How often have you had an employee who comes to work and is clearly in a negative mindset? Are they consistently showing up to work late or complaining about the jobs they are assigned? As soon as you know it, this infectious negative attitude is spreading to other team members and is having a serious impact on your workplace. Unfortunately, when members of a team are underperforming or continually show up to work with bad attitudes, team leaders are quick to blame the employees.

Owning a business is stressful. Long hours, managing multiple jobs and employees, and significant financial risk are just some of the stressors you will face throughout your career.

Are you finding that when you have a problem at work or are having a stressful day, you tend to bring that problem home with you? Is this resulting in you feeling irritable, anxious or sad and that you tend to take these emotions out on those around you or find yourself being unable to sleep at night? Having the ability to “switch off” once you’ve finished a working day is often not easy.

As a tradie, you could provide the best service, have the most knowledgeable team, be the cheapest and most efficient in the business and all this could result in nothing without new customers. No matter how solid your business foundation is, you still need to be practising good marketing techniques and spending time on improving your lead generation or you will find your business struggling to bring in new customers. Luckily, there are a few simple ways you can improve the amount of leads you generate so you can grow your business and offer your services to the widest audience possible.

The average Australian tradie is often stereotyped as being strong, unemotional and easy going. Expecting people to live up to this image is completely unrealistic at the best of times, and now more than ever.As a result of this pressure to meet the stereotype, many tradies try to be stoic and push negative feelings to the back of their minds, avoiding discussing any issues with friends and family so as not to appear weak. While tradies will openly chat about physical health, the discussion of mental health is still regarded as somewhat taboo (particularly on the job site) and as a result, is often avoided until someone's at their breaking point.This culture helps contribute to these alarming stats:

On the 8th of April 2020, legislation passed both Houses of Parliament for Workplace Flexibility and JobKeeper. For most modern Awards, Fair Work amendments have now been included. The basic summary of Workplace Flexibility Arrangements is:

As a business owner, as much as you would like to be, you can’t be everywhere at once. This means that you have to put total trust in your employees to be arriving and leaving the job site on time, and that they’re actually working during these hours. If you have an employee that you have your doubts about, providing them with this trust can be a hard ask.

While many tradies have already made the switch to take their businesses online with job management software, timesheets are often sadly forgotten in this process. If your company is using them (and regularly), you’re a step ahead of the rest. However, keeping a digital log of employee’s hours not only helps to increase efficiency, but can also save you time and money!

It should go without saying that in order to get paid, you need to be invoicing. However, too often we hear stories of electricians simply forgetting to bill their clients, and sadly, not all customers are honest enough to chase you up if this is the case.