Why We Switched to Pay for Performance (And Never Looked Back)

If you're still paying your crews hourly, you're paying for time, not results.

That might sound obvious, but I promise you it's costing you money every single day. When I built Augusta Lawn Care past 200 locations and $60M in revenue, one of the biggest operational shifts we made was moving to a Pay for Performance (P4P) model. It wasn't easy. It wasn't smooth at first. But after the dust settled, we never looked back.

Why Hourly Pay Is Broken for Field Operations

Think about what hourly pay actually incentivizes.

Your crew lead makes $22 an hour. If they finish a job in 45 minutes, they make $16.50. If they take 90 minutes, they make $33. The slower they go, the more they make.

That's not a character flaw. That's math.

Now flip it. Under P4P, your crew gets paid a percentage of the job value—say, 35% of revenue. A $200 mowing job pays them $70 regardless of how long it takes. If they finish in 45 minutes instead of 90, they've effectively doubled their hourly rate. And they can take on another job.

Now they have a reason to hustle.

The Initial Friction Is Real

I'm not going to sugarcoat this. When you switch from hourly to P4P, there's friction.

Some employees will resist it. Some will quit. The ones who were milking the clock will be the most upset, because the system that was working in their favor is being replaced.

I coached a $3M company through this transition. The first two weeks were rough. Three crew members quit. The owner called me twice thinking he'd made a mistake.

By week six, production was up 22%. By month three, the remaining crews were making more money than they had on hourly—because they were doing more jobs per day.

The people who stayed were the ones who wanted to earn based on output. Those are the people you want anyway.

How P4P Works for Different Job Types

P4P isn't one-size-fits-all. Here's how I think about it:

Recurring maintenance (mowing, fertilization): Pure production pay. Set a budgeted time for each property. Pay a percentage of the job value. Simple.

Larger projects (cleanups, installs, mulch): Use budgeted hours. Estimate how many hours the job should take. If the crew finishes in fewer hours, they keep the savings as a bonus.

Hourly work (when truly necessary): Some jobs—like troubleshooting irrigation or unusual repairs—genuinely require hourly billing. That's fine. But these should be the exception, not the rule.

P4Psoftware.com: The Tool That Makes It Work

Managing P4P manually is a nightmare. Tracking budgeted hours, calculating production pay, running reports—it's a full-time job if you're doing it in spreadsheets.

P4Psoftware.com was built specifically to solve this problem. It integrates with your job management software and automatically calculates crew pay based on production. Your crew leads can see their earnings in real-time. You can see production rates by crew, by job type, and by location.

When people can see their own numbers, they manage themselves.

The Bigger Picture

P4P isn't just a compensation strategy. It's a culture shift.

When you pay for performance, you're telling your team: I trust you to manage your own time. I'm paying you for what you produce, not for showing up.

That's a fundamentally different relationship than hourly employment. And it attracts a fundamentally different type of employee—one who wants to earn based on their effort.

Combined with Home.works for job tracking and scheduling, P4P becomes the engine that drives your operation. Your crews move faster. Your margins improve. Your managers spend less time babysitting and more time coaching.

That's the business I want to run. I bet it's the one you want to run too.

— Mike Andes, Founder of Augusta Lawn Care & Home.works