One number tells you if your plumbing business is a business or a job
Revenue per technician. It's the single metric that separates shops building real equity from shops where the owner earns less than their best plumber.
If you don't know yours, you're flying blind. And if you've never compared it to the benchmark, you might be shocked at the gap.
Where the numbers actually land
A well-run plumbing shop with trained techs, tight scheduling, and proper pricing generates $250,000–$350,000+ in revenue per technician per year. Top performers push past $400K.
The average? Significantly lower. And the gap between "average" and "top performer" on a 5-tech shop isn't a rounding error — it's $250,000–$500,000 in annual revenue that you're not capturing.
That's not a marketing problem. Your techs are already in the field. The trucks are already on the road. The overhead is already being paid. Revenue per tech is a measure of how well you're extracting value from the infrastructure you've already built.
Why revenue per tech falls short
Four things compress revenue per tech in plumbing shops:
Underpricing. The average contractor underprices by 10–15%. On every job, every day. Multiply that across 5 techs running 4 jobs a day, and you're leaving hundreds of thousands on the table annually.
Scheduling gaps. Drive time between jobs, callbacks that eat a morning, no-shows that leave a 2-hour hole in the schedule. A tech who runs 3 jobs instead of 4 in a day is 25% less productive — and your overhead stays the same.
Low close rates. If your techs are diagnosing problems and quoting work but only closing 50% of estimates, half your diagnostic time generates zero revenue. The top shops close 70%+ because they follow up on every unsold estimate.
No upsell structure. Your tech is already in the home. They see the corroded supply lines, the aging water heater, the code violations. If they don't have a system for presenting additional work — and the training to do it without being pushy — you're leaving revenue on every call.
The cost of "good enough"
Here's what the gap looks like on a 5-tech shop:
- Average performance: $200K revenue per tech = $1M total
- Top performance: $350K revenue per tech = $1.75M total
- The gap: $750,000 in annual revenue
Same number of techs. Same trucks. Same overhead. $750K more in revenue — and at plumbing margins, that's $75K–$185K more in profit depending on your cost structure.
Most shop owners look at that gap and think "I need better techs." But the top shops aren't staffed with superhuman plumbers. They're staffed with the same people who would produce average numbers at your shop — except they have systems, pricing, and scheduling that extract the full value from every truck-hour.
The numbers you need to track
Revenue per tech is the headline number. But to actually improve it, you need to see:
- Revenue per job — are your prices right, or are you undercharging?
- Jobs per tech per day — are your schedules tight, or full of gaps?
- Close rate — how much diagnosed work is converting to revenue?
- Average ticket — is additional work being identified and presented?
If you're not tracking these four numbers weekly, you're managing by gut feel. And gut feel, as we've established, systematically underperforms.
See your revenue per tech — and the gap
We pull your actual data and calculate your revenue per tech against the benchmark. Then we show you exactly which lever — pricing, scheduling, close rate, or average ticket — is costing you the most.
Not theory. Your numbers.
Call (507) 577-5982 or book a discovery call.
15 minutes. Free. No pitch.
See how we work with plumbing businesses, or learn about our full process.