Your first apprentice will quit on Day 90. Here's how to keep the next one.

The first apprentice almost always quits.

Talk to any contractor who runs a two-to-five truck shop today and they'll tell you the same story: the first guy they hired washed out somewhere between week 8 and month 5. Usually around Day 90, give or take. The contractor will tell you the kid "wasn't cut out for it" or "had attitude problems" or "just stopped showing up one Tuesday."

That's not what happened.

What happened is that you — the owner — didn't know how to be a boss yet, because three months earlier you had never been one. The first apprentice quit because you were learning a job (managing people) on the job, and they were the curriculum.

The good news: the second apprentice doesn't have to quit. You learn this skill the same way you learned brazing — slowly, deliberately, and with a handful of habits that feel awkward at first and then become muscle memory.

The Day 90 quit pattern

Across HVAC, plumbing, and electrical, the attrition curve for first-time hires by a solo operator looks roughly the same:

Weeks 1-4: The honeymoon. They're stoked to have a job. You're stoked to have help. Everything is fine.
Weeks 5-8: The fog. They've stopped being useful by accident and haven't started being useful on purpose. You're frustrated. They can feel it.
Weeks 9-13: The cliff. Something small happens — a missed inspection, a chewed-out moment, a Saturday they didn't want to work — and they ghost. Or they tell you they got "a better offer."
Months 4-6: The drift. If they survived the cliff, this is when the quiet quitting starts. They show up but they're already looking.

The 90-day mark is the danger zone. By then, the novelty is gone, the pay isn't a surprise anymore, and they've started noticing all the things about the job you forgot to tell them.

What apprentices actually want (it's not the bonus)

When solo operators lose their first apprentice, the next thing they almost always do is raise the starting wage by $3/hour. They think it's a money problem.

It's almost never a money problem.

Surveys of trade apprentices who quit in their first year consistently turn up the same four reasons — and pay is usually 4th or 5th on the list:

"I didn't feel like I was learning anything." They got hired thinking they'd become a journeyman. They spent 90 days holding flashlights and sweeping the truck.
"I never knew if I was doing a good job." No feedback, no praise, no path. Silence reads as disapproval.
"My boss was unpredictable." Calm on Monday, blowing up on Wednesday, normal again Friday. They couldn't read you.
"I felt like a burden, not a teammate." Every question got a sigh. Every mistake got a lecture. They stopped asking questions, which made the mistakes worse.
(Then, pay.)

You can fix items 1-4 for free. Item 5 is the only one a raise solves, and it doesn't solve it for long.

Note: A 22-year-old apprentice who quits your shop for $2/hour more at a bigger shop almost never tells you the real reason. The real reason is they got tired of feeling stupid. The $2/hour was the excuse.

The boring habits that keep people for years

None of these are clever. None of them are from a leadership book. All of them work, and all of them are skipped by 80% of first-time bosses because they feel unnecessary when there are only two people in the company.

1. The 15-minute Monday morning

Every Monday, before anyone touches a truck, sit down for 15 minutes. Coffee, donut, whatever. Cover three things:

What we're doing this week. Walk through the calendar. Which jobs, which days, who's doing what. They should leave knowing the shape of their week, not just today.
What I want you to focus on. One specific skill or area. "This week I want you to lead the diagnostic on every service call. I'll back you up but you're driving." Tiny, specific, learnable.
What's on your mind. Open question. Wait through the silence. They will not answer the first time. They will answer the third time, once they believe you're really asking.

That's it. Fifteen minutes. The first three weeks it'll feel forced. By week six it's the most important meeting you have all week, and you will notice when you miss one because the whole week feels off.

2. End-of-day feedback in one sentence

Before they get out of the truck at the end of the day, give them one sentence of feedback. Just one.

"You handled that homeowner who was hovering really well today."
"The way you torqued those flares — back off about a quarter turn. You're crushing the gasket."
"You crushed it on the diag. The capacitor call was clean."

It doesn't have to be deep. It has to be honest, specific, and daily. Apprentices who get this consistently report — years later — that this was the single thing that made them feel like they were getting better.

Most bosses skip this because they're tired at the end of the day and they assume "no news is good news." For a 23-year-old who just spent 9 hours sweating in an attic wondering if they're cut out for this, no news is bad news.

3. Tell them the plan

Apprentices want a path. Sit down in their first week and tell them, in writing, what the next two years look like:

"First 6 months: ride-along, parts, tools, basic diag. You'll learn refrigerant handling and we'll get you EPA 608 certified by month 4."
"Months 6-12: you'll be running simple service calls solo. I'll set you up with the next-level license study materials and pay for the exam."
"Year 2: full installs alongside me. Raise to $X. By the end of year 2, you're a journeyman."

