We Believe Performance Pay Can Turn Jobs Into Careers

I spent eight years in sales before joining Housecall Pro. In my year and a half there, I worked with home service operators across the trades and fell in love with the space. I met some of the best entrepreneurs I’ve come across, running great businesses and wanting to take the best possible care of their crews. The revenue is usually there and the will is there; putting it together is the hard part.

After Housecall Pro, I joined a company building performance pay software. What I kept seeing in shops was a bad split. Companies would run commission-only setups that end up pushing volume at the expense of the brand and the customer because it’s the path of least resistance. Meanwhile, flat hourly pay gave nobody a clear reason to perform. Small operators stuck between those two have almost no lever when costs rise and good people have somewhere else to go.

Private equity has been rolling up home service businesses, and the playbook often leans on commission-only pay. That can work at PE scale because they have the systems to run it. But the setup hurts everyone it touches: the owner has their brand tied to aggressive sales; technicians only make money when they sell, so there’s no safety net and every month resets what they’ve earned; and consumers get pushed toward services they don’t necessarily need.

Independent operators run without PE’s scale or back office. When pay stays rigid while costs climb, they lose people to shops that can pay better. Small shops already compete on service. What they still need is a pay system that flexes with the business the way a better-capitalized competitor’s does.

A lot of home services software money still goes toward cutting admin cost: faster payroll, cleaner job costing, fewer spreadsheet hours. However, more than anything, great technicians are the hardest to find and even harder to keep. They need a reason to stay and a path to earning more as the shop grows.

TeamBuyIn is what Noah and I started building in August 2025 for that gap. We build for small home service operators so they can run performance pay with the same operating clarity bigger groups get, without PE overhead. Done right, performance pay grows technician earnings alongside revenue, on top of the FSM you already use, with job-level rules techs can see.