Keeping Good Tradies

What losing one actually costs

Retention gets treated as a soft topic because the cost of losing someone never lands on a single invoice. It lands in five places instead:

• You pay the first year twice. Recruiting, inducting, kitting out and carrying someone through a run-in period where they're not covering themselves — you did that once already.
• Your own hours go back into supervision at exactly the point you'd stopped needing to.
• Work slips while you're short. Jobs pushed out, quotes not followed up, and clients who notice.
• Client relationships walk out with them. In maintenance and repeat work especially, the customer often has a relationship with the person, not the business.
• The crew watches. One departure is an event; two in six months is a signal everyone else reads.

Put a rough number on it once, using the on-cost thinking in our guide on what your first employee costs, and the case for spending an afternoon on retention makes itself.

Why tradies actually leave

Exit conversations in the trades produce a fairly consistent list, and pay is on it but rarely at the top on its own. What people describe is the accumulation:

Look down that list and notice how few of them cost money to fix. Most are operational — the same disorganisation that costs you margin is what makes your business tiring to work in.

Pay: review it deliberately

You don't have to be the highest payer in the region, but you do have to know where you sit and be able to say it out loud. The failure mode isn't underpaying on purpose — it's never looking.

• Put a date on it. Once a year, on the calendar, you review every person's rate whether or not they've asked.
• Know the award position. Check the classification and the current rates that apply to your trade through Fair Work, so you know what the floor is and how far above it you actually sit.
• Know the market position. Ask suppliers and other owners what people are moving for. If there's a real gap between you and the business down the road, assume your crew already knows about it.
• Say what a raise is for. Tie it to something — a ticket earned, jobs they now run alone, the standard of their finish. A raise with no reason attached teaches nothing.
• If you can't pay more, say so honestly and be specific about when you'll revisit it. Silence gets interpreted as a no forever.

Progression in a business with four people

The standard objection is that a small trade business has nowhere for anyone to go. That's true of job titles and untrue of everything else. What people actually want is to be getting better and to have it recognised:

• Tickets and licences — pay for the course and the time. It costs you a few hundred dollars and buys you capability plus a reason to stay.
• Running jobs alone, then running jobs with an apprentice under them. That's a promotion whether or not it has a name.
• Quoting and pricing — teaching someone to quote is the highest-trust thing you can hand over, and the people you'd most want to keep are the ones who want it.
• Client-facing responsibility — being the person who talks to the builder, not the person who waits in the ute.
• Their own vehicle, their own keys, their own patch — concrete markers that mean more than a title.
• A path to something bigger, if it's real. Some owners genuinely intend to hand over or partner up eventually. If you do, say so early and specifically. If you don't, don't hint at it.

Ask each person once a year what they want to be doing in three years. Half will not have thought about it, and the conversation itself is worth having. The other half will tell you exactly what would keep them.

The day-to-day stuff that decides it

Retention is mostly the accumulated experience of ordinary Tuesdays. The things that make a business good to work in are small, cheap and boring:

• They know tomorrow's work before they go home tonight. Roster certainty is worth more than most owners believe.
• The job comes with information — address, access, scope, who to ask for, what happened last time. Sending someone in blind is the most common daily insult in the trades.
• Their gear works. Fix it or replace it. A crew that's fighting its tools all day is losing you money as well as goodwill.
• Paperwork isn't a punishment. If recording a job takes twenty minutes at the kitchen table each night, it won't get done and they'll resent it.
• They get paid right, on time, every time. One wrong pay run undoes months of good management.
• They hear about the wins. Client praise passed on, a hard job acknowledged, a beer on a Friday after a rough week.

Find out before they resign, not after

By the time someone hands in a notice, they've usually been decided for a month and are past being persuaded. The useful conversation happens earlier and it isn't complicated:

1. Ask twice a year, one on one. Three questions: what's going well, what's frustrating you, what would you change if it were your business. Ten minutes in the ute counts.
2. Actually do one thing they said. Then tell them you did it. Nothing kills a check-in faster than the third one being asked after nothing came of the first two.
3. Watch the early signals. Withdrawal from the crew, a drop in initiative, suddenly protective of their phone, leave requests they won't explain. Ask sooner rather than waiting to be told.
4. If they resign, have the conversation anyway. Ask what would have kept them, and take it on the chin. It's the most honest feedback about your business you will ever get, and it's free.
5. Leave the door open. Good tradies come back. How you handle the last fortnight decides whether that's possible, and it's also what they'll tell everyone at the supplier counter.

Frequently asked questions