I hate commission pay!

I was thinking, for example, on a 2 man crew… paying one a commission (whoever the leader or stronger cleaner is) and the other an hourly wage.

That way, the stronger employee makes his money for being the stronger employee, yet also pushes the hourly guy to work faster , and vice versa.

I haven’t dealt with crews yet, but this was my idea for next year-ish :slight_smile:

If one man is on commission and one is hourly, they cannot work on the same job unless you pay by
by the window.

[SIZE=2]Hey Steve,<O:p</O:p[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Times New Roman][FONT=Verdana][SIZE=2]Great post. I agree it’s good to call the customers. If they’re happy it’s great PR. But I learned something valuable when I worked for a multi million dollar carpet cleaning company in the next town. They would call every customer the next day and they believed that unhappy customers would all complain. Sometimes they would complain but a lot of unhappy customers would never complain. I learned that they preferred to simply call someone else the next time. I bumped into a lot of their old customers who knew me when I worked for the first company. I always did a nice job for them so they liked me. They would tell me how unhappy they were with some of the other techs but they would not tell the companies customer service reps on the phone how unhappy they were. It’s kind of funny but that’s how a lot of people are. Complaining is unpleasant and for a lot of people something to be avoided. As you mentioned in your post, Steve, it is important to spot check the jobs as well. I have to agree with you, because if you really want to know what’s going on in the field you have to check the work yourself.[/SIZE][/FONT][/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Times New Roman]<O:p</O:p[/FONT][/SIZE]

Mike,
I totally agree. That is good advice. No one wants to be in position to become a nark. It can also make the customer feel like they are in the middle of something that they dont want to be a part of.

Chris,
From my experience with doing a commission guy and an hourly guy, it never has worked out for me not once. I tried it with new guys, college help you name it. The commission paid employee will usually slow down to the least experience level employees pace. I have seen this behavior over and over. Most commission guys will slow down so the hourly guy will get his hours in. If you take total commission of the job and the commission guy has to pay the hourly guy out of the gross from that commission, it just may work. I have never tried this because I dont want friction between a crew. Thats just me.

Steve

That’s right winderwasher, I would always say “You should have complained. They are always happy to come out and fix any problem.” Guess what the customer would almost always say. “I know, (pause) but I didn’t want to get the guy in trouble!” The guy who was almost always on commission was screwing them out of a quality job to make himself more money and they didn’t want to get him trouble. That’s funny.

Another angle would be to have someone else call to check on the jobs other than the owner. An office manager or your wife or something. A female voice may get a answer better than a male? It would be nice to have some sort of script that could be used to get positive or negative feedback without putting the customer in the limelight. That has got me thinking…

Steve

I may have already missed it, but speaking of structure, what percentages do you actually pay out in commission to one-man, two-man, three-man, etc. crews on residential jobs? on commercial jobs? Thanks for any input!

I pay 30% commission for a solo window cleaner and 40% split between a two man crew. I dont think that I could bring myself to offer 30% split between a two man crew.
Steve

I love commission pay. When I started as a worker bee I was getting hours which I didn’t mind, but some guys milked the clock a little. Heck I took a longer break then was needed sometimes but when we went commission everyone went into overdrive mode. Its like you take control of your paycheck a little and get rewarded for working harder.

We pay our people hourly. They are w-2d. We pay workmans comp and unemployment pool benefits as well. We just got our people Health Care this year as well. Blue Cross…Blue Shield. Its a challenge…

We are hourly now but will switch to commission in April for all the reasons in previous posts. I have 1 full timer now that will go thru the change. I am bringing 3 guys on in April and they will be hourly until (1-2weeks) they are up to speed. I am apprehensive about it but I think its just a mental hurdle that I am jumping.

We pay a total of %30 and absolutely no more than %35 for commission. This is for one, two or more techs on the job. As long as your jobs are bid high enough everyone is happy. I do try to get every customers email address at sign up. Every Monday I send an email out to the previous weeks clients and ask them if they were 100% satisfied with the service. We also have every client sign off a checklist after every cleaning saying everything was completed to satisfaction, all windows are shut and locked…etc. Then, we also send a letter one month after the cleaning thanking them and letting them know that they can go to our website and fill out a simple quality report. Most of this is to touch them several times so they don’t forget us in the future. Also, to display superior customer service. We tried the commission for one, hourly for another. It wasn’t horrible but I think it just works better if everyone is on commission because then they all have the same goal…finish fast and make more money.

Excellent, excellent advice with all the follow up. Thanks to everybody for putting in their two-cents worth. Cheers!

amen!

Do you guys pay commission for pressure washing as well? I am currently paying 30% commission for house washing / pressure washing but it seems the guys are making a heck of a lot more money with pressure washing. One guy can complete 80 - 100 dollars an hour of work which pays him 30 bucks an hour. Or, if you do pay commission for pressure washing, do you pay a lower commission? Any thoughts would be great. What do you do for this Chris?

how many total man hours does the job usually take?
how many man hours were spent that day?
divide that day’s man hours into the whole job hours to get a percentage
multiply the % by the total job $

ex:
$120,000 job takes 1200 total man hours

employee 1 spent 9 hours on it today
9/1200=.0075
.0075 * $120,000 = $900 in revenue generated for the day

I have seen others respond that this ended up being a constant push/pull between people on the same team being rewarded for different things. The supervisor being rewarded for efficiency and speed, the hourly’s for standing there breathing. In other words, the hourlys are not being rewarded for efficiency, speed, production, higher revenue in a day etc, so there was no motivation for them to produce.

Not talking about initial hourly pay training, but rather an experienced team.

seems like that company would have an anonymous feedback form, to gather the real story

many won’t complain in a scenario like that on the phone feeling they will be hounded by the person or pressured in some way and just “don’t want to deal with it”. Exactly, the job didn’t measure up or whatever, they chalk up the loss and will just call someone else, waaay easier for sure.

Hourly or commission, it’s the same, they are just both a means to an end. The end being, at then end of the month (or any period) those wages ideally would be no more than 30% of the revenue generated.