The 8–14 point GM spread between your top and bottom techs is worth $400K–$875K per year. Most operators have never run this calculation — because the P&L makes it invisible.
You run a 50-tech HVAC operation. Revenue is $35M. You’re growing. But your gross margin hasn’t moved in two years. Might be slipping. You pull the P&L. Overall GM sits at 48%. Looks fine. Within range of your budget. Your controller doesn’t flag it. Your PE sponsor glances at it quarterly and moves on.
Here’s the problem: 48% is an average. And averages hide the most expensive problems in field services.
Margin drift is the gap between what your best techs produce and what everyone else produces — on the same job types, in the same zip codes, with the same pricebook.
We’ve seen it in every operation we’ve embedded with. The pattern is consistent:
That’s not a training problem. It’s a systems problem. Your best tech diagnoses differently, presents options differently, prices differently, and closes differently. None of that knowledge is captured anywhere. It lives in their head.
When they’re sick, it stays home. When they quit, it walks out.
Let’s do the math on a real operation. We’ll use conservative assumptions based on FSM data from comparable operators.
The operation:
The margin spread:
What the bottom half costs you:
If you brought the bottom 25 techs from 26% to just 31% (not even top-quartile — just average), that’s 5 points of margin on roughly 14,000 jobs.
5% × $1,250 × 14,000 = $875,000 per year.
Not theoretical. Not “potential revenue.” That’s margin you’re already generating through your top performers. Your bottom half just isn’t executing at the same standard.
And that’s the conservative number. If you close half the gap to your top quartile, you’re looking at $400K–$800K in recovered margin depending on your ticket size and job mix.
Margin drift isn’t random. It follows patterns. After embedding with dozens of operations, these are the five root causes that show up every time.
Your best tech walks into a no-cool call and runs a systematic diagnostic. Checks capacitor, contactor, refrigerant charge, airflow. Finds the root cause and the secondary issue.
Your average tech replaces the part that’s obviously failed and leaves. The secondary issue becomes next month’s callback.
Same job. Same truck. Different diagnostic depth. Different margin.
Top performers present 3 options on every qualifying job — repair, repair-plus, and replace. They anchor on the replacement, walk through the math on repair vs. replace, and let the customer choose.
Bottom performers present 1 option: the repair. They leave money on the table because nobody taught them the framework, and there’s no system ensuring it happens.
The gap in average ticket between a 3-option presenter and a 1-option presenter is typically 30–45%.
Your pricebook exists. Your techs don’t all use it the same way. Some round down. Some skip line items. Some “give the customer a break” on the diagnostic fee.
We’ve measured quote variance of 15–30% on identical job scopes across techs in the same branch. That’s not a pricing problem. It’s an enforcement problem.
Your best tech sells a maintenance agreement on 40% of qualifying jobs. Your average sits at 15%. Nobody tracks this by tech. Nobody coaches to close the gap.
On a 50-tech operation, that delta in attach rate is worth $120K–$200K in annual recurring membership revenue alone.
Techs who are rushing — whether to hit a job count, finish early, or avoid a difficult conversation — cut corners on diagnostics and skip the option presentation. They close the job faster at lower margin.
This isn’t laziness. It’s a system failure. If there’s no standard for how long a diagnostic should take, and no measurement of what a complete diagnostic includes, speed always wins over thoroughness.
We’ll pull your FSM data and show you GM per job by tech and job type — the numbers your P&L doesn’t show.
Book the 45-minute diagnostic →The reason margin drift persists in $20M–$100M operations is that it’s invisible at the P&L level. Here’s why:
Monthly financial reporting is too aggregated. Your P&L shows overall gross margin by department. It doesn’t show GM by tech, by job type, by branch. The spread is buried inside an average that looks acceptable.
FSM reports aren’t built for this. ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, FieldEdge — they store the data. But the out-of-box reports don’t surface tech-to-tech margin variance by job type. You’d have to build custom reports and review them weekly. Most operators don’t.
Nobody owns the metric. In most operations, gross margin is a finance metric. But margin is produced in the field by techs making pricing and diagnostic decisions 15 times a day. Finance can’t coach a tech. And operations managers don’t have margin visibility at the job level.
Top performers mask the problem. When your best 10 techs are producing 39% GM, they pull the average up enough that the bottom 15 don’t trigger an alarm. The average looks fine. The variance is where the money is.
Fixing margin drift starts with seeing it. Not at the P&L level. At the job level.
The baseline you need:
Most operators have never seen this data laid out. When they do, the reaction is always the same: “I knew it was a problem. I didn’t know it was this big.”
The fix isn’t training. Training without measurement changes behavior for 2 weeks. The fix is a system that:
That’s the difference between a one-time initiative and a living system. Training decays. Systems compound.
Margin drift isn’t static. It compounds.
A 50-tech operation that ignores 8–12 points of margin spread for 3 years leaves $1.2M–$2.4M on the table. That’s EBITDA that should be on your balance sheet.
You don’t need more dashboards. You need someone to sit in your operation, pull the actual data, watch the actual behavior, and build a system from what your best people actually do.
That’s what a full-operation audit does in 30 days:
If the audit doesn’t identify at least $200K in recoverable annual revenue, you pay nothing.
The spread in your operation exists. The only question is whether you can see it.
Spaid embeds engineers inside field services operations to find and fix revenue leaks across the full operation — call center, dispatch, field, and follow-up. We work with $20M–$100M operators running 40–120+ techs on a modern FSM.
Our Full-Operation Audit (Days 1–30) maps every revenue leak — field and back of house. If we don’t identify at least $200,000 in recoverable annual revenue, we refund Phase 1 in full. You keep all audit deliverables.
After kickoff, we ask for about 30 minutes a week of your ops leader’s time.
We’ll start with a recent export or sample call data from your FSM and call system, show you the biggest leaks, and scope the engagement. Full access happens only if you proceed to the audit.