Most solo operators don't do this because they don't know the plan themselves. The act of writing it down forces you to actually have one — which is good for the apprentice and even better for you.

Warning: If you can't articulate what your apprentice's job will look like in 12 months, they can't either. People don't stay in jobs that have no visible future. They stay in jobs where they can picture themselves a year from now and like the picture.

4. Praise in public, correct in private

This is old advice, and it works. Don't chew them out in front of a customer. Don't chew them out in front of another tech. Pull them aside. Be specific. Tell them what happened, what you needed instead, and what to do next time. Then move on.

And when they do something right where a customer can see it, say it out loud where the customer can hear it. "Mike here just caught something I would've missed — good eye." Costs nothing. Builds a person.

5. Pay them on time, every time, without drama

This sounds dumb but a startling number of small contractors are late on paychecks "just by a day or two" because cash flow is tight. Or they ask the apprentice to "wait until Friday this week, I'll get you Monday."

Never. Do. This.

For a 22-year-old with $300 in checking, a payroll delay is not a minor inconvenience — it's a vote of no confidence in the entire enterprise. Set up direct deposit. Use a real payroll service. Pay on the same day, every time, no matter what. If cash is that tight, the problem is your pricing, not your payroll calendar.

When to fire fast vs when to coach

Sometimes the apprentice isn't a fit. That happens. Not every kid wants to be in HVAC, and finding out at month two is better than finding out at year two.

Fire fast if:

They lie. Once. About anything.
They steal. Tools, time, parts — anything.
They're unsafe and don't take correction. Ladder safety, ladder safety, ladder safety.
They've been told the same thing three times and it keeps happening.
A customer files a complaint about their conduct (not their skill — their conduct).

Coach, don't fire, if:

They're slow. Slow is fixable.
They're nervous around customers. That's coachable.
They're making technical mistakes. Of course they are — they're an apprentice.
They asked you the same question twice. They needed to hear it again.
They had a bad week. Adults have bad weeks.

The mistake most first-time bosses make is the inverse of this list: they coach the liar (because firing feels harsh) and they fire the nervous kid (because they confuse nervousness for incompetence). Reverse it.

The compounding effect of keeping them

A good apprentice you keep for three years is worth roughly 10x a good apprentice you keep for one year. Here's why:

Year 1: They cost you money. You're training, supervising, fixing.
Year 2: They pay for themselves. They're running their own service calls, you're billing their hours.
Year 3: They are billing alongside you at near-journeyman productivity, and now you can take a Wednesday off without the business stopping.

That third year is the entire reason you hired someone in the first place. You can't get to year three with a year-one mindset about retention.

Where most owners actually lose the apprentice

Talk to apprentices who quit and you'll find a pattern: it's almost never the technical work. It's the chaos.

The dispatcher (you) sending them to a job where the permit was never pulled. The customer they show up to who was told a different time than what's on the schedule. The Friday at 4:30 when you call and tell them they have to go pick up a part across town because the wholesaler closed early. The Saturday morning install where the inspection wasn't booked so the whole crew sat for two hours.

Every one of those moments tells the apprentice: this place isn't run well. And once they decide that, they're already looking.

You can be the best teacher in the world about brazing. If the schedule is chaos, they're gone.

Most apprentices don't quit because of the work. They quit because of the chaos around the work — missed permits, rescheduled inspections, jobs that can't start on time. PermitPress handles the permit side so your shop runs like one that's worth staying at. Get permits off your plate →

The 90-day checklist

If you have an apprentice right now and Day 90 is coming up fast, do these five things this week:

Schedule a 30-minute sit-down for Friday. Tell them it's a check-in, not a review. No surprises.
Ask three questions and shut up. "What's been the best part of the first 90 days? What's been the worst? What would make month four better than month three?" Write down their answers. Don't argue with any of them.
Give them a real raise. Not because they earned it. Because they survived 90 days and you want them to survive 365. Even $1/hour is a signal.
Write down the next 90 days. What they'll learn. What you expect. What they can expect from you. Hand it to them on paper.
Schedule next Monday's 15-minute check-in. Recurring. On the calendar. Until you retire.

The bottom line

You will lose your first apprentice. You probably already have. That's tuition.

The second one doesn't have to walk. They quit when they feel invisible, stuck, or part of a chaotic operation. Fix those three things — most of it through habits that take less than 30 minutes a week — and you'll keep them long enough to become the kind of shop where good people apply, stay, and eventually train the next generation for you.

Which, by the way, is the only way out of the truck.