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Career Ladder
Hi, I run a medium size (24 staff) cleaning company. When we hire we have the growth mindset people - which I love BTW - and one of their first question is what does a career ladder look like? I am only hiring for cleaners as even if I would double in size which would take many years I do not need more office staff. For maintenance, cleaning supplies I would rather hire part time for now. So how do I have this conversation with these amazing candidates about maybe yes but not now or ever?
Should a Growing Business Hire Office Staff or a Field Tech First?
Hey everyone, Comfort Kings HVAC here, We opened our company this year in March and are rapidly approaching 500k in revenue. Me and my partner are running like crazy trying to keep up with demand and are curious when would be a good time to hire AND would it be wise to hire office first or field tech? We currently answer all the incoming calls on our cell phones while we are in the field working and do our best to get everything scheduled or just handled same day because tomorrow more calls will come. We would be able to do more in a day if we had another employee in the field. We would also be much more organized and structured without having invoices fall through the cracks with somebody in the office fielding the calls, making the schedule, and making sure we don't miss any billing opportunities. Anybody with experience in this wanna chime in and help us decide which way to go?Thinking about performance pay but don't know where to start?
I run into a lot of owners who want to set up performance pay and don't know where to start. My answer is always the same: figure out your labor cost first, then build everything down from that number. Labor cost is your tech wages divided by revenue. For HVAC and plumbing, around 20% is healthy, for landscaping and window washing, anywhere from 30-35% is healthy. Find the weekly revenue each tech needs to hit that number. Example tech at $35/hour: $35 x 40 hours = $1,400 weekly wage $1,400 / 0.20 = $7,000 weekly revenue target Under $7,000, he gets his hourly. Over $7,000, he earns a bonus on every extra dollar. Keep that bonus rate at 20% or less and the bonus never pushes your labor cost past 20%. His production goes up, he takes home more, and as long as your bonus rate is under 20%, his labor cost percentage goes down. Once you know your number, you can layer in tiers and spiffs without guessing. Do you know your labor cost percentage off the top of your head? And if you're already paying performance pay, what does your structure look like?Would your best technician actually want to be a manager? 🤔
Being great at the work doesn’t always mean someone wants to manage a crew. Some technicians want to keep growing in the field, while others enjoy helping people learn and making the tough calls that come with leading a team. 👍 What’s the first thing you’d consider before offering a technician a management role? Vote in the poll below. Have another factor you look for? Drop it in the comments! In this Masters of Home Service episode, Sadi Ingallina (Grow Your Tree Co.) and Rich Camacho (BlueRecruit) share the signs they look for in future managers, how they test leadership potential with small opportunities, and what helps them decide when someone is ready for more responsibility. 👉 Want to put their tips into action? Download our free team readiness checklist for this episode. Never miss an episode of Masters of Home Service. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How often are you actually measuring whether your employees still fit your core values?
One thing we’ve started doing is a quarterly core value analysis of our team. Not just, “Are they good at their job?” but: Are they actually demonstrating the behaviors we say matter here? I think this gets especially interesting with long-term employees. Someone can be productive, reliable, and technically great at their job while slowly becoming a poor culture fit. And sometimes we tolerate it because replacing a good producer feels harder than dealing with the cultural damage. The other side is hiring. We can interview for experience and skill all day long, but figuring out whether someone genuinely aligns with your values before they’re inside the company is much harder. So I’m curious how other owners handle this: Do you formally evaluate employees against your core values? If so, how often—and have you ever let a high performer go because they were consistently failing the culture side of the scorecard?Would you rather hire an experienced tech with a bad attitude or a beginner with a great attitude?
I’ve learned that experience doesn't always make someone a good employee. An experienced technician might be productive on day one, but if they're constantly complaining, ignoring procedures, or pushing back on feedback, that behavior can affect the entire team. A beginner with a great attitude will take more time and money to train. There will be mistakes, slower days, and plenty of questions along the way. Personally, I'd rather invest in someone who shows up consistently, takes ownership of their work, and genuinely wants to improve. In our business, getting someone ready to work routes independently takes roughly 2 weeks. I'd much rather spend that time training someone who's willing to learn than constantly deal with an experienced employee who makes everyone else's job harder. And sometimes a scooper from another company has already learned bad habits that's very difficult to break. Of course, a great attitude alone won't get the work done. They still need to demonstrate that they can meet our standards. Would you hire the experienced technician with a bad attitude or take a chance on someone with zero experience but a great work ethic?Strategies / Suggestions for hiring manual labourer for a niche Biz.
