A Competitor Is Recruiting Your Technicians

Why this matters

Of everything a competitor can do to a small shop, taking a technician lands hardest and gets handled worst. Losing a five-year tech costs you the customers who ask for them by name, the jobs nobody else can run, months of recruiting and ramp-up, and the unsettling effect on everyone who watched them go. The two standard responses - a counteroffer on Friday afternoon, an angry call to the other owner - manage between them to be expensive, ineffective, and in one case a criminal exposure.

Nothing here is legal advice about your own situation. There is one point below where you should stop and take specific documents to a lawyer, and it is marked.

Two calls you must not make

Do not call the other owner to agree that you will stay off each other's people. This feels like the obvious adult solution and it is the most dangerous thing in this article. An agreement between employers not to recruit each other's employees, or to hold wages at a level, is a naked no-poach or wage-fixing agreement. The Department of Justice and the FTC stated in their Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals, issued October 2016, that the agencies would proceed criminally against naked wage-fixing and no-poach agreements under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, and the DOJ has since brought criminal charges on that theory. Outcomes at trial have been mixed, which is not the comfort it sounds like: the exposure is the investigation, the legal spend and the disclosure, not only the verdict. So do not propose it, and if another owner proposes it to you, decline in a way you would be content to have read back.

That also rules out the softer version, calling a competitor to compare what you each pay: employers exchanging current or forward-looking wage information directly is the fact pattern those guidelines warn about. Use published survey data, covered below.

Do not call the technician's spouse, the customer they are close to, or a referral source you share. It converts a resignation into a story about you, and the trade in any town is small enough that the story travels faster than the tech does.

Which of three things is happening

Ambient recruiting. A staffing agency or a growing shop is calling every licensed technician in the county. The tells: several of your people got the same call in the same fortnight, the caller did not know what work they do, and the message was generic. This is not about you and is diagnostic of nothing except a tight labour market. Do not restructure your pay over it, but do make sure your people hear from you before the third call, because silence from an owner while recruiters are active reads as indifference.

A targeted approach. One or two named people, with knowledge of what they can do. The tells: the caller knew their certification or their specialty, the approach came from someone who has worked with them, and the offer had numbers in it on the first call.

This one is about you, and it means somebody concluded your best person was available. That conclusion normally rests on something observable - a tech complaining at a supply house counter, one who has been on call every other week since spring, one who has not had a raise in two years. Find the observable thing before you decide what to offer.

Recruitment from inside. A current or recently departed employee is approaching your crew. Different problem, legal dimension, covered below.

The counteroffer, and one shop's arithmetic

A six-technician shop. The lead tech, paid roughly 1.3 times the crew average with the other five near 1.0 each, brings in an offer at about 1.12 times his current pay. The owner counters at 1.15, on the reasoning that replacing him would cost more than the difference.

Set the crew payroll at an index of 1.3 + 5 x 1.0 = 6.3 before the counter.

• The counter takes him to 1.3 x 1.15 = 1.495, so the crew index becomes 1.495 + 5.0 = 6.495. That is 6.495 / 6.3 = 1.031, a rise of about 3.1 percent.
• Within a quarter, two technicians with longer tenure work out roughly where he now sits and ask. Both are brought up 8 percent, adding 2 x 0.08 = 0.16, so the index becomes 6.655. Against the original 6.3 that is 6.655 / 6.3 = 1.056, a rise of about 5.6 percent.
• Eleven months after the counteroffer, he leaves anyway.

The shop ended with crew payroll permanently about 5.6 percent higher, two raises it cannot reverse, and no lead technician. And the raise it actually wanted to make - the one that would have kept him - was available the whole time and was not offered until a competitor priced him.

Why it failed, and it was not the money. By the time someone brings you an offer they have already updated their CV, taken a call, sat an interview, thought about telling you, and made a decision. Money can suspend that sequence; it does not unwind it. Whatever produced the decision - the on-call rota, a job that went badly and was handled badly, a promised change that never came - is still there on Monday, now with a raise sitting on top of it.

The relationship changes both ways, too. You now know he looked. He now knows the money was there and was not offered until he threatened to leave, which is a lesson about how to get a raise here, and the crew learns it with him.

Counteroffers are not always wrong. They are defensible when the person's reason genuinely is money, when you have independently established you were below market, and when you would have made the same move without the offer on the table. Those three conditions are rare together, and in this case none of them held.

