Trades PaintersHiring and team

Painter Business HiringYou can find someone who can roll. Finding someone who cuts in clean and turns up is the job.

Hiring for painting business owners: what to pay under the award, how to find a painter who can actually cut in, and how to keep an apprentice long enough to be worth what you put into them. Built for Australian and New Zealand painting businesses.

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A painted scene of a painter in whites on a step ladder, cutting in the verandah of a Victorian terrace with iron lacework above him

The week this is about

Sound Like Your Painting Business?

You cannot tell who can paint until they start

The resume says ten years. Day one you watch him load the brush and you already know. By day three you are following him around with a sanding block and doing the cut in yourself, on a job you priced for one painter.

The award is a maze and you are guessing

Painters fall under the Building and Construction General On-site Award MA000020, with classification levels, apprentice percentages by year, adult apprentice rates and tool, industry and travel allowances. You have been paying a flat hourly rate and hoping it covers it.

You train them and they leave

Four years of teaching an apprentice to prep properly, cut a line and mix a batch, and the week he gets his ticket he goes out on his own quoting against you on the same street. Nothing about the job made him want to stay.

A crew you cannot trust on a job without you means you are the quality control, forever, and the business never gets bigger than one painter.

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 inside the Learning Hub covers the whole chain: writing the ad, testing a painter before he is on a client's wall, paying the award correctly, and running a crew that does not need you standing over it. 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 Painting Business Hiring Actually Changes.

Three things painting business owners walk away able to do.

Test a painter's prep and cut in before you put him on a client's job.

Pay the award correctly, allowances included, without guessing.

Run a crew that hits your prep standard when you are not 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

Painter Business Hiring, Answered.

What do I have to pay a painter and an apprentice legally?

Painters are covered by the Building and Construction General On-site Award MA000020. The Fair Work Ombudsman publishes the pay guide with tradesperson rates, apprentice rates as a percentage by year, adult apprentice rates and the tool, industry and travel allowances. Check it each 1 July, then make sure your charge-out rate carries that cost.

When should a painting business put on its first employee?

When you are turning away work you would have made money on, and the numbers show the wage plus on costs is covered before you are flat out. Most owners hire too late, out of panic on a big job.

How do I stop apprentices leaving the week they get their ticket?

Give them something the bloke down the road cannot: a clear path, real responsibility on a job, and a reason to see a future in your business rather than a ute of their own. That is leadership, and it is trainable.

Painters

The Other Ways We Help Painters.

Training

Join the Waitlist to Work With Greg.