How a Leak Detection and Plumbing Company Traded Commission-Only Chaos for a Tiered Pay Plan

Commission-only pay sounds simple until you are the technician living on it. A leak detection and plumbing company in Southwest Florida ran its field technicians almost entirely on commission, no real floor underneath it, which meant a great week and a slow week could look wildly different in the same paycheck. For the business, the problem showed up differently: labor cost was running at roughly 27% of revenue against a 25% target, a gap that does not sound dramatic until you multiply it across a full year of payroll.

Underneath that labor cost number was a second, quieter problem. Cancellations were eating a meaningful chunk of the team's capacity, and there was no formal target for keeping them down. A technician who lost two jobs to same-day cancellations in a week was not just losing commission. The company was losing the labor hours that had already been scheduled for that slot, hours that could have gone to a job that actually happened.

When Commission-Only Pay Stops Being an Advantage

Commission-only structures get built for a good reason. They feel fair on paper: you eat what you kill, and a strong technician can out-earn almost anyone on a flat wage. The trouble is that fairness on paper does not always translate into a stable business underneath it. A commission-only technician has every incentive to chase revenue, but no built-in reason to think about the cancellation rate, the booking rate, or the labor cost percentage that leadership actually has to manage the company against.

That mismatch is common across plumbing and home service businesses that started small, where a simple commission split made total sense for two or three technicians and never got revisited as the team grew past ten. The plan that felt generous and simple at five people can quietly become the reason labor cost drifts two points above target once the business is running a real dispatch schedule with real cancellation risk baked into it.

Leadership did not want to strip technicians down to a flat hourly wage. That trades one problem for a worse one: a flat wage kills the upside that made strong technicians want to work there in the first place. The fix needed to keep real earning potential intact while finally giving the business some predictability underneath it, and while pointing technician behavior at the two metrics that were actually hurting the company: cancellations and inconsistent booking.

Three Tiers, One Underlying Logic

ShareWillow built the company three parallel technician pay tiers instead of one flat commission rate. A tech could sit on a $15 per hour base with a 12.5% commission rate, a $20 per hour base at 10%, or a $25 per hour base at 7.5%. Every tier lands in a similar place for a technician performing at a normal level. The difference is where the floor sits. A technician who wants more guaranteed income and is willing to trade a little commission upside for it can choose the higher base. A technician confident in their close rate can choose the lower base and the higher commission percentage.

That structure alone would have fixed the income-volatility problem. It would not have touched the cancellation rate or the inconsistent booking that were actually driving the labor cost gap. So the plan added a biweekly tiered sales bonus on top: 1% at $10,000 to $12,000 in a two-week window, 3% at $12,000 to $14,000, and 4% above $14,000. Alongside it came two new office-side KPIs: an inbound booking rate target of at least 80%, and a cancellation rate target under 5%, down from the roughly 10% the company had been running.

Sixty Jobs a Month, Recovered From the Schedule Itself

Cutting the cancellation rate from 10% to 5% does something specific and countable: it frees up field capacity that already exists on the schedule. The company modeled that closing that gap could recover roughly 60 jobs of capacity a month, jobs that were already being scheduled and then falling off the board before a technician ever rolled a truck. That is not new demand the company has to go find. It is demand the business was already generating and then losing to a soft spot in the process.

That distinction matters for how the whole plan was framed to the team. The cancellation-rate KPI was not presented as a compliance metric bolted onto pay for leadership's benefit. It was framed as capacity the technicians themselves were leaving on the table, jobs that would have paid out commission if they had stuck. Tying office KPIs to the same plan technicians care about is what makes a target like an 80% booking rate feel connected to the paycheck instead of like one more number from a dashboard nobody asked for.

The plan launched in mid-April, and the tiered technician structure has run every two weeks since without a gap. Across the first six confirmed payout cycles from late April through early July, the team's $20-per-hour tier alone paid out an average of roughly $22,700 every two weeks, consistently, cycle after cycle. That kind of steady, predictable payout is exactly what a commission-only structure could not reliably deliver, and it is happening at the same time the company is chasing down its cancellation and booking targets.

