We Analyzed 500+ Contractors. Here's What the Most Profitable Companies Do Differently.

November 20th, 2012, $332. This was my first commission paycheck. This is the first time that I took a bet on myself and I moved from hourly pay to incentive pay. And then if you look at the next checks here, 6 months later, $2,677. I was able to actually control my own destiny. And then a third paycheck with the memo, Bahamas trip. And it's not just Bahamas trip, it was because I controlled my own destiny and I was able to lock in and I was able to reignite something inside of me that I know is inside of all of your technicians. So incentives completely changed my life, and this is why I'm on this path to helping millions of other companies create incentives for their technicians. And it wasn't just me. I actually flew to Italy to a wedding in 2023, and I sat at the same table as this guy Chuck Kuhn. He owns a moving company. It's actually the largest moving company in the United States. And I was asking him, I was kept asking him all these different questions. How'd you do it? How'd you build this big business? He started in his garage and he told me he was He's like, look, what I do is I take care of my people. And I'm like, everyone says that they take care of their people. He's like, we do profit sharing. We have all these incentives. He's like, I present a big check every single year to my movers. And then I saw on LinkedIn a little bit later that he posted the check with his movers. This is $1.8 million split amongst a bunch of different movers in his company. And I was like, that's so interesting, you know? So it's like, if he has built the biggest moving company in the United States using profit sharing and incentives, if I've felt this inside of me and it unlocks something inside of me, because I'd always been hourly before that. Okay, I'd always been hourly. You show up, you do the work, you get paid the same regardless of the outcome. But when I was able to actually feel that I was incentivized and I was able to lock in and I was able to achieve extraordinary things, um, and there's tons of other businesses that are feeling this way as well. So after I met up with him and I learned this, I was like, I'm gonna go all in and I'm gonna build a platform to create incentive pay for technicians regardless of the business. So most of our customers are in home services. I know that there's a lot of repair companies here, repair shops, but potentially you're getting into home services as well. But it's working super, super well in home services. And I want to tell you a little bit about why it's really working well. First of all, in home services, I don't know if you guys have been following, but there's a ton of, you know, PE activity right now, right? People are buying and selling home service companies, but there's also a shortage of technicians in home services. And then there's the bigger thing that's happening is, hey, my guys don't really care about the job. They only care about the hourly pay. When there's hourly pay, you're incentivized to just log more hours, which is actually misaligned with the business goals where you want them to do the jobs faster, sell a membership, you want them to potentially do an upsell, have a tech-generated leads. There's all these things that you want them to do as a business owner that is misaligned when you're paying them hourly. What we did is we created Sharewillow to have every single business unlock what is inside of every single technician, the same motivation that was unlocked inside of me when I was able to get that first commission check for $332. So I talk to shop owners every single day. We have hundreds of customers. I've been doing it for 3 years. I spent the last 15 years, by the way, selling to companies in the trades. Okay, my first company, M Help Desk, got acquired by HomeAdvisor back in 2014, really long time ago. And then I started a call tracking software company called PhoneWagon that got acquired by CallRail in 2021. So I've been talking with business owners every single day for the last 15 years, and one of the things that we keep hearing is leads aren't the problem. I can't find great people. How do I find great people to actually do the work, right? It's not necessarily a leads problem. So here's like a few things, right? Callbacks are killing my business. My guy went in, he Fix the issue. And then we get a call 3 days later that, hey, it still doesn't work. Or, hey, my bonuses— no one cares about the bonuses because the bonuses, you know, there's no transparency. They're not tied to actual performance metrics. The techs just don't care. It's like they just show up. By the way, has anyone heard of Tommy Mello? He's a big garage door company. All right. So basically he has this huge garage door company, 800 employees. Every single one of his employees are on purely performance pay. There's not even an hourly tied to it. And I actually stopped one of them in a parking lot one time and I did like a little street interview because I like making content and also learn this morning, and he was saying that, hey, he used to work at a garage door company that, you know, was pure hourly. He didn't care about the jobs. He would just go in, he would bang out the tickets, he would do the job, he would just leave. Now that he's on performance pay, he's like, I care. And he's like, me and my coworkers, we chirp each other, we look at every single little metric, we look at the scoreboard, and his performance is off the charts. He's like, I'm making more money than ever, and I'm actually invested in my day-to-day work that I do every single day. I'm not just going in, doing the job, and leaving. And look, at the end of the day, the best people are leaving for a bigger upside. And this is one That we hear every single day as well. And I'll talk about it in a second. But I did a webinar recently with a guy who has a plumbing company and he said he got one technician in his town that came to him just because he had incentive pay and performance pay. The technician was tired of just getting paid hourly at like the competing shop down the street. And it was— I had no idea that that happened. So when he said that, especially on the webinar, I was like, that's a great insight. And look, here's just some conversations. I was talking to a remediation company. 4 techs over the summer left. To do gig work. They were like left to do like Uber and like just other random gig work. They didn't want the ceiling. They wanted an upside. And then a plumbing company right here. So like one of their techs was doing $300K in revenue per quarter. That's over $1 million a year. You always hear about like the million-dollar tech and then the rest of the company was barely clearing $60K a quarter. So it's like you have this huge gap between techs and I'm sure everyone here can relate to that. And if you're able to move those bottom techs up to performing at what the top techs look like, your business actually transforms. So 3 years ago today, incentive incentive pay, performance pay was a competitive advantage. It's like if we have that, we're going to be able to pull the best people and we're going to be able to, you know, have more revenue because we're going to extract a higher average ticket size. We're going to be able to get more reviews. It was a competitive advantage.

