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.

Have a chat with Greg

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.

A chat with Greg

Talk to Greg about anything in your trade business. Places are limited, and it is by application.

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.

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.

Greg Allan mid-explanation with his hands open, talking to a trade business owner across a desk

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.

Illustration: a trade business owner standing over three office staff buried in paperwork at night. — The old way
More customers meant more people doing your computer work, and you paying for all of it.

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. 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 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

Have a Chat With Greg About Your Business.