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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
More customers meant more people doing your computer work, and you paying for all of it.
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 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.
Questions
Painter Business Hiring, Answered.
What do I have to pay a painter and an apprentice legally?
When should a painting business put on its first employee?
How do I stop apprentices leaving the week they get their ticket?
Painters
The Other Ways We Help Painters.
Painter Business Training
Structured training that turns what painters know on the tools into a business that runs properly.
CoachingPainter Business Coaching
Greg Allan in your corner, holding painters to the plan. By application.
SystemsPainter Business Systems
The documented process that lets the work happen properly when painters are not standing there.
The free appPainter Business App
Lessons, tools and a room full of other owners, free for painters with an active ABN.
Marketing and leadsPainter Business Marketing
How painters get the phone ringing with the jobs worth having, not just the cheap ones.
Pricing and profitPainter Business Pricing
The number painters should actually be charging, worked out properly rather than guessed.
Have a Chat With Greg About Your Business.
An hour with Greg, one on one, about anything in your trade business. By application: if his diary is full, you join his waitlist and he invites you. He only takes owners who are committed.