Two Pipelines: Leads In, People In

Every builder knows they have a leads pipeline. Almost none of them realise they need a second one running right beside it: a people pipeline. Your business needs a steady flow of potential clients and a steady flow of potential team members, and the mistake I see constantly is treating the second one as something you’ll get to after the first one delivers.

It comes up in almost every one-on-one I do with builders at that critical stage, stuck on the tools, carrying everything, knowing they need to hire. The plan is always the same: win the next job first, then start looking for someone. I understand the logic, cash flow is real, but I push back on it every time, and here’s why.

Run both in parallel, not in sequence

Finding the right person takes months. Winning a job takes weeks. If you wait for the job before you start the search, you’ll spend the first third of that job doing everything yourself while you interview, which is exactly when you can least afford to. And the reverse risk barely exists: if the right person shows up before the job does, that’s not a problem, that’s motivation. Nothing sharpens your sales effort like knowing you have wages to cover.

When I look back at my own journey, the pattern was: put the time in to win the job, then have the confidence to hire even when I didn’t have the next one lined up yet. One job’s worth of certainty was enough. The person I hired helped me get the next one, because I finally had time to go win it.

You can’t grow without either pipeline. So start both today, not one after the other.

Everything you post is recruiting

Here’s the reframe that makes the people pipeline click: everything you put on social media is being read by two audiences. Future clients, and future employees. The job photos, the finished builds, the way you talk about your team and your standards, all of it is telling some carpenter out there what it would be like to work for you.

Most of the people I’ve hired already knew about the company before they applied. That’s not luck. Good tradespeople considering a move do their homework, and what you’ve been posting for the past two years is the homework. Often they’re a really good chippy stuck doing commercial work who wants to get onto nicer residential jobs, and your feed is what convinces them yours is the place.

So when you’re ready to hire, the move is simple: post the role on your social channels, tell your subbies and your team, and ask the good people you already have who they know. Quality people know quality people.

Put a system behind it

Here’s a detail that costs almost nothing and changes how candidates see you: build an application form. A simple form, a few questions, and a short automated process behind it, exactly like the enquiry form you (should) have for leads.

When a candidate applying to a small building company has to fill out a proper form and gets a professional response, something shifts in their head: this builder runs a real business. The good candidates, the ones with options, are exactly the ones who notice. You’re differentiating yourself in a market where most hiring happens through a text message and a handshake.

With AI, the whole thing is an afternoon’s work. One member I sat down with this month had already built his own lead system with AI driving it; the employment version is the same plumbing with different questions.

Hire experienced, and don’t fear the side hustle

Two convictions from my own hiring, offered as they are:

Hire someone who knows their stuff over someone you’ll train from scratch. An experienced hire puts you a year ahead, because you’re only teaching them your way of doing things, not the trade. Training up green blokes is admirable and I do it too, but it adds to your load right when the whole point of hiring was to reduce it. Your first key hire needs to hit the ground running.

Someone with a development on the side is not a flight risk. I’ve kept two of my best people for years partly because they each do a small development project on the side. The steady wage from me plus the wealth-building itch scratched elsewhere means they’re not restless. The only version to avoid is the person for whom your job is explicitly the waiting room for their real plan.

And when they start? Give them one system with everything in it, one place where the whole job lives, and onboarding gets radically easier.

The right person, found through a pipeline you built before you desperately needed it, is what buys back your time. What you do with that time is the subject of just about everything else I write.