How the owners pay the people who do the work

Most coverage of these businesses stops at the owner. The work, past the first year or two, is usually done by somebody else, and the owner pages in this database say a fair amount about how those people are paid: a share of each job, an hourly wage, a subcontractor's invoice, a two-hour night shift, a son learning the route. The choice shows up later in the margin, in the hiring problems and in what the business is worth without its founder. This piece collects what the owners say about it.

Paying a share of the job

Mike Andes built Augusta Lawn Care around what he calls P4P, pay for performance: crews earn a percentage of the revenue they produce instead of an hourly wage. He has claimed efficiency gains of around 45 percent from it, and the model went with the brand when Augusta began franchising in 2019. It now runs across more than 200 locations reporting $50 million-plus systemwide.

Alan Tursunbaev reached the same answer in mobile detailing. GoDetail pays detailers 30 percent of each job plus tips, which he says makes them behave like business owners because their effort maps directly to their pay. His entry draws the connection to Andes: when crews work where nobody can watch them, the pay is tied to the work rather than the clock. GoDetail reports roughly $900,000 a year at 60 percent gross margins. A percentage also moves with the season. A quiet week costs the owner less in wages, though the crew feels it too.

Employee or subcontractor

Cristobal and Sandra Mondragon learned this one by fine. Early on they classified their cleaners as subcontractors when the state said they were employees, and the mistake cost about $10,000 in penalties. They converted to an employed, trained and certified staff. Their entry describes what happened next: in a trade full of informal labor, being able to show that the people inside a customer's house are legal, insured and trained became part of the sales pitch.

Johnny Robinson and Sergio Silesky went the other way on purpose. In 2019 they moved Orange Window Cleaning to subcontractor crews and ran acquisition, scheduling and quality from laptops. Their entry's reasoning is that crews exist in every city, while a phone that rings does not. They sold the company, and it still runs above $1 million a year under new ownership. Ian Hecht is the furthest version of the idea. He owns no trucks; the haulers who do the dumpster jobs he sells keep 80 to 85 percent of the job value. Which arrangement is legal depends on how the work is controlled and on the state, and the Mondragons' entry is the reminder that a regulator decides, not the owner.

Part-time and short shifts

Marcus Gram's vending cost breakdown has about 10 percent of revenue going to five part-time employees, against about 30 percent for product. On his $500,000 of 2022 sales that would be about $50,000 of wages across the five, our arithmetic. He says he works about four hours a week on the route himself. Machines do the selling, so the people only restock and fix them.

Haley Gallagher's commercial cleaning company runs entirely after hours, in jobs of two to three hours a night. Her entry says staff were recruited on the promise of picking their own shifts and stayed for the same reason. Moonlight Commercial Cleaning turned over $170,000 in its first full year with nine employees. Short shifts are also why the business could start beside the founders' day jobs.

When labor is the biggest line

Daniel Tom puts labor at about 30 percent of revenue for his 19-person team at Bay Area Sanitation, the largest cost ahead of fuel and consumables. On $4.3 million of 2025 total income that is roughly $1.3 million, our arithmetic. Tom pays himself about $120,000 and reinvests the rest. The industry benchmarks quoted on the Davis pool service entry put labor at 30 to 38 percent of revenue for pool companies with employees. Those are industry figures, not the Davises' books.

The most expensive single hire on record here is the one that replaces the owner. Kyle Landwehr hired an operations manager at roughly $75,000 a year in his third year of junk removal, and his gross margin settled near 20 percent, down from about 50 when he worked the truck himself. Our piece on the margin cliff covers what that does to owner income.

Paying through the slow months

Seasonal owners face a choice about wages when the work drops off, and the two clearest cases in the database chose opposite ways. Kim Hatch keeps trained septic crews on payroll through winter months of about $30,000 so that she is not short-handed in summer months of up to $200,000. Her entry calls the trough something to finance deliberately rather than cut. Andes describes the costly version of the same decision: he says he burned about $100,000 one winter keeping lawn crews busy on pointless work rather than admitting the season was over.

The difference is whether the skill is hard to replace. A septic technician who can run a pump truck on a mountain road is hard to find in a small market. A mowing crew in December has nothing to do. Steve Hunsaker's holiday lighting business is built so the problem barely exists: three or more install crews at peak, every crew hour in roughly eight weeks, and an off-season that, per his entry, costs almost nothing to carry.

Family on the payroll

Several businesses in the database staffed their first years with family. Joel Davis runs his pool franchise with his son Hunter, which his entry calls the succession plan most trades never build. Christian Sanya's husband and four employees fill the gaps around the roughly twelve hours of laundry requests she still handles each day. Adam Hill's vending route became a family business with employees, and the Mondragons started with Sandra's own cleaning experience and family labor.

Family labor is cheap at the start because nobody is paid market rate, which is part of why early margins look the way they do on the margin ledger. It also hides a cost a buyer will notice. A business whose work is done by the owner's relatives can be worth less to a stranger, for the reasons in our piece on the key employee problem.

Hiring order, and firing

Tursunbaev's hiring order is detailers first, then a receptionist, then a manager, because the phone becomes the constraint before management does. His other rule is blunter: do not expect people to change, and replace someone unreliable rather than waiting. Brian Scudamore took that to its limit in the mid-1990s, firing his entire eleven-person team at what became 1-800-GOT-JUNK? after deciding he had hired badly, then rebuilding with people he wanted to work with.

Dave Menz made staffing the product. His four Queen City Laundry stores are fully attended, with about 40 employees, which he credits with cutting incidents and insurance headaches to nearly zero. His entry describes the unattended version as the run-down store he bought in 2010. John and Tom D'Eri staff their Rising Tide car washes largely with autistic adults, and report attrition far below the norm for a trade known for turnover.

What to take from it

The owners who wrote about pay at all tended to tie it to output when the work was unsupervised, used part-time or short shifts when the work came in short blocks, and kept people through slow months only when they would be hard to replace. Most of the founders here did the work themselves before they paid anyone else to. The ranking of revenue per employee shows how much each head brings in where the owners published a headcount, and the gap between a toilet fleet and a cleaning crew is wide. Every owner named here has a sourced entry in the database, and Start here sorts the models by capital and hours. This site is one of SideRoad's weekly builds, where the same question of who does the work comes up every week.

Common questions

Keep reading

• The margin cliff: why doubling revenue can cut your income
• The key employee problem in trades acquisitions
• Revenue per employee, ranked