Here is an uncomfortable truth about hiring in this industry: the best account manager in your market is already employed, already good at the job, and already being courted by someone else. The thing that moves them is almost never the plan with the most moving parts. It is the plan they understand, the plan they can actually influence, and the plan that pays them fast enough to feel it.

Getting all three right at once is genuinely hard, and most owners are missing one without realizing it. The good news is that tightening even one of them changes the caliber of people who start showing up.

So let us fix that. Not with a lecture on profit sharing theory, but with the way we actually walk owners through this at 212.

The plan is not as complicated as you think, and that is the whole point

When companies come to us wanting to build a bonus or commission structure, the first question is usually some version of “can we set this up in our software?” And the answer is almost always yes, as long as it is simple. Whatever platform you run, whether that is Aspire or something else, the software will happily calculate a five layer plan with subcontractor carve outs and three gross margin tiers. That is not the problem. The problem is that your team cannot do the math in their head, so they stop trying to hit the number.

A compensation plan does one job: it tells a person exactly what a great month looks like and pays them for it. If your team cannot explain their own plan back to you in two sentences, it is too complicated, and complicated plans do not motivate. They confuse.

Keep it simple. Make it achievable. Make it motivating. Everything below serves those three words.

Commission or profit sharing: who gets which

Do not build one plan for the whole company. Build two, because two very different jobs are happening.

What to pay a landscape account manager or sales rep

Here is where we tend to lose the room, so we will just say it plainly. A lot of companies are underpaying, and it is the single biggest reason they cannot attract the people they say they want.

We watch owners try to hire an account manager for $50,000 to $60,000 a year. It is not a $50,000 or $60,000 role. It does not matter where you live. An account manager should be earning somewhere in the range of $70,000 to $80,000 base, plus commission. A sales rep should be in the $80,000 to $100,000 range, and a good one carrying commission should be able to clear $150,000 selling landscape contracts. Account manager is arguably the hardest seat in the company to fill, because that person is selling, retaining an existing portfolio, and keeping clients happy, all at once. That is a rare skill set.

You get what you pay for. If you start at $50,000 with a 2% commission, you are going to get a $50,000 result, and then complain about the caliber of your account managers. If you genuinely need to start the base at $50,000, then the commission has to do the heavy lifting: 5% or 6% on enhancements, not 2%, so a strong performer can still reach six figures. One way or another, the math has to get them there.

None of this works if you cannot afford it, which brings us to the two rules everybody wants to skip.

Paying your field crew on what they control

The fastest way to kill a plan is to pay people on a number they cannot move.

For the frontline, the thing they control is their hours. That is the lever. Estimated hours versus actual hours is where field incentive lives, whether you track it inside your software or on a whiteboard. But there are two guardrails.

First, quality. You cannot reward a crew for coming in under budget on hours if the work is not up to standard. Beating the clock while cutting corners is not a win, it is a callback. Tie the incentive to hours and quality, or you will train your best crews to rush.

Second, and this is the one nobody wants to hear: the hours only mean something if your estimating is real. We still see companies that have been in their software for years and are not using production rates. They are guesstimating the hours, then asking the crew to beat a number that came out of thin air. That is not fair to the team, and it quietly poisons the whole plan. Before you incentivize hours, get your estimating honest. The foundation has to hold weight before you build on it.

How often should you pay commission?

If someone is incentivized to sell, pay them often. Money in the pocket is the motivation. We see companies paying commissions quarterly or twice a year, and honestly, that is close to pointless. The connection between effort and reward becomes too faint to drive behavior. Monthly should be your floor. Faster is better.

There is one more timing move worth stealing. When a seller hits their annual sales plan, do not let them coast. A lot of reps reach their target and mentally clock out for the year because they have “made it.” Instead, raise the commission rate on everything past the plan. You have already covered their overhead by that point, so reward them for flooring it through the finish. Our commission calculator builds this in automatically as a base rate up to plan and a premium rate beyond it. It turns the last stretch of the year into found money for both of you.

You cannot pay out money you do not make

This is the rule that protects everything else. Do not launch a new compensation plan that adds cost to the business until you have a budget you can actually rely on. If you are not profitable, you do not have a bonus pool. A profit share funded by profit you did not earn is not generosity; it is a hole you are digging.

That is also why we are cautious about rushing owners into complex profit sharing. You have to protect the company first: reinvestment, cash flow, the reserve you need to survive a slow spring. Get the budget solid, then share the upside.

And here is the part that makes it all work. Your team has to know what winning looks like. If nobody understands what it means to win, it is nearly impossible to win. Open the books enough that your managers, and ideally your whole team, understand the P&L: that millions in revenue can still leave a thin slice of net profit at the end, and that everyone’s decisions affect that slice. People make better financial decisions when they can see the scoreboard.

One last thing that gets forgotten in all the enthusiasm to pay more: accountability rides along with the raise. If you are going to pay an account manager an $80,000 base plus commission that gets them to $120,000, then expect $120,000 of performance. Higher pay earns higher expectations. That is not a threat, it is the deal. Raise the pay and raise the bar together.

If you read all of that and thought “I have a problem,” good. Here is the fastest way to find it. Walk your current setup through four questions.

Do you have a commission plan at all?

If the answer is no, that is your starting line. You need one.

Is the plan simple enough to control?

If it runs more than about 10 steps, or if it pays people on numbers they cannot personally move, start clean.

Throw out the complicated version and rebuild around what the person actually controls.

How fast are you paying it out?

If it is slower than monthly, that alone is worth fixing. Shorten the cycle.

Can you afford it?

If the budget is not there yet, that is the first project, before any plan goes live. You do not have to overhaul everything this quarter. If it all feels overwhelming, pick one lever. Even a small, short gamified push for the field team is a better starting point than a grand profit sharing scheme you are not ready to fund.

Underpaying is expensive. Overcomplicating is expensive. The right plan, paid fast, on numbers your team can actually move, is how you finally land the people you have been trying to hire. That is the extra degree.