What an Open Tech Seat Actually Costs You Per Week

Take the senior tech seat you've been trying to fill at $54 an hour. Cover it with overtime instead and you're paying $81 an hour for the same work, out of the same crew you already have.

That's $27 an hour extra on every covered hour. Twenty hours a week and you're $540 over, on money nobody budgeted. Hold the seat open twelve weeks and it's $6,480. You paid for that seat twice and you still don't have a tech.

Overtime is the part you can see on a report. The rest never shows up anywhere. PMs slide. Road calls stack behind each other. A unit sits three days waiting on a diagnosis nobody has time to run. The customer who waited eleven days for a callout usually doesn't complain, he just calls somebody else the next time.

Then there's who's absorbing all of it. Your remaining techs. The good ones. The same ones already getting three messages a week from people like me. Nobody works six days a week for a quarter straight and comes out the other side more loyal than they went in.

The fee to fill the seat is a number you can see, weigh, and decide on in an afternoon. The vacancy is a number that runs quietly in the background and nobody ever totals up. Total yours before you decide the seat can wait another month.