Okay.

Today it is table stakes. These guys want performance pay. They want incentive pay. They want the upside. And there's a few different ways to structure it. It doesn't have to be pure performance pay. It can be hourly plus, but it has to be tied to day-to-day performance metrics that you care about as a business because you want to align their incentives your incentives as a business owner and ultimately give the customer a better experience. So Hourly puts you and your team literally on opposite sides of the table, right? Imagine you tell a customer, hey, we're going to be there, we're going to fix your thing. And then the guy gets paid to stay there more time. Like if he stays there longer, he gets paid more. But like, you don't get paid more if he stays there longer. A lot of times you're pricing, you know, whatever these repairs are, not by just how long the tech takes, right? It's usually like a flat rate pricing based on category or whatever it is. So if your techs get paid based on logging more hours and you get paid on finishing jobs efficiently, you're completely misaligned, right? So how do we bridge that gap? And then the other thing, by the way, is there's a ceiling on it. So there's a ceiling, they're capped. These, these techs are capped. There's no path up. And that's why we're seeing a lot of them leave traditional shops that, you know, have just the hourly rate. And they all kind of talk, right? They sort of know, hey, this one pays this, this one pays that. And they're going to a place that they get that upside. And that's what we're seeing every single day. You know, one of the ways that we're creating these incentive plans is we're really back solving for a labor rate, right? Most of you guys probably are like, hey, I want to pay 20% of the revenue of the job in total labor, right? So we're back solving that, we're paying it out. But if the job takes 5 times as long or you have to go back to the job, it could completely kill all the profits of the job versus if you do it or someone, your top tech does it, finishes it in 2 hours, it's the best service, you get a 5-star review, person refers you to their neighbor and every single person that they've ever met, right? That is like incredibly profitable of the job. So one of the things too, and by the way, And this is, you know, one of the common sort of, I guess, pushbacks that we always get is like, I just don't want my techs selling customers things that they don't need. Right? So you put guardrails on it, put guardrails on it based on, you know, customer satisfaction, callback, all of these different things. And you make sure that it's not just commission. You're not just, hey, I just want my techs selling a bunch of shit that the customer doesn't need. Right? Like that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to completely align incentives, get the customer the best experience and get your techs paid more than they're making now because they're doing a better job. It's more aligned with things that you care about.

So what do you care about?

What matters? How do I build these plans? This sounds crazy, right? So you guys are all probably using some type of software, whether it's Repair Shopper or, you know, one of these different platforms, right? And you probably are tracking a lot of this information or even in their time cards, right? So you don't want a list of 100 different things. When you have 100 different KPIs, you might as well be tracking zero KPIs because it doesn't matter, right? So what we do and what we found is you pick the top 3 things that matter to your business that are going to move the needle. There's going to be certain metrics that actually move the needle.

