Trades BuildersHiring and team

Builder Business HiringFinding a chippy who turns up is hard. Keeping one who could run a site is harder.

Hiring for building companies: what you legally have to pay under the Building and Construction General On-site Award, what an apprentice really costs after incentives, how to find a supervisor who can run a site, and how to keep the good ones when the next builder offers more.

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A painted scene of a timber framed house on its slab with the roof trusses up, builders working along the top plate against an open sky

The week this is about

Sound Like Your Building Business?

You are still the only real supervisor

Three sites running and every sequencing call, every subcontractor no-show and every client question comes back to you. You cannot take a job further away because there is nobody who can run one without you standing on it.

Award rates and allowances are a guessing game

MA000020 sets the rates, and on top sit tool, travel, meal and industry allowances that most builders apply by feel. Get the adult apprentice rate or an allowance wrong across a crew and the back-pay bill is real.

You train them and the next builder takes them

Four years teaching an apprentice to set out, frame and finish properly, and he leaves not long after getting his ticket for a bit more an hour. There is no plan for what he was working towards, so there was nothing holding him.

While you are the only person who can run a site, the company cannot grow, cannot be sold and cannot survive a fortnight without you.

A trade business owner working alone at the kitchen table late at night, laptop open and paperwork spread across the table, work boots and tool bag by the door

Hiring and team

Here Is What We Do About It.

Hiring, team and leadership training in the Learning Hub covers what to pay, how to recruit and how to build a crew that stays. Greg works through the big hiring calls with you directly. And the hires have changed: agents can now do the quoting, invoicing and chasing your way, so the people you add are the ones facing your customers and leading your crew.

The Academy waitlist

The Academy is at full capacity. Join the waitlist and when a place opens, Greg interviews the owners who look like the right fit.

Learning Hub

The full lesson library inside the Tradies App, self paced, $199/month.

Business Foundations

Weekly live sessions hosted by Greg Allan, where you bring your own numbers.

Free tool, no sign-up

Apprentice cost calculator

Wages and on-costs are the easy part. This adds the weeks they are at trade school, the on-site hours that never reach an invoice, and the supervision time that pulls a qualified tradesperson off their own work, then gives you what one billable apprentice hour actually costs. It runs in your browser and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Work out the real cost

How it works

Three Steps, Starting Tonight.

Step 1

Hire before you are desperate

Every bad hire in this industry happens in the same week: the week you were already too busy. The training covers hiring on a plan instead of on a panic.

Step 2

Give them a system to follow

People do not fail because they are lazy. They fail because nobody wrote down what good looks like. That is why systems and hiring are the same problem.

Step 3

Lead them, then get off the tools

Greg works the bit that is genuinely hard: running a team when you were trained as a tradesperson, and letting go of work you can do faster yourself.

Greg Allan mid-explanation with his hands open, talking to a trade business owner across a desk

Why Greg

You speak to the owner who has already done it.

Greg built Response Electricians in Perth into a 30+ staff business with 1,950+ five-star reviews. A general manager runs it.

He has trained 9,000+ trade business owners across Australia and New Zealand.

He grew a coaching company to 35 staff, a CEO and 15 coaches, then cut it back so every owner deals with him directly.

Most coaching companies hand you to a salesperson, then to a coach who has never run a trade business. Here you get the owner.

Read how Greg built a trade business that runs without him

What changes for you

The old way. The new way.

Illustration: a trade business owner standing over three office staff buried in paperwork at night. — The old way
More customers meant more people doing the computer work, and more wages nobody invoices.

Illustration: a tradesman shaking hands with a homeowner in her driveway, his phone showing jobs quoted and invoiced. — The new way
You stay with your customers and your team. The office stops landing on you.

The old way

More jobs. More paperwork. Less of the owner left.

Most trade businesses grow the same way.

More jobs means more quoting, invoicing, chasing and scheduling.

None of it gets paid for.

So the owner does it at night, after a full day on site.

Or hires an office person to do it.

The office grows. The wages grow. The margin does not.

And the owner is still the one everything waits on.

Where we take you

More work. More profit. More of you left.

The phone rings with the jobs you want, at the price you set.

You grow when you're ready, never faster than the business can carry.

Every job is priced to make money, so the busy months show up in the bank.

The best tradies in your area want to work for you, and they stay.

The chasing, the paperwork and the 9pm admin stop landing on you.

The business runs the day. You pick which parts of it you're in.

Bigger, without the headaches. Getting bigger stops meaning getting busier.

What changes

What Building Business Hiring Actually Changes.

Three things building business owners walk away able to do.

Pay your carpenters, labourers and apprentices correctly under MA000020

Hire an apprentice knowing the wage, the incentives and the true cost to you

Build a supervisor who can run a site without you on it every day

A trade business owner watching his child play sport on a Saturday morning, coffee in hand and phone face down — Nights and weekends back

A trade business owner and his partner in the kitchen looking at a tablet showing the numbers going up — Work that actually pays

A trade business owner shaking hands with a new apprentice in the work yard — A good hire who stays

A trade business owner standing calmly in the yard while his crew load two utes behind him — Out of the middle of everything

9,000+tradies trained4.9★Google rating4.9★App Store rating

Questions

Builder Business Hiring, Answered.

What award covers builders and carpenters in Australia?

The Building and Construction General On-site Award, MA000020, administered by the Fair Work Commission. It sets base rates plus tool, travel, meal and industry allowances. Fair Work's pay guide listed a Level 1 base of $25.46 an hour from 1 July 2025. New Zealand has no award system: you use employment agreements and the statutory minimum wage.

What does it actually cost to put on an apprentice in 2026?

Less than the award rate suggests once incentives are counted. From 1 January 2026 the Key Apprenticeship Program offers up to $5,000 to employers and up to $10,000 to apprentices in housing construction, per Australian Apprenticeships. Note that adult apprentices must be paid at least the national minimum wage under Fair Work rules.

How do I get a supervisor I can trust to run a site?

You build one, usually from a leading hand who already knows your standard. That needs a written sequence, a defined claim and variation process, and a clear standard for what finished looks like, so you are handing over a system rather than your instincts. Our hiring and leadership training and Greg walk you through both halves.

Builders

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Training

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