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. Tradie Teams and Freedom Fighter 1:1 coach you through the hard conversations.
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
The coaching goes into 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.
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
A coach who has run a trade business, in your corner, holding painters to the plan.
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.
Talk It Through First.
The Crew, daily Q&A, starter courses and your AI Coaching Call. Free with an active ABN. No card, no trial clock.
Turning over $10k a month or more? Thirty minutes, one on one, on what AI would actually do in your business, which part to build first, and how fast the Pathway gets you there.