So pick those 3.

Train on those 3, focus on those 3, and those 3 are going to be what takes you from where you're currently at. And it's going to help grow your business with no more leads, no more employees, no more customers.

Okay.

They're going to be able to extract more revenue, happier customers, more referrals from what you currently have. Guarantee it. We see it every single day. And then the first thing, by the way, so it's like, this is kind of scary, right? So as you're like, I can't change their pay. This is how they get paid. Like, I can't mess up people's pay. So one of the things that we do is we do a shadow payroll that is like such a foolproof way to roll this out, to show them what they would have gotten. So basically show them the plan, show them, hey, this is the plan that we're going to introduce. We're going to let it go over here. It's going to be in parallel to what you're currently making. Right. But these are the metrics that you're going to get paid on. Show them what they would have made with incentive pay before you roll it out. They're going to be able to see, oh my God, wow. Or they're going to be able to see, hey, John made that.

Wow.

How did John get an extra $1,200 this paycheck? Well, it's like, well, John, you know, was able to like— didn't take 5 hours. He took 2.5 hours. He also was able to identify another area that, you know, he was able to do an estimate for a customer on, you know, this right here and was able to make a sale. So shout Shadow payroll, prove the upside before you switch the payroll. And then this is gonna get buy-in. It's gonna show them what it actually looks like. And one of the other things, by the way, that we found is super, super important is you have to have transparency. You have to have transparency and real-time data and visibility into that data. So one of the things that, you know, we're doing at, at Sharewillow and what we recommend every single person do is, you know, you basically have to integrate with whatever you're using. All of your data has to be clean. It has to be trustworthy. You have to have a source of truth for the actual data and then give the techs the transparency seeing the visibility. So we give every single person a mobile app and they're gonna be able to see where they stand, how much money they're making based on their current jobs. When I first started Share Willow, by the way, I wasn't focused on the actual technician. I totally screwed up. I was focused just on the business owner. I was like, I'm gonna give you this software to manage incentives, it's going to be awesome. But what we found is that you get the behavior change from the technicians, from the actual people doing the work, and that's where you need the buy-in and that's where you need the visibility, the transparency. They need the app. I totally screwed up and I didn't have that at first, and it like wasn't working. And I was like, why isn't this working? It feels like it should work in theory. And then everything changed when we launched, you know, and when we changed our focus to focusing on the actual technicians and giving them transparency and visibility. Because what was also happening is if you think about it before, you know, you're kind of just worried about your hours. Like, oh, I need like 50 hours this week. I need like 48 hours this week. What are my hours? What are my hours? Whereas if you change it and it's based on incentives, they have to know when they're getting stuff. If they don't know, did that customer close? Was there a callback? If they don't know, it's just this surprise that hits. It's like, that doesn't actually impact behavior because they're— it's too late. It's too detached from the actual, from the actual behavior that happens. So real-time data, real-time behavior change is something that has to happen. So when I'm preaching this, and regardless of Sharewillow, or we just think that incentive pay aligns everyone perfectly, and you have to have the real-time data to have the actual behavior change and a live leaderboard. So when I talked to that technician that worked at A1 Garage Door for Tommy Mello's garage door company, he told me, he was like, honestly, just the leaderboard was probably enough to change their behavior because they're competing with each other. Imagine playing sports and not keeping score. So like the, the leaderboard of, hey, you know, how long is it, how many installs do you have, how many repairs do you have, how many closeouts do you have. Like people are competitive. There's always like fitness tracker apps and there's leaderboards and scoreboards. So I think like just that piece of it could influence behavior. You start to layer in the incentives and the money piece and all of that, and that's where you get real actual behavior change at the technician level. So I'm going to tell just a couple stories. These are real customer stories that we're hearing. Um, again, a lot of these are home services, it applies to just technicians across the board because we're seeing it absolutely across the board. So this guy, Ron Williams, he's from Ocean City, Maryland. He owns two franchises, a