Haute Lumière

Commerce · IV.08 · MMXXVI · daylight

La Bourse  /  Volume IV  /  Nº IV.08  /  Workbook — the Gainshare employee

WORKBOOK — THE LUMINOUS GAINSHARE EMPLOYEE

Chapter IV.08 · The Repair Economy

For the person working inside a gainshare arrangement — where a defined share of verified improvement returns to the people who created it — and whose work involves keeping things running. This workbook is about reading the mechanism from inside, contributing to it deliberately, and asking for what the arithmetic already says you are owed.

---

WHY THIS CHAPTER IS YOURS MORE THAN ANYONE'S

Every other chapter in this volume describes an improvement that somebody has to go and find. This one describes an improvement you are already producing, every day, and that almost certainly is not in your measure.

Here is the whole argument in one line from the chapter. In the refurbished-phone market, the marketplace that never touches a device reached EBITDA break-even and runs a 35.0 percent EBITDA margin in France; the refurbisher that employs the technicians ran a −8.47 percent net margin on €248.0 million of revenue. 43.47 points of margin, and all of it is the labour term.

Read that as a warning and as a lever, because it is both. It says: value in the repair economy accrues to whoever is not doing the repairing, unless somebody deliberately arranges otherwise. A gainshare is the arrangement. That is literally what it is for.

And there is a second line you should hold, from the chapter's honest negative. Repairing a £400.00 washing machine properly implies a technician wage of £9.01 an hour — 70.9 percent of the UK National Living Wage of £12.71 from April 2026. The arithmetic of repair, left alone, pushes your wage down. Not because anybody is hostile. Because w is the only term in the equation that the customer experiences as a price and you experience as a life.

So the skill this workbook teaches is: move the other terms, and claim the movement.

---

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Days 1–30: find where the gain actually comes from

Exercise 1.1 — Locate yourself in the equation (one hour)

          q · L_r · C_n / L_n  −  p  −  k
   w*  =  --------------------------------
                        h

Four of those terms are yours in whole or in part.

• h — how long the job takes, including diagnosis. Yours entirely.
• q — whether it holds first time. Yours almost entirely.
• k — the visit, the second visit, the wrong part ordered. Yours in part.
• p — which part you specify, new or reman. Yours in part.

Write down, for each, one thing you personally do that moves it. Then write down whether your scheme measures it. In most schemes the honest answer is no for at least three of the four, and that gap is your entire opportunity in this chapter.

Exercise 1.2 — Split diagnosis from fix (two weeks, five minutes a day)

On every job, record two times: when you knew what was wrong, and when it was working. Nothing else.

This is the single most valuable measurement available to you, and almost nobody takes it. Job time is usually recorded as one number, which means the part of the work that is actually skilled — the diagnosis — is invisible, and invisible work is unpaid work by default.

After two weeks you will be able to say something no one else in the building can: diagnosis is X percent of my job time, and on the model families I know well it is less than half what it is on the ones I do not. That sentence is a training business case, a rota argument and a pay argument, and you obtained it with a notebook.

Exercise 1.3 — Find the repeat (half a day)

Pull your own repeat-visit or repeat-failure rate for the last hundred jobs. Not the team's — yours. q sits in the denominator of the ratio, so a shop fixing 0.70 of jobs first time carries a 42.86 percent loading, 43 percent as the page prints it, on every job that does hold.

If your q is above the team's, you are subsidising the measure and not being paid for it. If it is below, you have just found your own improvement and you found it before anyone told you. Either answer is worth having and only one of them is uncomfortable for about a week.

Exercise 1.4 — The volunteer benchmark (one evening)

Community repair publishes its results: 53.0 percent fix rate across 208,491 logged attempts by 1,158 groups at 19,986 events in 31 countries. That is volunteers, without a parts inventory, at about 10.43 attempts an event.

Compare your own rate to it, honestly. The gap between you and a volunteer is what your employer is actually buying: tooling, parts access and accumulated fault knowledge. Knowing the size of that gap is knowing the size of your contribution, and it is a number you can say out loud without it sounding like a boast, because it is arithmetic.

---

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–45: compute what you are owed

Exercise 2.1 — Price one hour of your own h reduction (90 minutes)

Take a model family you know well. Estimate the hours a competent stranger would take on its commonest fault, and the hours you take. The difference is your contribution, per job, in hours.

Now convert it. Multiply by the number of those jobs the business does in a year, and by the loaded charge-out rate — not by your wage. The published US gap between the two is instructive: an average shop rate of $132.00 an hour against a median technician wage of $24.34, a multiple of 5.4232.

That multiple is not a scandal. It pays for premises, parts float, insurance, the van and every unbilled hour. But it is the correct multiplier for the value of an hour you removed, because the hour you removed was a chargeable hour, and that is what you should be claiming against.

Exercise 2.2 — Compute the threshold on a job you do (one hour)

Take one real job and compute w, using the chapter's worked machine as your model: £400.00 new, 11-year life, 5 years of residual life, a £45.00 part, a £60.00 callout, 1.20 hours, 90 percent first-time fix gives A = £163.64 and w = £48.86 an hour.

Then run your own version, and then run it again with your diagnosis time instead of the standard. If your h is lower, w* is higher, and the category clears at a rate the standard says it does not. You have just demonstrated that a category is profitable because of you specifically, in a form a finance function can read.

Exercise 2.3 — The lever table, for your own work (one hour)

On the worked machine, each lever alone moves the threshold like this:

Notice the second and third rows. Those are the two you touch, and together they are worth nearly £99.00 an hour of threshold against £18.75 for halving the price of the part. The procurement negotiation everybody watches is worth less than the two things you do quietly.

