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.

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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.

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 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

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