a company called Blackhawk Heating and Air out of Appleton, Wisconsin, um, about a 25-year-old company, um, about $25 million in annual revenue. Um, I just personally actually pulled some data from them pre and post Share Willow And just if you just look at two core metrics which improved. So they've been with us for about a year, but I looked at the first six months after working with us and then the six months prior, and I basically just looked at the number of jobs and I normalized it. So I said, okay, if the number of jobs was the same because there are jobs varied, but I said, okay, let me, let me take the same number of jobs and then the average ticket. So they increased average ticket. And by the way, this is a 25-year-old company. It's not like these things fluctuate. It had been pretty like baseline, right? Um, because they've been around a while, family-owned, they're not PE-backed. Uh, CEO Jim Hawk, amazing guy. We actually visited him on site in Wisconsin, like incredible. But anyway, their average ticket size increased by like 15%, not even crazy. So I forget exact numbers, but say it was like $900, it increased to like $1,100 or whatever, $1,000. Not, not even crazy amount, right? But it's hard after when you have— they have like 100 employees, 56 technicians. Um, so to like really increase the average across everyone, it's pretty hard to like move it up once you've been around. There's, you know, training's already happened and all of that stuff, right? So they increased average ticket size and their callbacks reduced. Um, their callbacks were already super low, so I think like even other companies could have a way bigger ROI. But anyway, uh, callbacks reduced and an average ticket went up about, about 15%. So again, since the callbacks reduced, even though they were doing the same number of jobs, they were doing more net new jobs. And then instead of, call it 1,000 jobs over the period, 1,000 jobs times 900, and now it's, uh, or 1,000 jobs, but let's say it was 900 net new jobs. Now it's like 950 net new jobs because they decrease callbacks, and then times 1,100 average ticket versus 900. Anyway, they were up over like $1.5 million over this period, over this 6-month period, which is $3 million annualized, right? And, and just again, same number of technicians, same number of gross number of jobs, but they're doing more net new jobs, right? So it's like same people, same number of jobs, but an extra $3 million per year, which is $1.5 million in the first 6 months. Like, that was just being left on the table, right? Like, that's crazy. So I think that is like an incredible— and again, their numbers were already pretty optimized. So like other companies that we see that we work with, with like 20 employees that have been around, you know, 5, 6 years, it's like they're able to boost those numbers like way more. But I thought that was a pretty great use case, right? Like, like they pay Sharewillow, call it $12K, $15K a year. Um, they're paying out, you know, $30K a month in incentives. Um, so it'd be like $350K in incentives. So think about it, you give your guys $300K to bring in $3 million, right? It's like, you'll do that all day.

All day long. Yes, all day. And what I love—

investment—

yes, that net number falls straight to your bottom line profits. That you didn't have to sell more jobs. You just needed to be more efficient and get rid of, you know, cut back the callbacks, cut back the overtime, those kinds of things. And that money goes straight to your bottom line. So they didn't have to go out and sell a couple thousand more jobs. They just had to do a better job with the ones that they already had. And that's the message that I think makes me get excited when I'm working with these businesses is is let's just, let's, let's optimize the team that you currently have and get that bottom line profit. You know, what would you do with an extra $2.5 million sitting out there? Yeah, that all you had to do was go pluck it off the tree. Basically, you didn't have to work harder, you just had to work smarter. And that's why I love your program, you know, from what I had seen and the demo had done, and, you know, some of those types of things I was super impressed with how relatively easy it is to add extra profit to your bottom line. And businesses tend to get blinded by the day-to-day, trying to put out the fires, trying to figure out why it took this, you know, John so long to get this job done when Bob could have done it in this many hours. It took John, you know, 2.5 times longer, twice as long, or whatever. They're running around going back and trying to figure out why there was a callback and run out and try to fix it themselves. And they get so caught up in that day-to-day, um, put out the fires that they're not strategically thinking about how can we fix this and add this money back into our bottom line. And then exactly a ton of stress off of that owner too, because now they're no longer following along behind those texts. And making sure that jobs got done correctly, they're able to step into that CEO mode, a CEO role, and, and run their company. So that's a— it's like wins on so many different sides. It's amazing.

