Concrete repair ran a 60% gross margin against roughly 45% on new-pour concrete, the same crews, the same overhead, 2 very different results.
The ceiling placed on new-pour concrete sales as a share of a rep's monthly volume, past which no bonus commission is paid.
Solo-close commission and combined outside-plus-inside commission when a second rep helps close the deal, replacing a flat, unaligned structure.
Growth credited to the combined effect of inside sales support and a commission plan that stopped punishing reps for getting help closing a deal.
A concrete repair contractor rebuilds his marketing spend and sales commission structure around a 15-point gross margin gap between two of his own services.
Most home service businesses sell more than 1 service, and few owners have ever measured what each one nets after cost. When 2 services sit 15 points apart in gross margin, deciding which one gets the marketing budget and the stronger sales incentive is a strategic call, the kind most owners make by instinct, long before the harder financial fixes ever come into view.
Owen's business closed 2024 with $3.1 million in sales and just $16,000 in net profit, under 1%. The full financial diagnosis, and the deeper fix that eventually followed it, is its own story (see the companion case study below). But before any of that, Owen had to answer a simpler question: of everything his crews could sell, what should they be selling more of?
Nobody had ever measured it directly. Concrete repair, VUBA Stone, and new-pour concrete pouring all ran through the same crews, the same trucks, the same overhead, and the same commission plan, priced and sold as if they were interchangeable. They weren't.
"But basically we sold too much of the other services," Owen said once retroactive job costing made the margin gap visible for the first time. Stuart Trier named the mechanism directly: the low-margin product had been pumping up revenue without adding anything to the bottom line.
Margin mix is the ratio of high-margin to low-margin services a business sells, and it's a separate question from whether each individual job is priced correctly.
Two services can both be priced fairly and still produce very different results for the business as a whole. Sell $100,000 split evenly between a 60%-margin service and a 45%-margin service, and the blend nets meaningfully less than the same $100,000 weighted toward the higher-margin side, even though the top-line number looks identical either way. Most owners track margin job by job and revenue in total, but never track the ratio between the two, which is exactly how a record sales year can still land a flat bottom line: more of that revenue than usual came from the harder-to-profit-on side of the business.
A higher price tag doesn't automatically mean a healthier mix, either. Owen's premium VUBA Stone resurfacing line looked like the obvious upsell on paper, until job costing showed material alone was running 30% to 40% of the job price, thin enough on the highest-volume applications to undercut standard concrete repair's cleaner margin. Price and profit aren't the same measurement, and only one of them shows up on an invoice.
Once the margin gap was visible, Owen made a specific decision: point Signature Media's ad spend at concrete repair leads instead of running broad, service-agnostic campaigns.
"If I have a 60 percent... margin on concrete repair, well then in my other services or 45... I'm really pushing on Signature Media to get me more concrete repair."
— Owen
The goal, discussed on the March 2025 call, was to shift the lead mix from roughly 30% concrete repair toward 70-80%, a target Owen set rather than a number confirmed after the fact. Redirecting a marketing budget toward a specific margin, rather than toward whichever service was easiest to advertise, is a strategic-planning decision most home service owners never make explicitly. It usually happens by accident, or not at all.
A marketing shift alone couldn't fix the mix on its own, because the sales team's incentives still pointed the other way. Concrete pouring was, in Owen's own words, "lower hanging fruit," easier to sell even though it was harder to make money on. Nothing in the commission plan gave a rep a reason to push the harder sell.
The commission plan changed in 2 stages, several months apart.
In November 2025, the business's old 3-tier commission structure (10% on concrete repair, 6% on VUBA, 5% on concrete pouring) was replaced with a blended rate: 7.5% if a rep closed a deal solo, 5.5% if inside sales helped close it. Alongside the new rate, Stuart and Owen set a hard ceiling: reps became ineligible for bonus commission on any pour volume above 20% of their monthly sales.
"Reports 20 percent," Owen confirmed. "Anything over 20 percent, we don't pay a bonus on," Stuart said back. The cap did the enforcement work the marketing shift alone couldn't. A rep could still sell pour work; selling too much of it simply stopped paying a bonus.
In January 2026, the structure was refined again. Rather than the outside rep simply earning less when inside sales (Jamie) helped close a deal, the inside rep now earned her own 4% on the same deal, on top of the outside rep's 5.5%, a combined 9.5% cost to the company. Owen framed the change as splitting the difference rather than cutting anyone:
"We don't want the jump to be too dramatic... if we went down to 4% for inside sales, that would mean that both sides are eating 2%."
— Owen
Change to a commission plan doesn't land evenly, even when the math works out fine.
When the January refinement was proposed, Owen's top-performing rep, Brian, got nervous. "They're a little nervous about the commission change stuff," Owen reported. "Brian keeps pressing me on that." Running Brian's own 2025 numbers against the new model produced a scary headline: "If I use his numbers from this year, he ends up making $12,000 less under this model."
Nobody corrected that fear immediately. It sat there for weeks, unresolved, exactly the kind of thing that can quietly stall a good plan before it ever gets tested.
