Trades CarpentersHiring and team

Carpenter Business HiringYou need a second chippy, but the last one you put on cost you more than he ever made you.

Hiring for carpentry businesses: putting on an apprentice or a qualified carpenter, paying them right under MA000020, working out whether a subbie is really a contractor, and keeping good people once you have finally got them.

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A painted scene of three carpenters on a slab standing timber wall frames upright, tool belts on, a nail gun and offcuts at their feet

The week this is about

Sound Like Your Carpentry Business?

You cannot work out what a chippy really costs

The award rate is one number, then there is the industry allowance, the tool allowance, super, workers compensation, leave and the days it rains. You have never added it up properly, so you do not know whether the next hire pays for himself.

You hope the ABN makes them a contractor

Three blokes turn up in your ute, use your tools and work the hours you set, and they invoice you weekly on an ABN. Under the whole of relationship test that arrangement may not be contracting at all, and the super and the penalties land on you.

You train them and they leave

You take an apprentice from first year to fourth, teach him to set out, frame and fix out, and six months after he gets his ticket he goes subbying for the builder you work for. Nothing about the job gave him a reason to stay.

Without a crew you can rely on, the business never grows past what your own hands can build, and every holiday costs you a month of income.

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.

The Academy's hiring, team and leadership training covers what a carpenter actually costs, how to recruit, how to induct and how to keep people. 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 Carpentry Business Hiring Actually Changes.

Three things carpentry business owners walk away able to do.

Work out the true weekly cost of a carpenter or apprentice before you hire

Classify your crew correctly so super and penalties do not land later

Hand a job to a leading hand and have it finish without you on site

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

Carpenter Business Hiring, Answered.

What does an apprentice carpenter actually cost me each week?

More than the headline wage. Fair Work sets apprentice rates as a percentage of the qualified rate by year, and MA000020 adds allowances on top. Then there is super, workers compensation, training time, tools and the productivity of a first year on site. Add it all up before you commit, not after the first pay run.

Is my regular subbie actually an employee?

Possibly. Since 2024 the test looks at the whole of the relationship, not just the contract wording, so control over hours, whose tools are used and how integrated the person is all count. An ABN does not settle it, and sham contracting carries penalties. Check it against the Fair Work and ATO guidance before your next TPAR.

How do I keep a good carpenter once he has his ticket?

Give him something the builder down the road cannot: a clear role, a path to leading hand, predictable pay above the award floor and work he is proud of. That only exists if the business has systems and margin to fund it.

Carpenters

The Other Ways We Help Carpenters.

Training

Join the Waitlist to Work With Greg.