Yeah, um, exactly. And I think all of these, all of these companies, you know, hopefully a lot of companies listening, you know, You're right there. You know, you have the guy, the motivation is within them. I think it's really about putting them into a system that allows them to thrive, to operate efficiently, right? And, you know, it's one simple tweak in incentives, right? In their compensation, it's literally going from hourly to hourly plus bonus or to performance pay and showing them You're going to make more. Everyone's going to make more here. The customers are happier. They get the jobs done faster with less callbacks. You make more money. You go from $25 to $40 an hour and the company makes more money because we're doing more jobs. And guess what? These are happier customers now who write better reviews and that kind of compounds. It's like, it's such a win and it's, it's, it's insane. Not insane. It's, it's interesting how it's like, you know, it's just a minor tweak, right? Let's just, tweak the comp plan, the incentives of the technicians. I mean, look, there's a lot of stuff that I think we're doing that's magic behind the scenes with mapping the data, because look, you know, I could talk about that for days, but, you know, we present it in a way that makes it super easy and everyone understands it and digests it and is able to, um, visibly see how it works. And I think, you know, again, this is like, in my opinion, kind of what you said, this is a low-hanging fruit, you know, like Everyone wants this at the end of the day. Like, you should want to do it as the business owner. You shouldn't want to pay them hourly. Like, you should want to align their pay with the performance. The customers want it. You know, this feels like it should be table stakes. So again, this is like one of those low-hanging fruits to just pull the profit off the tree and get it into your business.

Yeah. I love that. Do you have any, or can you share a success story with us from a technician's point of view?

Yeah, I actually interviewed, I interviewed a technician named Max. He's a 19-year-old kid at a company called Clogbusters, and they're in Boise, Idaho. And Max, is making with incentives $186K annualized.

You're kidding. He's— he's how old now?

He's 19 years old. He's 19 years old. I interviewed him. He's on our Instagram and YouTube and again, a company called Clogbusters. I mean, he crushes it. This kid's like competitive. If you think about what's the greatest profile, right? He's like competitive. He looks like he was an athlete. It's like, I'm sure he's just like just being a dog in the best way possible, right? Like just work out, work, you know, he's a workhorse and I don't know how I know that we, we manage their incentive plans, right? So and they're moved, they're actually pure, pure performance pay. I actually just got a notification. They actually run their performance pay weekly. They just ran it actually right now. And actually, let me just pull it. So like Every week they're paying out, I'm looking right now, $26,295. So they pay $26K a week in incentives to how many techs? To 19 people. So call it $25K a week to 19 people weekly. And yeah, I mean, so his life has changed. And also, no, that's a great salary anywhere, but that's a great salary in Boise, Idaho, or in Idaho. Oh, you bet.

I'm in Idaho and nobody makes that kind of money around here.

Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, look, this is like an outlier. I'm not saying like everyone makes this. Probably the best people at a bunch of companies don't make this. I am not saying that. This is just one that stands out off the top of my head after talking to them. But like, that's so cool. And again, maybe that was like, yeah, you know, maybe he was just locked in for a little bit, but just the, just the fact that he had the ability to be in a role that gives him that upside is incredible.

Because how many 19-year-olds are presented with that opportunity? Very few.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's why I think that the trades in general are just like, you know, there's a massive upside right now. So yeah.