The correction came in February 2026, once Stuart and Owen ran Brian's real deal mix against the new structure instead of a worst-case guess. Running the real numbers found something the earlier estimate had missed: only 34% of Brian's deals closed through Jamie, so the 2% reduction touched about a third of his income instead of all of it. "It's like $700 a month," Stuart said. "So not crazy drop." A projected $12,000 annual hit turned into roughly $2,100 over a 90-day test, comfortably covered by a price increase already underway. Brian's fear was real. So was the distance between that fear and the actual math, and closing it took someone sitting down and running the real numbers instead of reacting to the scariest possible one.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing spend target | Service-agnostic, roughly 30% concrete-repair leads | Redirected toward concrete repair, targeting 70-80% of the lead mix |
| Sales commission structure | Tiered: 10% repair / 6% VUBA / 5% pouring, no shared incentive between reps | Blended: 7.5% solo close / 9.5% combined (5.5% + 4%) when inside sales assists |
| Pour-volume bonus eligibility | Uncapped | Capped at 20% of monthly sales |
| Visibility into margin by service line | None; services priced and sold as interchangeable | Tracked through ongoing job costing by service line |
| Top rep annual sales | ~$1.0 million | $1.6 million |
A note on scope: fixing the mix didn't fix everything. The business went on to run a $114,000 operating loss in the first half of 2025, a separate overhead-per-hour discovery that summer, and a 6% price increase that January, all covered in the companion case study below. Margin mix set the direction. It took a second, harder fix to make the number work.
Every trade with more than one service line runs the same risk, whether or not anyone's ever measured it directly.
An HVAC contractor doing both maintenance work and full system change-outs faces it in reverse: maintenance and diagnostics run 65-70% margins, but full change-outs, easier to sell on a hot day and worth a bigger invoice, can run closer to 25-30%. A sales team paid flat commission across both has every reason to chase the bigger, lower-margin ticket, and no reason to notice.
A plumbing company built around both emergency service calls and large sewer-line excavations hits it too. Drain clearing and leak detection can run 70% margins with almost no material drag; a big excavation, appealing because of its size, often nets 20%, once heavy equipment rental and unpredictable site conditions are counted. Reps love writing the big proposal. The business doesn't always love what it nets.
A roofing company selling both leak repairs and full insurance-driven reroofs sees the same split: repairs and maintenance run 70% margins, full reroofs closer to 25%, squeezed by shingle costs and sub-crew labor. A company that measures total revenue instead of margin mix can hit a record sales year built almost entirely on its thinnest-margin service, discovering it only once the numbers are already in.
Start with job-level margin by service line instead of total revenue. Owen's business found a 15-point gap between 2 services it had always treated as interchangeable, concrete repair at roughly 60% and new-pour concrete at 45%. Once that gap was visible, the decision became concrete: redirect marketing spend toward the higher-margin service and build sales incentives to match, rather than advertising and paying commission on whichever service happened to be easiest to sell.
Not necessarily. A specialty resurfacing product in this business looked like the obvious upsell at a higher price point, until job costing showed material alone consumed 30% to 40% of the job price, thin enough on the largest applications to fall behind standard repair work's cleaner margin. Price tells you what a customer pays. Only job-level costing tells you what the business keeps.
Set a volume ceiling tied to bonus eligibility rather than banning the service outright. Owen's team kept selling new-pour concrete, but reps became ineligible for bonus commission once it passed 20% of their monthly sales. The service stayed available. The incentive to lean on it stopped.
Not if the plan is modeled against real numbers instead of a worst case. Owen's top rep initially feared a $12,000 annual hit from a new commission structure. Running his actual deal mix against the real model found the true impact was closer to $700 a month, comfortably offset by other changes already underway. Reps rarely object to a specific number once it's the real one instead of a guess.
An inside sales safety net helps smooth it, but 1 large deal can still swing a month's numbers on its own. In one stretch, this business hit $299,000 in monthly sales, with a single $143,000 commercial job driving a large share of it. Without a system to also capture the smaller, easier-to-close jobs an outside rep doesn't have time to chase, monthly totals stay lumpy even in a strong year.
Not quite. Where a typical home service coaching program hands an owner a framework and checks in once a month, this kind of realignment gets built directly against the business's own numbers, job costing by service line, marketing spend redirected against a measured margin gap, and a commission plan modeled against a specific rep's real deal history rather than a guess. The output is a specific ratio and a specific dollar figure, rather than a general framework to apply on your own.
There's no universal number, but Owen's team settled on 20% for pour-volume bonus eligibility, a threshold set against the actual size of the margin gap (15 points) between its 2 main services. A business with a smaller gap between its high- and low-margin services can likely tolerate a higher cap; a wider gap argues for a tighter one. Your own job-costing data should set the number, since a rule of thumb borrowed from a different trade won't reflect your actual margin gap.
Stuart Trier is the Founder and CEO of Clear Results. Over the past 20 years, Stuart has built, bought, and sold 11 companies across the home service, healthcare, and marketing industries. He built his first company from startup to $8M in revenue in 3 years before a successful exit, then built a chain of 28 healthcare clinics and sold the business to a publicly traded company. Following that acquisition, Stuart spent 3 years working alongside the CEO, helping lead the organization through a take-private transaction before participating in a nine-figure exit to a Fortune 10 company. Today, he's the lead investor behind an electrical services platform operating across 3 U.S. states, and has worked directly with owners through 1,800+ strategic advisory sessions.
