Flat rate keeps your best techs hustling and burns out the rest. Hourly leaves production on the table. Here's how Nolavi works through it, the same way a good mechanic works on a car: find the concern, the cause, the correction, then verify the fix.
Nate paid his techs flat rate. His fastest tech earned well and his newer techs felt behind before the week started. Slow weeks hit everyone hard, and morale slid.
Flat rate turns every tech into his own business inside yours. When work slows down, the newer techs earn almost nothing. The fastest tech competes with his coworkers instead of with the work itself. Turnover stays high and training new techs costs more than keeping the ones you have.
Nolavi runs a hybrid plan: each tech gets a meaningful base pay they can count on, plus production pay for billed hours above their base threshold. The base covers slow weeks and gives newer techs a runway. The production pay rewards output without turning the shop into every man for himself. Nolavi tracks billed hours for each tech, calculates production pay each week, and shows the total payroll against the shop's payroll goal before the owner approves.
After switching, Nate's turnover stopped. His newest tech stopped worrying about slow weeks and started staying later to finish jobs. Billed hours rose from 188 to 214 a week, payroll as a share of sales fell from 31.2% to 28.4%, and he kept every tech he started with.
How we work. We make changes like this for shops all the time, using each shop's own data. The numbers shown are examples.
Auto repair shop coaching from your own numbers. Nolavi sends a plain report every Monday with the moves worth making next. See how it works
A hybrid plan pays a guaranteed base wage plus production pay when a tech bills above a set number of hours. It rewards output and protects income in slow weeks.
It depends on your mix of techs and work. Hybrid tends to build a more stable team, especially when you're training newer technicians alongside experienced ones.
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