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.
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.
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. Tradie Teams puts you next to owners who have already built a crew, and Freedom Fighter 1:1 builds your team plan with you.
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 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
Questions
Plumber Business Hiring, Answered.
How much do I have to pay a plumbing apprentice?
Are there incentives for taking on a plumbing apprentice?
How do I stop losing plumbers to bigger companies?
Plumbers
The Other Ways We Help Plumbers.
Plumber Business Training
Structured training that turns what plumbers know on the tools into a business that runs properly.
CoachingPlumber Business Coaching
A coach who has run a trade business, in your corner, holding plumbers to the plan.
SystemsPlumber Business Systems
The documented process that lets the work happen properly when plumbers are not standing there.
The free appPlumber Business App
Lessons, tools and a room full of other owners, free for plumbers with an active ABN.
Marketing and leadsPlumber Business Marketing
How plumbers get the phone ringing with the jobs worth having, not just the cheap ones.
Pricing and profitPlumber Business Pricing
The number plumbers 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.