A Technician Is Working Side Jobs on Your Customers: A Decision Tree
Why this matters
A customer says something in passing. "Your guy came back Saturday and sorted the other unit for me." Your stomach goes, and within about four seconds you have decided what happened.
The problem is that three genuinely different activities all get called side jobs, they carry different exposures, and only one of them is diversion. Owners collapse them, respond to all three as if they were the third, and either lose a good technician over something that was never their business or fail to act on the one case that actually was. Sorting which one you have is most of the work.
This card is orientation, not legal advice. There is a point below where you should stop reading articles and take documents to your own employment attorney, and it is named.
Fork one: which of the three is it?
Branch A: unrelated work, on their own time. Weekend delivery driving, a bar shift, a landscaping business with no overlap with your trade. This is not your business, and a shop that tries to prohibit it earns resentment out of all proportion to anything it protects. Some states also restrict employer control over lawful off-duty activity, and a blanket ban on any outside employment is the kind of clause most likely to be unenforceable and certain to be resented. Leave it alone.
Branch B: trade work, for people who are not your customers. A tech fits a unit for his brother-in-law's neighbour, sourced entirely through his own network. This is the grey area, and where most shops discover they have never written a policy. Your revenue is not affected, but four other exposures are, and they are the section below.
Branch C: your customers, your access, or your leads. Work for someone on your customer list, or work that came to him because he was standing in their house on your ticket. This is diversion. It is the real case, it is the only one of the three that is about money taken from the shop, and it is the one with a contractual dimension.
The test that separates B from C
Not "did he know them", which is always arguable. Ask where the opportunity came from, and answer it from the record rather than from the conversation:
- Is the customer on your customer list, and how did they get there? A customer you acquired and serviced is a shop relationship. A neighbour who has never called you is not.
- Was the tech in that house on your ticket within a reasonable window before the side work?
- Did the shop quote that work? An estimate you produced, at your cost, on your time, that the customer then declined and had done privately, is the clearest version of branch C there is.
- Did the tech use anything of yours to do it - your parts, your van, your account at the supply house, your licence?
A yes on any of those four puts it in branch C. A yes on the last one puts it somewhere worse, because at that point it is not only your money at stake.
The exposures you carry even in branch B
This is the part most owners have not thought about, and it is why a branch B policy is worth writing even though branch B costs you no revenue.
Licensing. In most states, the contractor licence that makes the work legal is held by the business or by a qualifying individual named on it, and a technician's own journeyman or apprentice credential does not by itself authorise them to contract with a homeowner. Where that is true, a tech taking money directly from a customer for licensable work is doing unlicensed contracting, and complaints land at the licensing board. The gate matters and it is exactly where shops get surprised: which work is licensable, at what value, and whether an individual credential carries contracting authority all vary by state and sometimes by trade within a state, so your own board's scope-of-work page is the only source that answers it for you.
Insurance. Your general liability responds to your operations. A fire or a flood on a job your shop never sold, scheduled or invoiced is not your operation and your carrier may well decline it. That is not the comfort it sounds like, because the customer believed it was you, will present the claim to you, and may name you anyway. Even a declined claim costs you a defence conversation and an incident on your record. This one is a question for your agent, not your attorney, and it is worth asking before you need the answer.
Warranty. The failure comes back to the shop, because from the customer's chair a technician in your shirt did the work. You then choose between warranting something you never sold and telling a long-standing customer that the person you sent them was working for himself. Both answers cost you the relationship.
Fatigue. A tech doing the same physical trade on Saturdays and evenings is doing the job twice. The leading indicator is not the schedule, it is rework and callbacks early in the week. Watch that number rather than policing the weekend.
A worked case, and its mirror
The case. A four-tech shop. The customer of six years, eleven jobs on record, mentions Saturday. Before anyone says anything to anyone, the owner reads the record: the shop attended three weeks earlier on its own ticket, that visit produced a quote for the second unit, the customer declined the quote, and the technician who attended and wrote the quote is the one who came back Saturday.