Why Three Tiers Beat One Compromise Rate

The easy version of this fix would have been picking one hourly base and one commission rate that split the difference between what senior technicians wanted and what newer technicians needed. That kind of compromise rate usually satisfies nobody. A senior technician with a strong close rate feels like they are subsidizing a rate built for someone earlier in their career. A newer technician feels exposed by a base that assumes a close rate they have not hit yet.

Letting technicians choose their own tier solved that without leadership having to negotiate three separate custom deals. Every technician on the team is working from the same three published options, not a private conversation with a manager. That is a meaningfully different experience from the commission-only structure it replaced, where pay felt personal and situational instead of systematic. A technician who wants to change tiers as their confidence or their personal financial situation changes can do that on a known schedule, not through a renegotiation.

It also gives the company a cleaner way to plan labor cost going forward. Three known tiers, each with a predictable hourly floor and commission rate, are far easier to model against a revenue target than a single blended commission rate applied unevenly across a team with very different close rates. Leadership can see, tier by tier, roughly what a given month of bookings will cost in technician pay, instead of finding out after the fact.

There is also a hiring benefit that only shows up once the tiers have been running for a while. A candidate interviewing for a technician role can be shown three real, published pay structures instead of a vague promise about commission potential. That kind of transparency is a small thing in a job interview, but it changes how a new hire feels about the offer. They are choosing a tier, not just accepting a number someone quoted them over the phone.

The Office Side of the Plan Matters Just as Much

It is tempting to treat a story like this as purely a field technician pay redesign, but the booking rate KPI points at a team that never touches a wrench: the customer service representatives handling inbound calls. An 80% booking rate target only means something if the people answering the phone are converting calls into scheduled jobs consistently, not just logging tickets and hoping a technician's schedule works out later.

Tying an office KPI to the same incentive system as field technician pay is a small structural choice with a bigger effect than it looks like. It means the CSR team and the technician team are, functionally, working off the same scoreboard. A CSR who books a job well is setting up a technician to hit their own numbers. A technician who shows up and closes efficiently is protecting the booking rate the CSR worked to create. Without that connection, it is easy for field pay and office performance to drift into two separate conversations that never actually reinforce each other.

For a facilities director or operations lead evaluating a vendor for something like this, that connection is worth asking about directly. A pay plan that only touches technicians in the field is solving half the problem if the actual bottleneck sits in how consistently the phone gets answered and jobs get booked in the first place.

What Steady Payouts Actually Signal

Six straight payout cycles without a gap is a small detail that is easy to skim past, but it is the clearest signal the plan is doing its job. A pay structure that technicians do not trust tends to show up as disputes, confusion about how a number was calculated, or managers quietly overriding the formula to smooth things over. None of that shows up in a plan running cleanly, cycle after cycle, on a published formula every technician can check for themselves.

That reliability compounds. A technician who trusts the math behind their pay stops spending mental energy wondering if they got shorted, and starts spending that energy on the two things the company actually needs from them: closing more jobs and showing up for the ones already on the schedule. Automated incentive tracking tied directly to the field service platform is what keeps that trust intact, since every technician can see the same job data the payout was calculated from, not a number that only a manager can explain.

What Other Commission-Only Teams Should Take From This

If your technicians are running on a single commission rate with no real floor, the risk is not that the plan is unfair. It is that the plan is not pointed at the specific things hurting your labor cost or your schedule. A commission-only structure rewards revenue generically. It does not know your cancellation rate is too high or your booking rate is too low unless someone builds that awareness directly into the pay plan.

The version of this story that plays out at a much larger, multi-trade scale looks a little different in shape but not in substance. This HVAC, plumbing, and electrical company's move from eighteen disconnected side deals to one unified incentive system tackles the same underlying issue, pay that does not point at what the business actually needs, from the angle of a much bigger, multi-department operation. Same fix, different scale: replace pay that rewards activity in general with pay that rewards the specific outcomes your business is short on.

Three tiers instead of one rate is not a complicated idea. What made it work here was pairing it with KPIs tied to the exact leaks in the business, cancellations and inconsistent booking, so the pay plan and the operational fix were the same project instead of two separate initiatives competing for attention. That is usually the difference between an incentive plan that changes behavior and one that just changes a number on a paycheck.