How a Pool and Construction Company Tied Pay to Revenue Per Hour

A $115 bonus does not tell a technician anything. It does not say whether the week was fast or slow, whether the job ran efficiently or dragged, or what to do differently to earn more next time. A pool service and construction company running about ten field technicians across multiple markets had been handing out awards like that for years: small, flat, and disconnected from the actual number that determined whether a job made money.

That number is revenue per hour. Every technician on a truck, whether they are cleaning pools, running repairs, or working a construction crew, generates a certain amount of billed revenue for every hour they are on the clock. A technician who closes $100 an hour is worth more to the business than one closing $60 an hour, even if both had a busy week. The old bonus structure did not know the difference. A $115 award could land on either technician, for reasons nobody could fully explain.

A Bonus That Could Not Explain Itself

The deeper problem was not just that the awards were small. It was that they were subjective, and subjectivity is corrosive in a pay plan. When a technician cannot reconstruct how their own bonus was calculated, two things happen. First, they stop trusting the number. Second, and more expensive for the business, they have no way to change their behavior to earn more, because the formula was never really a formula. It was closer to a judgment call, applied inconsistently across a growing team.

Underneath that visible problem sat a messier one: the data itself was not reliable enough to build a real formula on top of. Time tracking was split across two different systems that did not talk to each other, which meant hours worked and revenue generated were never cleanly matched to the same technician on the same day. On top of that, technicians were clocking into a generic SHOP time category for non-revenue work like loading trucks or picking up parts, and that non-revenue time was getting folded into the same hour totals used to judge productivity. A technician who spent two hours at the shop before a job looked less efficient than one who did not, even though neither had done anything wrong.

That combination, unreliable time data plus a subjective bonus on top of it, meant the business had no clean way to answer a basic question: is this technician's day actually profitable? Growing past ten field technicians without an answer to that question is a real risk. A company can absorb an occasional inefficient day when it is small enough to notice by feel. It cannot do that once there are multiple crews running in multiple markets at once.

Building a Formula Around Revenue Per Hour

ShareWillow rebuilt the pay structure around a single, calculable number: revenue per hour, or RPH. Every technician's RPH is their total billed revenue for a period divided by their actual hours worked, with non-revenue shop time pulled out of the denominator so it no longer drags the number down artificially. That single change, excluding shop time from the hours calculation, immediately made the metric fairer and more accurate for technicians who spend real time on prep and logistics.

On top of that clean RPH number, the plan introduced tiered commission thresholds. A technician hitting 70 RPH qualifies for a base commission rate. Cross 80 RPH and the rate steps up. Cross 90 RPH and it steps up again. The exact mechanics played out in the numbers the company reviewed while building the plan: a technician generating $11,581 in monthly revenue would take home $115 at a 1% commission rate, $173 at 1.5%, or $231 at 2%, depending on which RPH tier they landed in that period. Suddenly the exact dollar amount tied to a knowable, checkable number instead of a manager's sense of who had a good month.

The Same Old Bonus, Now With A Reason Behind It

Here is what makes this redesign worth paying attention to: the dollar amounts in the new plan were not dramatically different from the old flat awards in a lot of cases. A technician performing at a typical level might still land somewhere close to $115 in a given period. What changed was not necessarily the size of the check. What changed was whether the technician could explain it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A technician earning $115 because a manager decided the week looked good has no lever to pull. A technician earning $115 because they hit 70 RPH knows exactly what number to move to earn $173 instead. The pay did not have to jump for the plan to work. It had to become legible. Once a technician can calculate their own bonus from numbers they can see in their own job data, they start optimizing for it without anyone having to tell them to.

The company's baseline data showed most technicians clustered in the 55 to 98 RPH range, averaging somewhere around 65 to 66 RPH before the new plan launched. That baseline became the map for the whole rollout: leadership could see, technician by technician, who was sitting just below the 70 RPH line and within reach of a real commission bump, and who had real room to grow. None of that visibility existed under the old flat-award system, where a $115 bonus looked identical whether it went to a technician at 60 RPH or one at 95 RPH.

