Leading and keeping a team

Hiring someone is the easy half. What decides whether the hire works is what happens in the weeks after they start, and "watch me, then go and do it yourself" has never been a training method.

Good onboarding starts before day one, with the van, the tools and the uniform ready, so the person arrives expected rather than accommodated. From there the useful pattern is three phases: they watch, they do it with you, they do it alone. The same principle scales to the whole business through a documented instruction manual, where every non-negotiable role carries a written task, an owner, a department and a time allocation, so a departure is a gap to fill rather than a crisis.

Pay and progression are the other half of retention. A levelling system gives every tradesperson a written path from standard through to best, with the criteria stated in numbers they can see, which takes the argument out of pay reviews and gives you a measurable way to lift profit at each step. A balanced scorecard extends that past raw output to retention, growth, people metrics, margin and safety, which is what stops commission alone quietly rewarding the brilliant jerk. And the real test of all of it is a holiday: go away, note what breaks, fix those gaps, and repeat until nothing breaks.