April 22, 2026
Here’s a test I give every business owner I work with. Before sending your tech out on their first call of the day, walk up to them and ask: if you sell a job today, what will you personally make?
If they reach for a spiff sheet, if they start muttering about percentages and thresholds and variables, if they say something like “it depends on a bunch of things” — your pay plan is not working. And I don’t mean it’s slightly ineffective. I mean it is actively failing your business every single day.
A great pay plan is one your technician can explain in one or two sentences. “I make 20 percent of my service tickets. A toilet install runs about $1,200, so I’d make $240.” Or: “I get $35 an hour plus $100 for selling a new unit.” That’s it. Simple. Clear. Immediate.
Anything more complicated than that isn’t driving performance. It’s creating confusion, killing motivation, and — worst of all — breeding distrust.
Think about what happens when a tech can’t calculate their own pay. They get in their truck and they’re not thinking about the customer or the sale or the job. They’re trying to reverse-engineer a spreadsheet in their head. That’s not performance. That’s friction.
And here’s the thing about distrust: once it sets in, it’s almost impossible to reverse. If your technicians feel like the pay plan is designed to be confusing on purpose — to give you wiggle room to avoid paying them what they earned — they will check out. Maybe not loudly. Maybe not immediately. But they will stop running hard toward your incentives because they don’t believe the incentives are real.
I made this mistake for years. I thought complexity meant sophistication. I had spiff sheets that were two pages long. I had bonus structures that required a manager to verify eligibility. I had plans that accounted for reviews, callbacks, revenue, gross margin, lead generation — all at once. I thought I was incentivizing everything. The truth is, when you try to incentivize everything, you incentivize nothing.
Owners build complicated plans for a simple reason: they want every behavior covered. They want techs to sell thermostats, generate leads, get five-star reviews, fill out paperwork correctly, keep callbacks low, AND hit revenue targets — all in one plan. I understand the impulse. Every one of those things matters to the business.
But your technician is a human being, not a software system. He cannot hold twelve variables in his head while he’s crawling in an attic at 2pm in August. He needs to know one or two things he’s being measured on, and he needs to know exactly what he’ll make when he does them.
If you want to know where to start, pick the one or two things that have the biggest impact on your business right now. Revenue? Gross margin? Average ticket? Start there. Make the plan around that. Make it so simple that a tired tech at 8pm on a Friday can tell his wife exactly why taking that emergency call is worth it.
Because if he can’t explain it to her, he’s not going to explain it to himself either. And you’re going to lose that call — and a hundred more like it — not because your people don’t care, but because you never gave them a clear enough reason to.