Benjamin Franklin Plumbing franchise and a One Hour Heating and Air franchise. So a plumbing and HVAC franchise does about $3 to $4 million top line revenue. He was saying his technicians, his plumbing techs, their average ticket was $800 forever. He had been doing this for multiple years. When he switched to incentive pay, it immediately went to $1,500 to $2,000. Like it immediately doubled, right? They were going into the home and they weren't just upselling, but they were looking at other areas that they could offer their services. And the homeowners wanted this, right? A lot of times your customers will have other things. If you guys are fixing something, other things are also broken. I'm like, yeah, my freaking blender doesn't work, whatever it is, right? So it's like you can offer, hey, I'm your guy. Because once you find your guy, you're happy, you trust that person, right? A lot of times if I trust my person, I'm like, can you also do my like roof? And they're like, no, no, that's way out of scope, right? But, but they trust you now. So that he was able to double his average ticket just when he switched to incentive pay, which is crazy to I had no idea that that was happening. And then his plumbers, like his technicians, went from making $25, $28 an hour to $50 an hour. Like, because a lot of their upside is based on that average ticket going up. And then the other thing is he has a deduction for callback. 8% of his jobs were requiring callbacks, which is super high. It should be like 1 to 2%. So like his callbacks suddenly reduced because there was no, there was no deduction. There was no like incentive or misincentive. Incentives— disincentive for a callback happening. And now that there was— so now that there's the focus on it, right? There's the focus on it, there's a leaderboard, and there's the accountability. All of those things combined, his business is thriving. They're doing like $6-7 million now in top line, and his plumbers or his technicians are making double what they were making. So Ron is awesome, and I'm super happy about him. Blackhawk HVAC Company, they've been around for 25 years. They're doing like $22 million— they're pretty big. They're doing like $22 million in top line revenue, but they increased their average ticket across 56 techs. So it's not just this one-off, right? And they had been around forever. So their numbers were pretty locked in, you know, like they, they, there wasn't some crazy variance because it's a new company or a small company. 10% increase in average ticket size across 56 technicians. And then their callbacks also reduced. Their business added an extra couple million dollars. Again, just from switching to incentive pay from pure hourly. And they didn't even go to pure performance pay. They went from from hourly to hourly plus, but it's calculated every single pay period. It's not this one-off bonus that gets calculated and paid quarterly, or this Christmas bonus that gets paid, you know, if the owner feels good. It's calculated as part of pay every single time. So Ron, then Blackhawk, and then this guy Max. I was actually at a conference and talking to Max. He's 19 years old. He's a technician for Clogbusters. This kid's the man. Some of his paychecks annualized to $176,000 a year. He's 19 years old, didn't go to college. He works at Clogbusters. It's like a drain cleaning company out of, out of Idaho, which which is awesome. So anyway, $180K a year, he works 40 to 45 hours, but this guy, he's crushing it and he's a competitor. And that's the thing. A lot of your techs, I bet, you know, this kid, he has the cauliflower ear. Like he was a wrestler. Like he's a competitor, right? And he wants to win. So, you know, when he's out there and he's now able to compete and he's able to win, he's able to do the jobs faster, do the jobs better, you know, kind of beat his— and it's not like he beats his peers. Like they win, he loses. You're on separate jobs, right? It's not like no one's losing at the end of the day. The customers are getting a better experience. The business is winning and this kid fires me up. So I was like, super happy about that. But he's been there for like over a year now and he's just crushing. And he's also now telling all of his friends in their South Idaho town and he's like bringing in people, right? He's like saying, hey guys, this is what I'm doing. And like, people are like, oh my God, I want to do that, right? So he's now recruiting for the company as well. Every single company, every single shop we work with that rolls this out, that actually creates the incentive plan, that gives the guys the mobile app, that like really understands what drives behavior, every single person across the board is seeing these results. No one— it's not, not working for anyone, which is insane. So it's the same playbook, different levers. You have to just decide what makes the most sense for your business is essentially how we're actually like building these plans. Shadow payroll, text to ask to switch. So this is 6 things. Okay. I told you that we only do 3 KPIs that we want to actually focus on. So I'm not going to expect you to have 6.

Okay.