Wow. This is exciting. I love hearing your success stories and how we can, how we can change lives. And that's part of the main reason why I do what I do. I'm sure it's the main reason you do what you do, is we can change lives, not just the business owner's life, but we can change their employees' lives too. And I'm sure some of these owners are sharing some of that newfound profit with the rest of their team, not just their technicians, because the technicians can't do their job if your CRMs and your other people aren't there to support and help them along the way. So it allows every employee in that company to, to get to take part in this win that this company is having. So it's pretty cool, um, you know, information and pretty cool knowledge that pretty much any home service business can jump on into this type of a pay for their, their teams.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Wow, this is exciting stuff. But we are starting to run out of time in our interview, so I want to start pulling this in and wrapping this up. But before we start wrapping up, I'd like to, to ask you my all-important question that we ask every podcast guest, and that question is, what is a hidden or unique profit leak that you see when you work with home service business owners?

The first thing that comes to mind is, uh, billable efficiency. Um, and billable efficiency is if I have 100 hours, how many of those hours are actually working hours versus travel, meetings, uh, you know, drive time, things like that. Most companies, um, and by the way, they're paying for 100 hours. Most companies, about 60% of those are actually passed to the customer as billable hours. If you can move that up, and most of these hours, call it, if you can move it to 80%, your business will transform, absolutely transform, um, by having an 80% billable efficiency, right? I, I, and look at it, try to track it. It's really important. That's why getting the CRM set up correctly and tracking and getting the data because we'll build the incentives around it and we'll give you the insights. You got to have the data tracked correctly, but it's very important. And if you can get that number to 80% plus, you are going to be a very profitable home service company or service company in general. And that is the one area. And I think, you know, if you want to take an honest look, like really do a deep dive, I bet some people's like, it's like 40%.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure it is. Cause I see it all the time. Yeah.

There's just a lot of hours that are not working hours that are not being passed to the customer as billable hours. So billable efficiency, I think, um, you know, in my opinion, trumps close rate, average ticket, a lot of these other ones. It's like, you know, yeah.

Wow. Thank you for sharing that one with me. That one is a new leak that we've not had come on the program. So thank you.

Yeah, it's a big leak.

I love those. And that is like, that's one of those big Gusher type leaks. It's not a little small dribble, it's a big Gusher type leak. So yeah, thank you, Ryan. If people are interested in taking a look at your software or booking a demo or something like that, how can they get a hold of you?

Book, go to ShareWillow, sharewillow.com. And, uh, and check it out, book a demo. We also are launching, um, next week an overtime tool called OvertimeIQ that helps business owners accurately calculate the correct overtime rate in California and a lot of states. Firstly, you have to include bonuses and incentive pay in the rate calculation. The other thing is Some states like California, they have a daily overtime. So even if you haven't hit the 40 hours per week, but if you work over 8 hours in a day, you have to pay overtime on that 9th hour, right? So we actually are— we built a tool that helps any home service company fully integrated with ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro accurately calculate the correct overtime rates for technicians. And I think that's super important. And it's obviously tied in with ShareWillow because bring in your incentives as well. So check out overtimeiq.com and then share Willow for the incentive piece.

All right, thank you so much, Ryan. I really appreciate you taking time. I know you're a very busy guy and appreciate you taking time to come share with our listeners today.

Of course, thank you so much for having me.

You bet. And for our listeners that are, are still with us here as we uncovered this massive profit leak week, um, I'd like to give you our, um, just a free little gift from us. We have a report titled The 15 Most Common Profit Leaks in Your Business, and we'd love to give that to you. And go down and look at that list and look on there and go, how many of these profit leaks are sitting in my business? And then book a call with me. I'd love to have a conversation with you and see if we can't uncover some of those profit leaks and get them plugged for you, because that is the fastest way to growing your profitability, is plugging these profit leaks. So thank you again, listeners, for spending time with us today. Thank you, Ryan, for joining us and sharing this amazing program, and that you have in Sharewillow. I'm sure people are already hopping on your site right now, booking demo calls and things like that. So thank you.

Thank you so much. Have a great one and, uh, have a happy New Year.

You too. And listeners, thank you again for sharing part of your day with us. We know you're busy and we know that, um, it's important where you spend those extra hours where you're learning new information and growing your business. So with that, we're gonna wrap this one up and we will catch you on the next episode of the Profitable Home Services Podcast. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.