How do you get out of the truck as a trades business owner?

You get out of the truck when the business no longer needs you in it to make money. That happens when your pricing is built on your true hourly cost, your jobs are quoted from flat-rate packages that already protect your margin, and your pay system rewards techs for production so they run their own hours. Once any tech can quote a profitable job without calling you, you stop being the bottleneck.

How should you pay irrigation or service techs?

Pay a base wage plus a cut of what the tech produces above their cost. That structure gets strong techs to higher total income with benefits, reduces turnover, and makes them police their own hours because the upside is theirs. Paying hourly alone gives no incentive to produce; paying pure commission removes the security a career needs. Base plus production-share balances both.

How I Got Out of the Truck — and Built a Business Worth Selling

Q: What is the difference between offering a job and offering a career in the trades?

A job is an hourly wage and a schedule. A career is a real income, full benefits, a clear path to earn more, and an owner with the time to coach. Techs rarely leave a career. Building one is what turns a shop from a revolving door into the place the best techs want to work, and it is made possible by getting the cost, pricing, and pay numbers right first.

18 years in residential irrigation. I built my company from one truck, got it running without me, and sold it last year. I want to give back the stuff I wish someone had told me at year three instead of year thirteen.

Here are the lessons that actually moved the needle, in order of how much they mattered.

I didn't know my real cost to put a tech on the road for one hour. Not his wage — the loaded number with taxes, the van, fuel, insurance, overhead, and profit. For years I priced off "what the other guy charges." That number is a guess, and it almost sank me.

Once I knew my cost, I built flat-rate packages off it. That's what got me out of the truck — any tech could quote a job at a price that already protected my margin, without calling me.

I paid my techs a base PLUS a cut of what they produced over their cost. They got to $80–100K with benefits, they stopped leaving, and they started policing their own hours because the upside was theirs.

The part nobody talks about

Getting the numbers right wasn't really about the money. It was about TIME. When my pricing was dialed and my pay system ran itself, I stopped spending every day fighting fires, chasing quotes, and refereeing payroll. That freed me up to actually do the thing I got into business for — lead my guys.

I could finally sit down with a tech and talk about where HE wanted to go. I could coach instead of bark. I could build a guy up instead of just dispatching him. The math is what bought me the room to put my people first — and when your techs feel like the priority instead of a cost line, everything changes. They take ownership. They think critically. They stop watching the clock because they actually care.

A job vs. a career

That's the difference between offering a job and offering a career. A job is "here's your hourly, see you Monday." A career is "here's a real income, full benefits, a clear way to earn more, and a boss who's got time to invest in you." Guys don't leave that. You stop being a revolving door and start being the shop the good techs WANT to work for.

It all traces back to the boring stuff — know your cost, price off it, pay people from it. Nail that, and you earn the time and the margin to actually take care of your crew. That's the whole game.

What contractors said when I first shared this

Best post I've seen on here in a long time. Good on you Robert Kemp.

— Kenny L., irrigation contractor

This is how you win. Best advice I've seen in this group and the only way I would ever run it.

— Tim H., irrigation contractor

I've got half of this dialed in. Flat rate pricing but not the pay-for-performance part. I need that final push to get the business model in tune.

— Tanner M., irrigation contractor

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Start with your cost

The whole thing starts with one number most owners have never run: what an hour of a tech's labor actually costs you. Get that, and the packages and the pay plan build themselves.

Find Your Burden Rate →

Go deeper: find your burden rate · pay techs commission