Retention is built before the approach

The response that works has to exist before the phone rings, and it is a conversation, not a programme. Run a stay conversation with every technician twice a year, and again within two weeks of any change to schedule, territory, pay structure or crew assignment that affects them. Four questions, asked by the owner rather than a supervisor:

• What is the most frustrating part of your week right now?
• Is there anything you have asked for that you have not had an answer on?
• What work do you want to be doing in two years, and is it here?
• If you got a call tomorrow offering you a job, what would make you take it seriously?

The last question is the one that pays. People answer it honestly, because it is hypothetical, and the answer tells you what a competitor will eventually offer them. Write the answers down and act on one within a month, visibly. A stay conversation that produces no change teaches the crew that talking to you is decorative, which is worse than never asking.

Running the compensation check honestly

When a tech is approached, the real question is whether you are below market or whether it only feels that way. Three rules make it answerable.

Compare total compensation per paid hour, not base wage. Include the employer share of health premium, retirement match, paid time off, paid training hours, tool and boot allowance, the take-home vehicle, and the on-call rate. A shop comparing its hourly rate against another shop's hourly rate while carrying an on-call rotation twice as frequent is not comparing the same job.

Use published data rather than a phone call. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics annually by occupation and metropolitan area, with percentile wages, and it is free. That is the right instrument here for the reason given above: it is third-party and historical, so you are not exchanging current wage information with a competitor.

Look at the percentile, not the median. If you are staffing for a senior technician who handles the difficult calls, the relevant comparison is the upper end of the local distribution for that occupation, not the middle. Comparing a senior person to a median figure is how shops conclude they are paying well while their best person is underpaid and everyone else is overpaid.

The levers that are not money

Owners consistently underrate these, and they show up first in exit conversations once you get past the polite answer.

Schedule predictability. A schedule published a week out, and an on-call rotation with a stated frequency that is actually honoured. A third consecutive called-in weekend costs more goodwill than a pay rise buys.

Equipment that works. A stocked van, a vehicle that is not twelve years old, tools replaced when they fail. A tech making two supply-house runs a day because the van is not stocked knows exactly what that costs them under a flat-rate or commission structure, and it reads as the shop taking money out of their pocket.

The mix of work. Technical people leave boring work. If one person gets every filter change while somebody else gets the diagnostics, you have built a reason to leave into the dispatch board.

Being treated as a professional. Named on the invoice. Allowed to make the call in front of the customer without being overruled by phone. Paid training time and a stated certification path. Asked before a decision that affects their week, not told after.

When the person recruiting is your own employee

This is the branch with a legal dimension and it is where you stop reading and start making a list.

An employee still on your payroll generally owes a duty of loyalty while employed, which in most states means they may prepare to compete but may not actively solicit your customers or your crew on your time. The scope and the remedies are state common law and they vary. Whether a written agreement helps you depends on what it says and where you are: employee non-competes are governed by state law with enormous variation - California voids them almost entirely, Minnesota bars new employee non-competes entered into on or after 1 July 2023, North Dakota and Oklahoma have long-standing prohibitions, while many states will enforce one that is reasonable in duration, geography and scope. A federal ban issued by the FTC in 2024 was set aside by a federal district court before it took effect and the Commission subsequently abandoned its appeals, so this remains a state question rather than a federal one. Non-solicitation of employees and of customers is a separate clause with separate treatment - see related: The Non-Solicitation Clause That Protects Your Customer List.

This is the fork. Before you accuse anyone, before you send anything in writing, and before you terminate, take to an employment lawyer in your state: the signed agreement if one exists, the employee's personnel file, dated notes of what you observed and who told you, any messages you legitimately hold, and a list of which customers or employees were approached and when. Your first written communication is the document that gets read first if this goes anywhere, which is why it should not be written at 10pm.

Letting one go well

There is a branch where the right answer is to let them go, help them do it cleanly, and mean it. It applies more often than owners expect: when the move is a genuine step up you cannot offer, when the person has outgrown the work you have, and when they have been straight with you.

A technician who leaves on good terms is a referral source, sends you the work their new employer will not take, and sometimes comes back with two years of someone else's training. Technicians in a town talk constantly, and how you handle a departure is the most visible thing you do as an employer.

Concretely: pay the final cheque correctly and on time, and check your own state on the timing - federal law sets no deadline for a final paycheck, while most states do and several require it on or near the last day worked. Handle tool return without theatre, give an honest reference, and say plainly that the door is open, specifically enough that it is heard as an offer rather than as politeness.

References

• See related: The Non-Solicitation Clause That Protects Your Customer List, Why Good Techs Quit, The Exit Interview: Learning From Departures
• See related: A Private Equity Rollup Starts Buying Shops in Your Market, Knowing Which Competitor You Are Actually Competing With
• U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals (October 2016); Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, by occupation and metropolitan area