Most field service operators know their revenue number. Fewer know their utilization number. And almost none of them know what a good utilization number looks like for their specific trade.
That’s the gap this report closes.
Over the past year, we pulled anonymized operational data from 40 high-volume operators running on Shwego — drain cleaning companies, septic pumping operations, and pest control routes. We looked at one metric across all of them: how much of a technician’s paid working day is actually spent on productive activity — on jobs, en route to jobs, or actively dispatched.
What we found was consistent enough to publish as benchmarks. Here’s what good looks like — and where most operations leak time they don’t know they’re losing.
How We Define Utilization
Before the numbers, a definition.
Technician utilization rate = (productive hours ÷ total hours on clock) × 100
Productive hours include time spent actively on a job and drive time between dispatched jobs. They do not include time waiting at the yard, time between jobs with no assignment, or time spent on calls with dispatch figuring out the next job.
A tech clocked in for 8 hours who spends 6.8 of those hours on jobs or actively en route is running at 85% utilization. The remaining 1.2 hours — 72 minutes — is idle time. In isolation that sounds fine. Across a fleet of 12 techs running 250 days a year, that’s 4,320 hours of paid idle time annually. At $25/hour fully loaded, that’s $108,000 in labor cost producing zero revenue.
That’s why utilization is the metric that serious operators watch — and why the difference between 70% and 85% is not a rounding error.
Drain Cleaning: The Benchmark Is 83%
Of the three verticals we analyzed, drain cleaning operations showed the highest average utilization — 83% across the operators in our data set. The top quartile ran at 88–91%.
Why does drain cleaning trend high? Job duration is short and predictable. A standard snake call runs 30–60 minutes. Routing density in most service areas is high — jobs cluster geographically because drain problems concentrate in older neighborhoods and commercial corridors. And the repeat-customer rate means dispatchers are often pre-assigning jobs to techs who know the property.
Where drain cleaning operations leak utilization:
The biggest gap we saw was morning startup. Operations where techs arrived at the yard, got briefed, and left between 8:15 and 8:45am were consistently running 6–8 points below operations where techs received their full day’s assignments the night before and left the yard by 7:30am.
The math on that is straightforward. A tech leaving 30 minutes late loses roughly one job per day depending on average duration. At 250 working days, that’s 250 jobs per tech per year sitting on the table because of a dispatch preparation problem — not a capacity problem.
The second leak: unassigned mid-day gaps. When a job cancels or runs short and the next job isn’t pre-loaded, the tech calls the dispatcher, the dispatcher finds something, assigns it, and the tech drives. That sequence averages 14 minutes of idle time in our data. In a 10-tech drain operation running 5 cancellations or early completions per day, that’s 70 minutes of idle time daily that a pre-built schedule buffer would eliminate.
Septic Pumping: The Benchmark Is 79%
Septic operations run at lower utilization than drain cleaning by nature — trucks are larger, routes are less dense, and pump-out jobs take longer than a snake call. The average across our septic operators was 79%, with the top quartile reaching 84–86%.
The utilization gap in septic is almost entirely a routing problem.
Septic trucks cover large geographic areas. A poorly sequenced route — one where a driver backtracks across their territory or takes jobs out of geographic order — adds 20–40 minutes of unproductive drive time per day compared to an optimized route. That’s 2–4 utilization points sitting in the routing sequence, not in the driver’s productivity.
Where septic operations leak utilization:
The biggest gap we found was between operations that pre-plan routes the evening before versus operations that dispatch reactively throughout the day. Reactive dispatch in septic creates two problems: techs receive jobs out of geographic sequence, and there’s inherent lag between job completion and the next assignment.
Operations in our top quartile had one thing in common: the next day’s full route was built and assigned before 6pm the previous evening. Drivers left the yard knowing their full day. Dispatchers spent their morning managing exceptions — not building routes from scratch while trucks sat waiting.
The second leak was inspection-to-repair conversion lag. When a driver flagged a baffle issue or drain field problem during a pump-out and there was no system to immediately schedule the follow-up, that finding sat unaddressed for days or weeks. The driver’s next visit to that property started cold. No history, no context, no efficiency. Operations with linked job records — where a finding at job completion automatically creates a follow-up — ran measurably tighter because techs arrived at repair jobs fully briefed.
Pest Control: The Benchmark Is 76%
Pest control showed the widest variance of the three verticals — a range of 61% at the bottom quartile to 87% at the top. The average was 76%.
