The Hidden Costs: Why Your Technician Shortage Is a Revenue Problem
- Feb 22
- 2 min read
The Number Nobody Talks About
When a technician position goes unfilled, most companies log it as a recruiting problem. They track time-to-hire, cost-per-candidate, and turnover rates. What they rarely calculate is the revenue walking out the door every single day that bay stays empty.
Timothy Spurlock, President and CEO of ADTC, wants to change that conversation. In this episode, Tim puts a hard number on the problem — and it's not the $8,000 average cost to fill an open position that should keep operators up at night. It's the $100,000 or more in lost billable revenue that accumulates while companies wait, recruit, and repeat the cycle.
Rethinking the Technician as an Asset
The field service and skilled trades industries have long treated labor as a line-item cost. Spurlock argues that framing is exactly what's holding companies back. A trained, billable technician isn't a cost center — they're a revenue and profit center. Every hour they're in the field, they're generating income. Every hour that seat is empty, that income disappears quietly and without a line item anyone tracks.
Shifting this mindset has real operational implications. If technicians are revenue-generating assets, then recruiting delays, poor retention, and inadequate training aren't HR problems — they're financial ones that belong in the same conversation as growth strategy.
The Math Behind Rapid Upskilling
One of the more compelling arguments Spurlock makes is around training ROI. Conventional wisdom in the trades assumes experience is the primary driver of technician performance. Tim's data challenges that assumption directly: with the right structured training program, 80% of new trainees can outperform experienced workers. Not eventually — quickly.
The return on that investment is equally striking. An upfront training investment of around 12% of a technician's potential revenue output can yield a 400% return. For companies sitting on unfilled positions and watching service calls pile up, that's not a training expense — it's one of the highest-ROI moves available to them.
Why the Traditional Hiring Model Keeps Failing
Part of the problem is structural. Companies default to recruiting experienced technicians from a shrinking pool, competing on wages while the underlying shortage only deepens. Spurlock advocates for what he calls the 80/20 rule for hiring — building a pipeline that doesn't rely solely on poaching talent that already exists, but developing new talent from the ground up.
This requires a willingness to look at candidates who don't fit the traditional mold and invest in accelerated training that gets them productive fast. It also requires companies to stop treating training as a risk and start treating the absence of training as the far greater one.
The Workforce Problem Isn't Going Away on Its Own
The skilled trades labor shortage is well-documented and getting worse. Spurlock's message isn't abstract — it's a call for field service and trades businesses to take concrete ownership of their workforce pipeline rather than waiting for the market to correct itself. The companies that build internal training capacity, view technicians as revenue assets, and adopt faster pathways to skilled labor will have a structural advantage over those still posting the same job listings and wondering why nobody's applying.
The cost of inaction, as Tim puts it, is already on your books. Most companies just haven't added it up yet.
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