Fitness Equipment Service Technician - Rock & A Hard Place 26 yrs at this and I cannot find my A-Player. Sorry, this is quite the essay from the heart of frustration, so if you make it to the end and have some valuable suggestions I can implement, beers are on me at this conference. 🍻🍻🍻 It’s been beyond frustrating with people lying on resumes until you see they can’t do what they say. OR They can’t follow the simplest of instructions and policies like... If ever unsure about what you're doing or need help of any sort, contact me, I’m ALWAYS available. Then they decide to go Cowboy and try to figure it out themselves, which I certainly encourage as that's how I learn best. Trial and error where just getting your hands in there, coupled with some well-lubricated gray matter, and things start coming together and making sense. But not to the point of adding additional unnecessary "HRS" not MIN, to an invoice I can’t charge for, but they expect to be paid. In my instructions, I let them know, even when right beside them during training, if they get stumped on an issue and they ask for advice, I tell them to run through some process of elimination and try to figure it out themselves without me constantly telling them. I'll let them go for 10 to 15 minutes, and if the lightbulb isn't flickering, then I'll methodically walk them through what I would do. This way I'm not just jumping in and doing it for them, but they're actually learning hands-on. It's when they decide to go cowboy rogue and spend way too much time trying to figure it out instead of calling me, then they expect to be paid for these hours I can't bill back to the customer. How do I tell my customer that we're overcharging them because my guy doesn't know what he's doing and wants to learn on their equipment Then he'll make a note of whatever the issue is and what their diagnosis is, which can include needing to order parts. I'm thinking that they didn't have an issue with the diagnosis and it was a cut-and-dry scenario and, hands-down, this is what the customer needs. Then we'll order wrong parts... not only costing money—which will be either out of my pocket or the customer's pocket upfront if the quote is over $1,000—we have to wait usually about a week for parts to come in, set up another appointment, and head back out to the location to rectify the situation. - Part gets installed, doesn't fix the issue, and we're back to square one. Tech expects to be paid for travel & time for his mistake. So I put in the contract that I backpay my techs by two weeks with the clause that this will cover any potential damage to customer property due to their negligence. Residential customers get invoiced and are expected to pay more or less immediately, and commercial customers are net 30 for the most part in a perfect world. So it kind of evens out to cover their pay if something were to happen. So what do I tell my customers now? "Sorry, my guy effed up. Now I have to go out there and diagnose it properly, and if you're lucky—which happens more times than not—it's just a matter of some adjustments that need to be made, and no part was needed after all." But the other side of that coin is a part is actually needed, so we have to run through the process again and face another week's delay. Then I feel in good conscience that I need to discount my customer and hope this hiccup isn't enough to lose them and they're gracious enough to understand. OR Lack of communication in general. I can't stress enough and tell them it’ll make us or break us if honesty and just pure, actual communication isn’t kept up. I make it very clear that if they're not happy with how things are going, my door is open and I am more than happy to discuss what's going on so that we can make an adjustment that works for both of us. 'Cause if I don't know, I don't know. And that goes two ways. I let them know I'll do the same for them. So it boils down to the fact that if they can't do it right, I might as well do it myself? PSA - common sense is not so common. LOL I refuse to drop my standards as we do charge a premium, and I would consider us to be a "boutique" service company as we have—or I should say I have—an incredible track record and can probably still count on one hand how many callbacks I've ever had. Even though we are the highest-charging company locally, if not regionally, I make sure that I add enough value to the customer so that they know they got their money's worth and then some. So how do I justify that when I have subpar techs going out and serving these customers with guarantees that I've made that don't get fulfilled? I tried doing the employee thing once and that was an absolute nightmare, so I only look for contractors now. I'm willing to pay good money for somebody who can prove themselves to me. If they have the drive and are willing to learn and be moldable, then they can increase their pay in a short amount of time. !!!!! So you can only imagine, after 26 years of working on the tools and without seeing any hope of getting off the truck in the near future, my drive, my mental, and my physical well-being are being stressed to the max! I even had a scare of a panic attack, so I was told. That kind of shit just is not in my vocabulary or in my DNA, but I was getting signs that were pointing towards a heart attack that did put me in a hospital for a day, but I checked out just fine. SO... FWD to today, things have gone from bad to worse. Financially, I can't even hire anybody in order to pay them as I can't even bring in enough to cover our own payroll, yet the hours that I work, no sane human should have to be exposed to. No word of a lie, I'm on the tools all day, usually starting at about 9–10 AM. I get home around 7–10 PM, just in time to kiss my favorite wife, give my teenage son a hug as he goes to bed, and then I'm on the computer catching up on the office work from the day and days past until usually around 5 AM seems to be the new norm. Up at about 8 AM—rinse and repeat my Groundhog Days. My loans & CCs are all maxed out constantly, and I just have no idea what happened to this dream drive I had to be the best in the industry and to truly make a change and grow this company to the vision I once had. UGH. I probably shouldn't even be coming to this event, but IDK, maybe there's something here that's going to allow for some transformation and growth to finally happen. AND GO000!!! I am all ears and moldable to learning and implementing any kind of positive criticism. MUCH appreciated! 👊How are you handling attendance policies without burning out your leadership team?
We currently use a 9-point attendance system, don’t require doctor’s notes for normal call-outs, and we’re starting to feel like the policy is being gamed. The bigger issue is the operational fallout (constant call-outs mean constant schedule changes, client reshuffling, and leadership spending way too much mental energy on attendance). For those of you with field teams, what has actually worked? Points systems, stricter probationary periods, doctor’s notes, progressive discipline, attendance bonuses, something else? I’d especially love to know where you draw the line between being flexible and creating a culture where reliability actually matters.What's a job you'd hand off if you knew it'd be done right every time?
Whether it's estimates, scheduling, field work, or customer calls, there's usually one task that's really hard to let go of. What’s yours? And if you've successfully handed something off, what finally gave you enough confidence to do it? In this Masters of Home Service episode, Austin Rogers (arogersavai) and Sadi Ingallina (Grow Your Tree Co.) break down one of the toughest transitions for home service owners: stepping out of the field. They share lessons on hiring, training, creating SOPs, and building a business that doesn't depend on the owner being there every day. Never miss an episode of Masters of Home Service. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
