How To Pay Your Techs And Team Leads

The two questions that stood out most to me this time around involved compensation and retention.

Specifically, how do I pay my techs and retain team leads. The answer? Incentives play a big part in finding—and keeping—rockstar team members.

Key Takeaways

• Incentive compensation impacts business growth, motivation
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• Different pay models cater to different roles.
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• Compensation for installers is essential to avoid culture issues.
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• Leads need a coaching mindset and an eye on future leadership.

The Importance of Incentive Pay

Compensation is complicated, full stop. And that’s because there are a ton of ways to pay your people, attract new potential employees, and retain the great ones.

The only real way you can fail is by not having any incentive. It’s a bad move.

When we were a small, eight-person shop in 2016, introducing performance-based incentive pay was a game-changer. It shifted the focus from individual tasks to collective business growth.

Here's why incentive compensation matters:

• Motivation: Incentives drive employees to perform better, and achieve more.
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• Ownership: Team members feel more invested in the company's success.
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• Transparency: Discussions about revenue create a unified vision.

Remember our culture talk? It’s back, and reminding us all once again that business success means being in the trenches.

By adding incentive compensation it went from just “John Wilson wants to grow the business” and to “We all want to grow this thing and increase revenue.”

And that’s awesome.

What’s Your Pay Model?

At Wilson today, we have multiple pay models that fit the wide variety of workers under our roof. It may shock some people but there’s very few hourly employees.

For the majority, they’re looking at hourly pay plus a structure on base compensation. That structure changes depending on a few things, mainly tenure and commission.

It sounds simple, and it is: Sell more, make more. Easy. Right? Here’s the rundown of the models we mess with the most.

Hourly Plus Commission: A base hourly rate with a commission based on sales. The commission typically ranges from 3.5-7%, based on volume sold and tenure in the trade.

This approach makes sure that employees are rewarded for their contributions.

Straight Performance Pay: A percentage of the performance metrics achieved. We also integrate this into installation roles.

This can lead to higher earnings for installers and balance the pay structure across different roles.

On Installers and Pay

Installers introduce a bit of a monkey wrench into the equation. Our install guys fall into that straight performance pay realm and they love it. But it does bring up culture again. Do you run into the problem of install and salespeople feeling at odds because of those pay structures?

This is where measuring your revenue is important. Because of this, we’ve been adding some performance into install. So far it’s gone well.

Great installers are hard to find. If you want to keep them then you need to pay competitively.

And speaking of keeping people…

Leading the Team

Team leads are a big part of the success of Wilson. They are not only technical experts but also future leaders, in the ears of your workers every day.

Here’s what you’re looking for in a team lead:

• Coaching Mindset: The ability to mentor and train apprentices is big.
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• Experience: While experience ranges from 5 to 25 years, the willingness to coach is more important.
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• Technical Expertise: Team leads should be hands-on professionals with deep knowledge of their trade.

Our best team leads have become managers, and there’s a reason.

But how do you pay such important people? The answer is that it’s a mix of those previously mentioned pay structures, at least for us.

The compensation should reflect their big responsibilities and the role they take in developing future leaders. But, also: They are the bedrocks of day to day work.

Pay them well, keep them around, and they’ll make everyone around you better.

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