The variance tells the story. Pest control utilization is almost entirely a function of recurring schedule density. Operations with tightly packed recurring treatment routes — customers scheduled at consistent frequencies with minimal geographic spread — run at the high end. Operations dispatching reactively, mixing emergency calls into recurring routes without a buffer system, run at the low end.
Where pest control operations leak utilization:
The primary leak is what we call schedule dilution. When emergency one-time calls get inserted into a recurring treatment route without a structured buffer, they disrupt the sequence and add drive time to every tech on that route. Operations that reserved a defined daily capacity for emergency calls — and dispatched them separately from recurring routes — ran 8–11 points higher in utilization than operations that inserted emergencies ad hoc.
The second leak is customer-not-home time. In pest control, a tech arriving at a property where no one is home — when interior access is required — results in a failed stop that costs the full drive time without producing revenue. Operations in our top quartile had a pre-call confirmation system that reduced failed stops to under 3% of scheduled visits. Operations without it ran failed stop rates of 9–14%, each one a utilization hit of 15–25 minutes depending on drive time.
The third leak, consistent across all three verticals but most pronounced in pest control: no-system-for-findings. When a tech observes a new pest issue, recommends a follow-up treatment, and that recommendation has no place to live in the dispatch system, it disappears. The revenue disappears with it. And the tech’s next visit to that property starts with no context from the last one.
What the Top Quartile Does Differently
Across all three verticals, the operations running in the top quartile of utilization shared four operational practices. None of them required additional headcount. All of them required discipline and the right system.
1. They build tomorrow’s board today. High-utilization operations don’t start the morning from scratch. The next day’s schedule is built, sequenced, and assigned before the last truck rolls back into the yard. Dispatchers start each morning managing exceptions — not constructing the day.
2. They sequence jobs geographically, not chronologically. Low-utilization operations schedule jobs in the order they were booked. High-utilization operations sequence jobs by location — clustering nearby jobs together and routing techs through their territory in a logical geographic arc. The difference in drive time can be 30–45 minutes per tech per day.
3. They have a system for findings and follow-ups. Every observation a tech makes in the field that could generate future work — a baffle issue, a drain field flag, a new pest observation — gets captured in the job record and converted into a follow-up job before the tech leaves the property. Zero revenue leaks between visits.
4. They measure utilization weekly, not monthly. Top-quartile operations review utilization data weekly at minimum. They know which techs are running below benchmark, and they address it immediately — through routing adjustments, schedule density changes, or dispatch timing corrections — before a pattern becomes a habit.
Your Benchmark Targets
| Vertical | Floor | Benchmark | Top Quartile |
| Drain Cleaning | 72% | 83% | 88–91% |
| Septic Pumping | 68% | 79% | 84–86% |
| Pest Control | 61% | 76% | 83–87% |
If your operation is running below the floor for your vertical, you have a structural problem in your dispatch or routing workflow. If you’re between the floor and the benchmark, you have identifiable leaks that are fixable without adding headcount. If you’re at or above benchmark, the question is whether you can close the gap to top quartile — and what one additional utilization point is worth in annual revenue at your job volume.
The Revenue Translation
Here’s what these numbers mean in dollars, using a 10-tech drain cleaning operation as the model:
- 10 techs × 8 hours × 250 days = 20,000 labor hours per year
- At 72% utilization: 14,400 productive hours
- At 83% utilization: 16,600 productive hours
- Difference: 2,200 hours
At an average drain cleaning job duration of 45 minutes and an average ticket of $175:
- 2,200 hours ÷ 0.75 hours per job = 2,933 additional jobs
- 2,933 jobs × $175 average ticket = $513,275 in recoverable annual revenue
That’s the difference between 72% and 83% utilization in a 10-tech drain operation. Not from hiring more techs. Not from raising prices. From closing the gap between where your operation runs today and where the benchmark says it should run.
What to Do With This
If you’ve read this far, you probably already know which number you’re going to check first when you close this article.
Start there. Calculate your current utilization rate for last week. Compare it to the benchmark for your vertical. Identify the single biggest leak — morning startup lag, routing sequence, findings with no follow-up system, reactive emergency dispatch — and fix that one thing before you move to the next.
The operations in our top quartile didn’t get there by overhauling everything at once. They got there by measuring, identifying the biggest gap, closing it, and repeating the process until the number stopped moving in the wrong direction.
That’s operational control. And it starts with knowing your number.
Shwego is the field operations platform built for high-volume service contractors running 20–200 jobs a day. If you want to see what your utilization data looks like on a live dispatch operation, book a demo.
Until next time,
-Sam
