Trades LandscapersHiring and team

Landscaper Business HiringYou cannot get off the tools until someone else can run the site, and hiring has burnt you before.

Hiring and leading a landscaping crew. What the Gardening and Landscaping Services Award actually costs you, how apprentices and casuals are paid, and how to build a crew that can set out, run and finish a job without you standing on it.

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A painted scene of a landscaping crew screeding a bed of sand along a rail, stacked pavers waiting beside them

The week this is about

Sound Like Your Landscaping Business?

You do not know what a crew member really costs

The hourly rate is the start of it. Then there is super, workers compensation, leave, the tool allowance, the vehicle allowance and the hours they are on site but not producing. You priced the job off the wage and the on-costs took the margin.

The last one you hired lasted a season

They came on in spring, could not read a level, needed watching all day and left when it got cold. You went back to doing it yourself and told yourself hiring does not work, when what did not work was having no process for it.

Nobody on the crew can run a site but you

You have good workers who will do anything you point them at, and not one who can set out a job, order materials, talk to the client and make a call on a wall detail. So you are still on every site, every day, forever.

Without a crew that can run a site, your landscaping business has a hard ceiling: it is exactly as big as the hours you can personally stand on the ground.

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 a crew actually costs, how to hire on purpose and how to grow a leading hand who can run a site. 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 Landscaping Business Hiring Actually Changes.

Three things landscaping business owners walk away able to do.

Cost a crew member fully, including award allowances, super and workers compensation.

Hire to a written process instead of taking whoever answers the ad in spring.

Train a leading hand who can set out and run a site without you.

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

Landscaper Business Hiring, Answered.

What award covers landscaping employees in Australia?

The Gardening and Landscaping Services Award MA000101, published by the Fair Work Commission. It sets the classification levels, casual loading, overtime, and allowances including a weekly tool allowance and a per kilometre vehicle allowance. Fair Work reissues the pay guide each 1 July after the Annual Wage Review, so check it every year before you set your charge-out rate.

How much do I pay an apprentice landscaper, and what about an adult apprentice?

Apprentice rates under MA000101 are a percentage of the trade rate and step up each year, and an adult apprentice starts at 80% of the Level 4 rate in year one. Casuals carry a 25% loading on top. Get the current figures from the Fair Work pay guide, then price the job so the crew cost is covered rather than absorbed.

Should I use subcontractors or put a crew on wages?

Subbies suit variable build work and cost you nothing in the quiet months, but you carry TPAR reporting obligations and less control over how the job runs. Wages give you a crew you can train into a leading hand, and a fixed cost through winter. The answer depends on your work mix, and it is exactly the sort of call to bring to Greg.

Landscapers

The Other Ways We Help Landscapers.

Training

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