TradesElectriciansHiring and team
Electrician Business HiringThe right apprentice pays for himself. The wrong one costs you a year and a customer.
Hiring for electrical businesses: when to put on your first sparkie, what an apprentice really costs under the Electrical Award, how to run supervision so quality holds, and how to keep good people once the market comes for them.
The week this is about
Sound Like Your Electrical Business?
You cannot tell if you can afford the next hire
The work is there, but so is the wage, the super, the workers compensation, the allowances and a second van. You have run the numbers on the back of a docket three times and got a different answer each time, so you keep working Saturdays.
Every hire so far has come back on you
One did not turn up on Mondays, one could not be left on a board unsupervised, and one took your best domestic clients when he got his own licence. So now you do the hard jobs yourself and the business stays exactly the size of you.
Nobody knows what good looks like but you
There is no induction, no standard for how a job gets left, no review beyond a comment in the ute. So quality depends on which sparkie got the job, and you are the one going back to fix the callback on a Saturday morning.
Stay a business the size of one person and you carry every job, every callback and every quiet week yourself, until the body or the family runs out of patience.
Hiring and team
Here Is What We Do About It.
Hiring, team and leadership training in the Learning Hub covers what to pay under the Electrical Award, how to induct and supervise, and how to hold a standard. Tradie Teams puts you with owners who have already made these hires, and Freedom Fighter 1:1 gives you a dedicated expert for the big calls.
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 costHow it works
Three Steps, Starting Tonight.
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.
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.
Lead them, then get off the tools
The coaching goes into 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.
What changes
What Electrical Business Hiring Actually Changes.
Three things electrical business owners walk away able to do.
Work out the true hourly cost of a sparkie or apprentice before you hire
Run an induction and a job standard so quality does not depend on you
Build a pay and progression plan that keeps your best sparkie from leaving
Questions
Electrician Business Hiring, Answered.
When should I hire my first employee?
What do I have to pay under the Electrical Award?
How do I stop training sparkies who then leave and compete?
Electricians
The Other Ways We Help Electricians.
Electrician Business Training
Structured training that turns what electricians know on the tools into a business that runs properly.
CoachingElectrician Business Coaching
A coach who has run a trade business, in your corner, holding electricians to the plan.
SystemsElectrician Business Systems
The documented process that lets the work happen properly when electricians are not standing there.
The free appElectrician Business App
Lessons, tools and a room full of other owners, free for electricians with an active ABN.
Marketing and leadsElectrician Business Marketing
How electricians get the phone ringing with the jobs worth having, not just the cheap ones.
Pricing and profitElectrician Business Pricing
The number electricians should actually be charging, worked out properly rather than guessed.
Talk It Through First.
The Crew, daily Q&A, starter courses and your AI Coaching Call. Free with an active ABN. No card, no trial clock.
Turning over $10k a month or more? Thirty minutes, one on one, on what AI would actually do in your business, which part to build first, and how fast the Pathway gets you there.