Trades PlumbersHiring and team

Plumber Business HiringYou cannot grow past two vans while you are still the best plumber in the business.

Hiring and team building for plumbing business owners who need another set of hands but have been burned before. Finding plumbers worth having, paying them right under the award, training apprentices who stay, and building a crew that runs a job without you.

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A painted scene of a plumber kneeling at a wall mounted hot water unit, working the copper pipework, ladder and tool bag beside him

The week this is about

Sound Like Your Plumbing Business?

Good plumbers are hard to find and easy to lose

The ones worth having are already working, and the mines or a bigger commercial outfit will outbid you on money alone. So you take who is available, carry them, then lose the good one you did train to someone offering an extra couple of dollars an hour.

You are not sure you are paying them legally

The Plumbing and Fire Sprinklers Award has apprentice percentages by year, plus tool, industry and travel allowances that move. You are paying a flat rate you think is generous and hoping it clears the award, which is not a position you want to be in.

Training an apprentice costs you a productive year

First year, they slow the job down and you double-check the work. By the time they can be left on a fit-off, they are looking around. You end up doing the training for the industry and wondering why you bother taking one on at all.

Stay a one man band and the business stops the day you do, whether that is a holiday, a bad back or the day you finally want out.

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: how to write the role, run the interview, induct properly and hold a plumber to a standard without becoming a bad boss. 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 Plumbing Business Hiring Actually Changes.

Three things plumbing business owners walk away able to do.

Hire a plumber against a written role instead of whoever is available

Check your pay rates and allowances against the award with confidence

Induct an apprentice so they are useful on site inside their first year

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

Plumber Business Hiring, Answered.

How much do I have to pay a plumbing apprentice?

Apprentice pay under the Plumbing and Fire Sprinklers Award (MA000036) is set as a percentage of the tradesperson rate, rising by year of the apprenticeship, with adult apprentice rules on top. Check the current Fair Work pay guide every 1 July. The Academy's training then shows you what that apprentice really costs once super, leave and allowances are counted.

Are there incentives for taking on a plumbing apprentice?

Yes. The Australian Government changed apprenticeship support from 1 January 2026, including a Priority Hiring Incentive worth up to $2,500 for eligible employers. Eligibility and occupation lists change, so check apprenticeships.gov.au for the current position before you budget on it, then work out the full cost of the hire with the incentive counted.

How do I stop losing plumbers to bigger companies?

You will not win every one on money alone, so compete on the things a big outfit cannot copy: a diary that finishes on time, work they are proud of, real training and a boss who is straight with them.

Plumbers

The Other Ways We Help Plumbers.

Training

Join the Waitlist to Work With Greg.