ATS created a bonus and incentive program that benefits everyone
Through remodeling its bonus and incentive program, Advanced Tower Services was able to create a system that benefits the company and every employee—creating a better reward system for quality and efficient work.
Location: Albuquerque, NM
For over 25 years, Advanced Tower Services, LLC. has served the broader Albuquerque-area with full-service radio tower communications site construction and staffing.
Annual Revenue: $8M+
"Although our commission structure was generous to our team members, it did not incentivize individuals for behaviors that would be necessary to grow and maintain excellent customer relationships.”
— Lori Henz
Principal
Bonus and Incentive Program
Ascent is well-versed in designing incentive compensation programs specifically for construction companies to motivate and reward their key employees. Our customized programs are designed to motivate your employees to make positive contributions to the success of your company.
Refreshing the old incentives
ATS was looking to put a structured bonus program in place that incentivized key behaviors across the organization and especially with their project teams to drive project profitability and performance. They were ready to revise their compensation packages to align with the growth goals of their company.
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A new bonus incentive program
Ascent created a bonus incentive program that rewarded employees for performance above expectations and meeting specific milestones or goals set by management.
"Not only did Ascent provide us with an incredible insight into industries similar to ours, they also conducted a deep dive into our financials and what small changes could be made that would have a big impact in the areas that we shared were a concern for us."
— Lori Henz
Principal
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Accountability and sustained scalability
Ascent began this project by performing a detailed financial analysis to discover key areas of opportunity that would improve the profitability of their projects. Through a series of workshops, we helped Advanced uncover the key behaviors that were impacting profitability at the project level and determined ways to measure these key behaviors. This provided us with an objective system to measure employee performance and remove the subjective nature of their previous bonus structure.
For the bonus program, we next worked with Advanced to determine a funding structure at the project level that would create a pool of bonus money for the project team based on their contributions to a project’s success. From this, we were able to create a straightforward and easy-to-manage bonus “calculator” that could be used to determine the bonus pool amount and relative payout for each position on the team.
Ascent also helped write a narrative that could be shared with the employees so they were fully aware of how the system worked, which key behaviors would be measured, and what the payout would be for high-performing teams. Simple project data was loaded into this calculator to provide concrete examples to the team and gain buy-in.
Sales Commission Redesign
In parallel, we examined their current sales commission structure. The current system had many variables and, by design, incentivized sales of products which had varying levels of markup. This resulted in a lopsided commission structure which did not align with the sales goals of the company or support longterm customer relationships. In addition, the existing sales commission structure had overly rewarded their salespeople to the detriment of the company’s bottom line. Ownership was not surprised to learn that they had been paying well above industry average for sales commissions, and desired to reset the playing field so that salespeople could still make substantial commissions, but would be more in line with their competitors in the industry.
Over the course of several discussions and workshops, Ascent built a new sales commission structure with tiers for hitting benchmarks towards both individual and company sales goals. The new sales structure rewarded both individual sales and overall sales per year. Similar to the bonus program, a written narrative was developed and sample data was loaded into the new commission calculator. This was then shared with the sales team to gather their input and generate buy-in for the new program.
Meet the team on this project:
Adam Cooper
President
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