My Best Tech Just Quit 🤯

When I heard those words from my service manager, I felt my stomach drop.

It was the third “best tech” we’d lost that year.

Each one costs us:

• Over $7,500 in recruiting and retraining

• At least $22,000 in lost productivity

• And even more in customer frustration, schedule chaos, and plain-old stress

Some of our long-time clients were even asking for that one tech by name—and now he was gone.

Turnover had hit 30%.

One out of every three team members was walking out the door each year.

Something had to give.

So I dug in.

I spent weeks pouring over exit interviews, team surveys, performance reports… anything I could find to get to the root of the problem.

And here’s what I discovered:

The issue wasn’t who we were hiring. The issue was what we were (or weren’t) doing after we hired them.

We were spending a fortune on technical training (over $45,000 a year) but almost nothing on the skills that actually impact customer experience, performance, and team retention.

Even worse, I realized that 84% of our callbacks and complaints had nothing to do with technical failures.

They were caused by poor communication, bad judgment, or missed expectations.

That was a gut punch.

So we completely reworked how we develop our team, from onboarding to daily meetings to leadership tracks.