Trades HVAC TechniciansHiring and team

HVAC Business HiringTicketed techs are hard to find, and good ones leave a business that runs on chaos.

Hiring for air conditioning and refrigeration owners who need more hands and cannot afford another bad one. Getting the award classification right, paying apprentices properly, building a crew that can commission without you, and keeping the people you train.

Have a chat with Greg

A painted scene of an air conditioning technician kneeling at an outdoor condenser unit against a brick wall, gauges and vacuum pump beside him

The week this is about

Sound Like Your Air Conditioning Business?

You hire in a panic in the middle of summer

The diary is full, a tech has gone, and you take whoever answers the ad. Two months later you are covering their callbacks and paying for a ute they cannot fill a day with. Hiring under pressure always costs more than the wage.

You are not certain which award covers your techs

The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes an article on award coverage for air conditioning tradespersons and refrigeration mechanics because it genuinely is confusing. Electrical, Manufacturing or Building and Construction, each with different rates, allowances and penalties. Get it wrong and the back pay is yours.

You train an apprentice for four years and lose them

You carry them through the slow first year, put them through their handling licence, get them useful, and then a bigger outfit offers them more money. There is nothing holding them, because you never built anything worth staying for.

The wrong hire in a busy season costs you twice: once in wages, and again in the customers who quietly stop calling.

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 covers the whole team side. Hiring, team and leadership training shows you how to write the role, run the interview, classify the position and onboard properly. 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.

A chat with Greg

Talk to Greg about anything in your trade business. Places are limited, and it is by application.

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.

Why you get me

I built the coaching company everyone else runs. Then I took it apart.

Most coaching companies work the same way. You enquire, you get a salesperson. You sign up, you get a coach who has never run a trade business.

I know, because I built one. I grew the Academy to 35 staff, a CEO and 15 coaches. It ran without me.

And I hated it. The bigger it got, the further I was from the owners I started it for.

What gets me up in the morning is getting under the hood of a trade business and helping the owner hit their goals in the least time possible.

So I restructured the whole thing.

When you enquire, you speak to me. If you are accepted into the Academy, you work with me. Directly.

And with agentic AI, the results come sooner than most owners can imagine.

Places are limited. I only take on owners who are committed and ready to do the work.

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

Who you will be talking to

I built Response Electricians in Perth into a 30+ staff business with more than 1,950+ five-star reviews.

A general manager runs it day to day. I live in Byron Bay.

I have trained 9,000+ trade business owners across Australia and New Zealand.

What AI actually changes

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 your computer work, and you paying for all of it.

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. Agents run the office your way.

The old way

Grow, then hire people to do the computer work.

Every new customer brought more quoting, invoicing, chasing, scheduling and reporting.

So you hired people to do it. Office staff, bookkeepers, admin.

None of it is billable, and every hire costs wages, sick leave and another person to manage.

Profit and time only grew as fast as you could add people.

The new way

Keep the human work. Give everything else to agents.

Your people do what only people can do: looking after customers and leading the team.

Everything else goes to agents that do it your way, instantly, any time it is needed.

No sick leave. No capacity problems. They scale as far as the business does.

So the only people you add are the ones facing your customers and your team.

A human-centred business that runs on systems you build in minutes. Nobody still running the old way can compete with it.

What changes

What Air Conditioning Business Hiring Actually Changes.

Three things air conditioning business owners walk away able to do.

Classify a technician or apprentice correctly and know the true hourly cost before you offer

Run a hiring process you can repeat in autumn instead of scrambling in January

Set out a pay and progression path that gives a good tech a reason to stay

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

HVAC Business Hiring, Answered.

Which award applies to a refrigeration mechanic I want to employ?

It turns on what your business does, not only on the job title. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes dedicated guidance because the work can fall under the Electrical, Manufacturing or Building and Construction award, and the Building and Construction award has an air conditioning and refrigeration industry allowance. Confirm coverage first. The Academy's training then shows you how to cost the role properly.

Is it worth taking on an apprentice in an air conditioning business?

It can be, but only with a plan. An apprentice cannot work unsupervised on refrigerant, so year one costs you supervision time as well as wages. The return comes in years three and four, and only if you still have them. The Academy's training covers the cost model, the supervision structure and how to keep them once they are useful.

How do I stop my best technician leaving for a bigger company?

Money is rarely the whole story. Techs leave businesses that are disorganised, where jobs run late because nobody planned them and the ute is never stocked. Fix the systems, set a clear progression path, and pay to the market you benchmarked.

HVAC Technicians

The Other Ways We Help HVAC Technicians.

Training

Have a Chat With Greg About Your Business.