That is branch C and it does not depend on any signed agreement. The lead was created on shop time, by shop access, at shop expense, because the quote is unpaid sales effort the shop funded. Whether it is also a breach of a restrictive covenant is a separate and harder question; whether it is diversion is not in doubt.
The mirror, same shop. A second technician does weekend work for two households sourced through his church. Neither is on the customer list, neither has ever called the shop, and the shop has never quoted either address. The owner runs the same four tests and all four come back clean. That is branch B, and the correct response is not a disciplinary conversation. It is a written policy that does not yet exist, plus a check on whether the work he is doing needs a licence he does not hold.
Note what distinguished them. It was not the volume, the trade, or how the owner felt about each man. It was one question answered from records: where did the opportunity come from.
The response ladder
- Establish what happened from the record before you speak to anybody. This group's sequencing card owns that, and it applies here: a confrontation on a customer's offhand remark, before you have read the ticket history, is how you accuse a man of diverting a job he was never on.
- Branch A: do nothing. Do not write a policy about it either. A clause banning all outside work makes every branch B conversation harder, because the tech now knows your policy overreaches and discounts the parts that are real.
- Branch B: write the policy, apply it forward, and say what it is for. Name licensing, insurance and warranty explicitly. A policy that reads as protecting the shop's licence is a policy a technician can respect; one that reads as protecting the shop's revenue from his weekends is one he will work around. Do not backdate it into discipline, because before it existed there was no rule.
- Branch C: one conversation, with the record in your hand, about the specific job. Decide beforehand what outcome you want, because the three available are different: it stops and he stays, he makes it right and stays, or he leaves. You can hold that conversation without any agreement in place at all, because declining to keep employing someone who diverts your leads is not a contractual question in most of the country. Be accurate about what you allege. Say the facts you have from the record and stop.
- The fork where you stop and get advice. The moment you want to enforce a restrictive covenant, demand money for a diverted job, contact the customer about his conduct, or tie any of it to his final pay. Take the signed agreement, the handbook page he acknowledged, the job records showing how that customer came to you, and the dates, to your own employment attorney. Two reasons it is worth the hour: enforceability is entirely a state question, and withholding pay to recover a loss is the single most common way an employer in the right creates a violation of their own. The final-paycheck card in this library is specifically about that trap.
What the agreement does and does not buy
Non-compete and non-solicitation are not the same instrument and are enforced very differently. A non-solicit, aimed narrowly at the customers the employee actually served, is the one that fits this situation and is the more likely of the two to be enforced; the clause itself is owned by its own card. A non-compete tries to stop him working in the trade at all, and four states void employee non-competes almost entirely by statute (California, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Minnesota for agreements entered into since 2023), while most other states enforce only a narrow one and some require a separate payment or notice period. Whether either is worth having, and what it may say where you are, is a question for your attorney rather than a template.
What no agreement buys is the branch B exposure. A signature does not make an unlicensed weekend job licensed, and it does not make your carrier cover a loss on a job you never sold.
Prevention, which is mostly two things
The written moonlighting policy, covered above, and pay. A technician who is quoting work in a customer's house and getting nothing when the shop sells it has a standing incentive to notice which jobs would be easier on a Saturday. A modest commission on work he identifies and the shop bills removes that incentive at the source and costs a fraction of the job. Shops that pay it report the same thing: the quoting gets better, which is a return on its own.
References
- See related: The Non-Solicitation Clause That Protects Your Customer List; Protecting a Customer List Without a Non-Compete; The Employee Non-Compete and Why Most of Them Fail
- See related: Before You Accuse Anyone: The Sequence; The Final Paycheck Clock and Why It Is a State Question
- Your state contractor licensing board, for whether the work is licensable and whether an individual credential carries contracting authority
- Employee Handbook Essentials, for where an outside-work policy sits alongside the rest of your written rules