Running a trade business means wearing a lot of hats, and for most owners, HR sits somewhere at the bottom of the pile. It doesn’t feel urgent until it is. And when something goes wrong with a team member, the instinct is to find the fastest and cheapest way through it.
That’s where a lot of tradie business owners are quietly getting themselves into trouble.
Kristy Lee Billet is the CEO of People Powered Business and founder of People Powered HR, with 20 years of helping small business owners build great teams without the chaos or the eye watering costs that usually come with getting proper support. She works with small businesses every day and she’s seeing a pattern that’s worth paying attention to.
More and more trade business owners are turning to AI to handle the HR side of things. Writing contracts, figuring out entitlements, working out what they can and can’t do when something comes up with a staff member. It feels quick, it feels easy, and it sounds incredibly convincing. The problem is AI doesn’t know your business, doesn’t know your specific award, and it will confidently give you the wrong answer like it’s gospel. Kristy Lee tested this herself and had ChatGPT quote legislation back at her that simply did not exist. Completely made up, but presented as fact.
And it’s not just business owners using it. Employees are using AI too. They’re getting across their rights, they know what unfair dismissal looks like, and they’re more prepared than ever to act on it. If your contracts and processes aren’t solid, that’s a risk sitting right in your business whether you know it or not.
Awards in the trades are some of the most complicated out there. Allowances, travel entitlements, loaded rates, industry allowances. There are entitlements sitting inside these documents that most business owners have never heard of, and a generic template or an AI generated contract won’t flag any of them. It just assumes everything is being paid on top. By the time it comes up, it usually lands as a back pay claim going back years, or an unfair dismissal at the Fair Work Commission.
The other trap is thinking that once you’ve made a decision about a staff member, you can just act on it. Something as straightforward as reducing someone’s hours because work has slowed down has a strict legal process behind it. Skip that process and you’re exposed, even if the decision itself was completely reasonable.
The good news is it’s never too late to sort it out. Updating contracts, tightening up your paperwork, getting proper advice on your award obligations. Most of the time the conversation with your team is a lot simpler than you’d expect. A quick update to keep everything current is usually all it takes and most employees don’t bat an eye.
Getting your people stuff right doesn’t have to be complicated. But it does have to be right. And getting ahead of it is always going to be cheaper than cleaning it up later.
Learn more about Kristy-Lee & People Powered Business here:
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