If anything, the only thing that I would want you to leave with is to just do a shadow payroll. You don't even have to communicate it to them. Create some incentives on the side, see what it would potentially look like. Just remember shadow payroll, run it in parallel. Parallel. See if it makes sense. Maybe tell a couple of your top guys, right, that, hey, this is, you know, what we're seeing happening in, in the market, in the world. You know, we're gonna just see what it looks like, right? You don't even have to make the decision now. Just run it, and I guarantee you that will at least open your eyes to potentially doing it. Okay, so that's what I want you to walk out of this room with. And then the other thing too is Charlie Munger has this quote: show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. Your techs are already telling you exactly what you're paying them to do, paying them to log hours. The question is not whether you— that's what want them to do. It's what you want your business to do and how you're going to grow your business using incentives. I want to open it up with Q&A, but I also have a QR code right here. We'd love to chat with you one-on-one. We'll do an audit, we'll look at your business. Scan the QR code, drop a time in there, and we should chat. But before that, who's doing incentives right now? Exactly. Okay, no one's doing incentives. It's not live.

Okay, cool.

Any other questions right now? I know we have a, a light— a lighter crowd today than normal.

Yeah, get our real-time data from our point of mail into APIs.

APIs are like some recurring report export. What are you guys using for My Repair App? Yeah, so most of these, I'd have to look at it, but most of the software we're able to like API in and we kind of like just feed the data in there. We, we like normalize it and do all that. But yeah, a lot of times, um, we just API in. That's awesome.

Yeah, they're, they're, they're still like kind of developing the software as you go.

Yeah, because they do have some commission. It is good. Yeah, they have some commission things built in. Cool. Quite the same to this extent. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, some of that.

Awesome.

I was told they don't have an API, but that was like a year ago.

They do have an API, it's still in progress, but like some data that's accessible through the API.

Yeah, but they would be good to talk to because—

yeah, yeah.

This, this is pretty awesome, honestly.

Thank you so much.

What are some of the popular KPIs that people do choose? They're choosing their 3.

Yeah, so revenue can be sold by revenue or completed by revenue, or they could do both if they're selling and completing techs. A lot of times we'll see different callbacks is a big one. And then like reviews, honestly, are like number 3 KPI is did you get an actual review on the job? So you want to combine some type of like revenue base with customer satisfaction. So like callbacks is such a good one because you don't want them to just speed through the job and then you also don't want them to sell customers things they don't need and the customers feel like icky afterwards. So you have to balance those and that's kind of like, hey, how do we put guardrails around this so it doesn't just feel like commission? And then the other thing too, by the way, just to like counter the commission, if you do it based on average ticket, it doesn't feel as like, hey, I get 5% of everything. It's like kind of averages across all of your jobs and you can even do average ticket by job type as well. So that's another thing that we found kind of deters people from just selling or even the concept of like selling things that the customers don't need. Yeah.

So what do you think are the pros and cons of going to entirely performance pay versus hourly plus?

So the pro— okay, so 50% of our customers are pure performance pay, which I did not expect to happen. I didn't even build it to be that. We had always built it around hourly plus and kind of this scorecard approach. Approach of like, hey, you can kind of like get incentives for these scorecards. 50% of our customers are doing pure performance pay. I think it allows you to completely control your labor rate. So you'll know like my all-in labor is never going to be more than like 20% because you're purely paying the labor as the performance pay. So that's like the best like knob there. Whereas sometimes, you know, if you have this hourly component plus this on top, it can kind of balloon to like 40%, you know, whatever it is. So that's the pro. Con is if the work's not there, then like then the work's not there for them. So we see some people even do like this. They do have— It's pure performance pay, like, on the surface, but they actually have this hourly, and then they do a top-up to the performance pay. So it's like the greater of, if that makes sense. So that way they get like kind of paid for shop time and drive time, and it's like it's topped up to the performance pay. So there is kind of this lore there as well.

The repair industry is kind of seasonal, so yeah, that's, that's almost, almost a variation of hourly plus.

I mean, because they're at least guaranteed.

Exactly. Yeah. And we see that also in like states that have a lot of like these like overtime and compliance things as well. They'll like technically do the hourly top-up. Like California, for instance, has like crazy overtime laws and things like that. So yeah, the top-up is something that we see a lot. Scan the QR code, book the demo, and I appreciate you guys being here. Thank you so much. I'm Ryan Shank with Sharebillo. Thank you.