Trades PlasterersHiring and team

Plasterer Business HiringGood setters are hard to find, harder to keep, and you have never had time to train one properly.

Hiring for plastering business owners: what the award actually requires you to pay, how to bring on an apprentice without it costing you a season, and how to build a crew that hangs and sets to your standard when you are not there.

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A painted scene of a plasterer reaching up to set the joints of a new plasterboard ceiling, the sheets still showing their stopping patches

The week this is about

Sound Like Your Plastering Business?

You are not sure what you are legally meant to pay

Plasterers sit at CW/ECW 3 under the Building and Construction General On-site Award, with allowances, apprentice year rates and a separate adult apprentice floor. You have been paying a flat cash figure and hoping nobody ever checks it.

The good ones leave and go out on their own

You train someone up for two years, get them setting to your standard, and then they buy a set of stilts and start quoting the same builders you work for. Nothing in your business ever gave them a reason to stay.

Hiring only happens when you are already drowning

You put someone on the week you cannot cope, so you take the first person who answers, teach them nothing, and put them on a job you have not checked. Six weeks later you are fixing their joints and wondering why you bothered.

A crew you cannot trust to set a job without you means you can never leave site, so the business stays the size of one pair of hands no matter how much work is on.

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 Learning Hub carries the hiring, team and leadership training: what to pay, how to induct, how to set a standard and how to hold 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 Plastering Business Hiring Actually Changes.

Three things plastering business owners walk away able to do.

Pay your crew and apprentices correctly under the award, every week

Induct a new hand so they set to your standard inside a month

Hire before you are desperate instead of during the worst week

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

Plasterer Business Hiring, Answered.

What award covers plasterers, and what classification do they sit at?

The Building and Construction General On-site Award MA000020 covers plastering work in Australia, and a qualified plasterer sits at the CW/ECW 3 classification. Apprentices have their own year by year rates, and adult apprentices have a separate floor. Check the current Fair Work pay guide, because the rates change. New Zealand has no award system, so pay sits in the employment agreement.

Is taking on a plastering apprentice worth the cost?

It is a real cost in the first year, and the government offsets part of it. Financial supports for Australian apprentices and their employers continued from 1 January 2026, so check what your apprentice attracts before you decide. The bigger question is whether you have a way to train them, which is the part most plastering businesses skip.

How do I stop trained setters leaving to start their own thing?

Some will go, and that is the trade. Fewer go when the work is steady, the pay is right, the standard is clear and there is somewhere to progress to, like leading hand or running a second crew.

Plasterers

The Other Ways We Help Plasterers.

Training

Join the Waitlist to Work With Greg.