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How to Hire a Leading Hand or Foreman to Run Your Sites

By Luke Tadich · The Tradie Owner

You're still the one unlocking the site gate at 6:45. Still the one who has to be there when the concrete turns up, because if you're not, nobody's confident enough to tell the truck driver where to pour. Still getting the call at 10am about a measurement, when you're forty minutes away quoting another job.

That's not because your crew can't do the work. It's because nobody on site is allowed to make a decision without you. You've got tradies. You don't have anyone running the site. Those are different jobs, and until you fill the second one, every site you've got needs you standing on it.

What a leading hand actually needs to be good at

Owners go looking for the best tradie on the tools and expect him to become a foreman by osmosis. Sometimes that works. More often you end up with your best installer doing twice the work for not much more money, still ringing you for every call, because being great with your hands and being able to run a site are barely related skills.

A leading hand's real job is three things: keep the program moving without you, catch problems before they become callbacks, and make the hundred small decisions a day that used to land on your phone. That last one is the whole point. If he still has to ring you for anything other than a genuine site hold-up — a variation, a safety issue, something that changes the quote — you haven't hired a leading hand. You've hired a second set of hands and given him a new title.

What to actually look for

• Already informally running things. The bloke the crew asks when you're not there, the one who sorts out the delivery mix-up before it's a drama — that's your leading hand, whether or not it's in his job title yet.
• Comfortable saying no to a client on site. If he caves to every "can you just quickly" request without pricing it, every job on his site will bleed hours the same way yours used to.
• Can read a program, not just a plan. Knowing the trade is the entry ticket. Knowing which trade needs to be booked next Tuesday so Thursday's pour isn't at risk is the actual job.
• Writes things down without being told to. Photos of the slab before it's covered, a text when materials are short, a note on a variation before it's forgotten — that habit will save you more than any qualification.

What to pay one

A leading hand typically sits somewhere above a tradesman's rate and below a project manager's — in a lot of trades that's roughly a $10,000 to $25,000 step up on what you're paying your best tradesman now, depending on your state, your trade and how much of the admin and safety load he's taking off you. That's a real number, and it should feel uncomfortable, because you're about to compare it to his wage instead of to what it's actually buying you.

Say you're turning over $2.4M and you're the one on site most days. Price your own time properly — not your trade rate, what an hour of your time is actually worth to the business when you're the only one who can quote, chase a lead or look at the numbers — and the leading hand pays for himself the first month he keeps a site running without you there. The raise isn't on his payslip. It's every afternoon you get back.

Handing over control without it going backwards

This is where most owners undo the hire in the first fortnight. They promote someone, then keep answering the questions that person is now supposed to own — because it's faster to just answer, and because letting a mistake happen feels worse than preventing it. Six weeks later nothing's changed except you've got a wages line that went up and a phone that still doesn't stop.

1. Pick one site, not all of them. Hand over full run of a single site first. Trying to delegate everywhere at once means you're still across everything, just one layer removed.
2. Write down what he can decide without you. Materials substitutions under a set cost, day-to-day sequencing, minor variations under a dollar figure, dealing with the client directly on site. Put a number on it so it's not a guess either of you has to make under pressure.
3. Write down what still comes to you. Anything that changes the quote materially, anything safety-related, anything the client might escalate. Short list, not a long one — the longer it is, the less you've actually delegated.
4. Let the small stuff go wrong. A site that runs slightly differently to how you'd have run it isn't a failure — it's him making calls instead of you making all of them. Save your input for the list above, not everything that's not exactly your way.
5. Review the numbers on that site weekly, not the site itself daily. Check the program and the margin on a Friday instead of walking the job every morning. That's the actual handover — from supervising the work to reviewing the result.

When you'll know it's working

Not when he stops ringing you — some calls are the right calls. You'll know it's working when the calls change character: fewer "what do I do about", more "heads up, I've handled this, here's what happened." That shift is the whole business case for the hire. One good leading hand, handed real authority, is the difference between a site that needs you and a site that reports to you.

Get that working on one site and the next hire is easier, because you've already written down what he's allowed to decide. Get it wrong — keep the title but not the authority — and you've just given your best tradesman a pay rise for doing your old job alongside his new one, and you're still the one at the gate at 6:45.