Exercise 2.4 — The honest negative, applied to you (30 minutes)

Run the instrument on the cheapest thing you are ever asked to fix. The chapter's illustration is a €25.00 kettle: A = €8.00, w* = €4.00 an hour. No legal wage clears it.

Write down the categories in your own work that fail this test. Then take the list to whoever sets the job mix. You are not refusing work; you are removing loss-making work from a measure you are paid against, and the distinction is worth stating explicitly when you raise it.

---

PART THREE — DESIGN

Days 46–70: make the uncounted countable

Exercise 3.1 — Build the fault library and put your name on it (ongoing)

Every fault you have met, with its symptom, in one structured file. Model, symptom, what it turned out to be, how long the diagnosis took.

This is the asset. It lowers h for everyone who reads it, it raises q, and it is the only thing in the whole operation that compounds. Volunteers built a public data set of 208,491 records — which grew to 305,649, 46.6 percent in a year — with clipboards.

Two things matter about how you do this. First, do it in a form the business can adopt, not in a private notebook, because a private asset cannot be claimed in a gainshare. Second, put attribution in it. Not for vanity: a gainshare allocates a share of verified improvement, and verification needs a record of who produced what.

Exercise 3.2 — Propose a measure, in writing (two hours)

Draft a one-page proposal for adding first-time fix to your scheme's measure. Four parts, in this order:

1. The baseline. Your team's current q, measured over a stated period, from records that already exist.
2. The measure. First-time fix as a percentage, defined precisely enough that two people compute it identically. Say what counts as a repeat and what does not.
3. The value. Jobs per year multiplied by the loading a failed job carries — the 42.86 percent arithmetic from Exercise 1.3 — at the loaded rate.
4. The share. What proportion of the verified improvement returns to the team, and on what allocation basis.

Exercise 3.3 — Ask for the residual-life warranty (one conversation)

The chapter's finding is that residual life is the strongest lever by a distance. If your employer starts warranting L_r — twelve months, or the EU directive's guarantee extension after 31 July 2026, whichever is longer — three things happen at once: the threshold rises, the product becomes years of service rather than an hour of labour, and the quality of your work becomes a balance-sheet item rather than a matter of reputation.

That last one is the argument to make. A warranted residual life makes careful work financially visible, and financially visible work is the only kind a gainshare can pay for.

---

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Days 71–90: make it hold

Exercise 4.1 — Get it into the standing pack (one hour)

A measure reviewed monthly persists; one reviewed by exception does not. Ask for first-time fix and diagnosis time to appear on the same page as job volume. One page, four numbers, every month.

Exercise 4.2 — Recruit the second owner (one conversation)

One person keeping a fault library is a hobby; two is a practice. Recruit the second person by giving them the credit for the first improvement it produces. This costs you nothing and it is the only thing that makes the asset survive your own next job.

Exercise 4.3 — Watch the wage, specifically (ongoing)

This is the one to keep your eye on, and the chapter says why. Repair's arithmetic pushes down on w, and the pressure is structural rather than personal.

So watch for the three signs that a repair operation is solving its margin out of the wage: job times tightened without any change to the work; the good diagnosticians leaving; the mix drifting toward the categories the arithmetic refuses. A business that solves its margin out of the wage is consuming the only stock it has, and the technicians see it about a year before the accounts do.

Raise it early, in the form the chapter uses: the threshold, the loaded rate, the gap, the lever that closes it. Not as a grievance — as an operating finding.

Exercise 4.4 — Name the pleasure, and do not trade it (ongoing)

The reliable joy of this work is diagnosis: the ten minutes between it does not work and I know why, and the click when symptom and mechanism snap together. It is genuine and it is one of the reasons people stay.

It is also the thing most often offered in place of money. Take the pleasure. Do not accept it as payment. Both sentences are true at once and the chapter insists on both.

---

KNOW YOUR SCHEME — A CHECKLIST

Work through this once. Keep the answers.

Any blank row is a question worth asking, and asking it in this form — calmly, in writing, as a request for clarity rather than a challenge — is how a scheme gets better without anybody losing face.

---

THE CONVERSATION, SCRIPTED

"I've been recording something we don't currently count — diagnosis time separately from fix time, and my own first-time fix rate over the last hundred jobs. On these figures, the repeat loading is costing us about X a year. I've got a one-page proposal for measuring it and for what share of the improvement comes back to the team. Can I leave it with you?"

That is the whole conversation. Note what it does not contain: no grievance, no comparison with another employer, no argument about fairness in the abstract.

You are arriving with a baseline, a number and a proposal — which is exactly what the executive in the parallel workbook is being taught to arrive with. That is not a coincidence. It is the point of the whole volume: the practitioner and the corporation are not operating different economics, only different vocabularies, and in this chapter they are operating the same equation from opposite sides of the same hour.

---

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

1. Think of a repair that went unusually well. How did we know what was wrong, and how long did the knowing take compared with the fixing?
2. What do we do here that visibly keeps things working and is counted nowhere?
3. Which of us is fastest to a fault on which model family, and how does anyone else find that out today?
4. When has a job we declined turned out to be the right decision, and who made the call?
5. What would we need to record, starting this month, to be able to prove in a year that we are better than we were?
6. If residual life were warranted on our work, what would we change about how we do it — and would we be proud of that change or uneasy about it?
7. Which part of the job is genuinely enjoyable, and what would it take to have more of that in a week?
8. What would we ask for if we knew the arithmetic supported it — and what arithmetic would we need to show?