A Construction Bonus Built On The Same Logic

The pool service side of the business was not the only place doing skilled labor by the hour. The construction crews needed their own incentive, but a straight RPH commission does not translate cleanly to project-based construction work, where a single job can stretch across days and multiple people touch the same task. So the plan added a second, complementary mechanism: a construction bonus pool built around budgeted labor versus actual labor on each job.

When a construction job comes in under its budgeted labor hours, the savings get pooled and split among the technicians who worked that job, weighted by how much time each person actually spent on it. A crew member who worked the whole job start to finish gets a larger share of the pool than someone who covered a single afternoon. That structure rewards the same underlying behavior as the RPH commission on the service side: work efficiently, and the savings come back to the people who created them, in proportion to their actual contribution.

Running both mechanisms side by side, RPH tiers for service work and a labor-savings pool for construction work, meant the company did not have to force two very different kinds of field work into one formula that fit neither well. Each got a structure suited to how the work actually happens, while both pointed at the same underlying goal: protect labor cost by rewarding technicians for the efficiency that protects it.

The Real Target Was Never The Bonus Check

It would be easy to read this as a story about bonus math. It is really a story about labor cost. The company's real target was holding labor cost at 20% of revenue, with technicians earning a $20 an hour base rate. Hitting that target depends entirely on RPH, because the math only works if the average technician is generating enough revenue per hour worked to keep the labor percentage where it needs to be.

That is why 100 RPH became the number leadership was ultimately building toward, well above the current 65 to 66 RPH average. The tiered commission plan was not designed as a reward sitting off to the side of the business. It was designed as the mechanism that gets the business from its current average to the number that keeps the 20% labor cost target intact as the company keeps adding technicians and expanding into more markets.

What Cleaning Up The Data Actually Bought The Business

None of the tiered commission math would have held up if the underlying time data stayed split across two systems with shop time bleeding into productivity numbers. That is the part of this story that is easy to skip past: the pay plan redesign and the data cleanup were not two separate projects. They were the same project. A commission formula is only as trustworthy as the hours and revenue numbers feeding it, and a company running technicians across multiple markets cannot afford a formula technicians quietly suspect is wrong.

Consolidating time tracking and pulling non-revenue shop time out of the productivity calculation is unglamorous work. It does not show up in a headline the way a commission percentage does. But it is the reason the RPH number could be trusted enough to build a real incentive plan on top of it. Pool and spa companies running multiple crews across multiple markets tend to accumulate exactly this kind of quiet data fragmentation, a scheduling app here, a time clock there, a spreadsheet somebody built two years ago that nobody wants to touch. Each piece made sense on its own. Together they make it nearly impossible to answer a simple question about which technicians are actually profitable.

What A Business Owner Should Take From This

If your field technicians are earning bonuses that cannot be explained in one sentence, that is worth investigating before you add another crew or another market. A bonus a technician cannot reconstruct is a bonus that is not actually motivating anyone, no matter how well-intentioned the number behind it is. The fix is rarely to pay more. It is usually to make the existing pay legible: pick the one number that actually reflects productivity, in this case revenue per hour, get the data feeding that number clean, and build the commission structure directly on top of it.

That same logic applies whether the work is hourly service calls or project-based construction. The format of the incentive can differ, tiered commission for one, a shared labor-savings pool for the other, but the underlying discipline is identical: reward the behavior that protects the business's actual economics, and make sure every technician can see exactly how.

The story of the plumbing and leak-detection company that replaced a single commission-only rate with three published pay tiers runs on a related idea from a different angle: give technicians a formula they can check for themselves, and the trust that formula builds tends to change behavior faster than the size of the check does. A flat $115 award and a calculated 70 RPH commission tier can pay out the same dollar amount. Only one of them gives a technician a reason to come back next week and try to earn more.