5 Leadership Lessons for Tradies from McCarthy Plumbing Group's Founders

Guests: Cat & Dave McCarthy

Episode: Season 1, Episode 1

Cat and Dave McCarthy started McCarthy Plumbing Group out of their garage in 2013 with, in Dave's words, "zero planning and no foresight." Twelve years on, it's a multi-award-winning Melbourne plumbing business with a retention rate most trade employers would envy.

Here's what they had to say about building it.

Lesson 1: Ownership Raises the Stakes of Every Leadership Decision

Both Cat and Dave led teams before going out on their own — Dave across large construction crews, Cat within AFL community programs in the UK, managing around 60 staff.

But when they started the business, with Cat newly pregnant and the pair fresh off a move back from overseas, the risk changed completely. Losing an employee, or losing profit on a job, was no longer someone else's cost to absorb.

"When you start to go into the world of high stakes lost through your own savings, it adds an extra heightened ability to understand the value of where you stand," Dave says.

That shift, more than any prior management experience, taught them the true cost of not leading well.

Lesson 2: How to Lead a Team Through Financial Hardship

Neither Cat nor Dave point to a formal system as their edge in keeping people around. They point to being upfront with the team, including through the hardest stretches.

During COVID, when cash flow tightened and they fell behind on supplier payments, they chose to tell their crew exactly what was happening rather than manage the optics.

"If you create fear by the unknown, it certainly doesn't help your culture," Cat says.

That transparency paid off in an unexpected way: during the toughest patch, staff offered to take a pay cut just to help the business get through.

"It made us cry," Cat says. "We never had to do it, but it was just like, wow, they really have our back."

Lesson 3: Building Culture in a Small Trade Business

A few years into the business, when the team had grown to around five people, Cat pushed to start monthly one-on-one meetings, an idea Dave initially resisted.

"We don't do that in construction," he'd told her.

She talked him into it anyway, and he came back converted, having learned things about his team he'd never known.

Later, the whole crew ran a "stop tools" day to choose their own company values rather than adopting generic ones from a poster.

"They were just token values," Cat says. "So, we all sat down and determined what our values were going to be."

One of their apprentices chose continuous improvement, now Cat's favourite of the lot.

Lesson 4: Building Team Retention for Tradies

Their ops manager was McCarthy Plumbing Group's very first hire, and this year (2025) marks his tenth anniversary with the business.

Industry data shows that only 3% of construction workers, particularly plumbers, stay with one employer that long — a number she found telling given how normal job-hopping has become in the trades.

For Cat and Dave, that kind of loyalty isn't the product of one good barbecue or a single team-building day.

"It's perpetual," Cat says. "It's the little things — the acknowledgment, the recognition, the flexibility for families."

They mark five-year anniversaries and celebrate apprentices completing their journeyman tickets, treating retention as an ongoing investment rather than a box to tick.

Lesson 5: Competitors Can Become Your Biggest Collaborators

Cat and Dave's involvement with the Master Plumbers Association has included a scholarship-funded trip to Scotland and England, visiting an innovation construction centre in Glasgow and a hydrogen plant in Newcastle, and attending a women-in-plumbing conference in London. They came home and wrote up a thesis on what they'd learned to share with the Victorian plumbing community.

That same spirit of sharing knowledge and opportunity shows up locally. Instead of viewing nearby plumbing businesses as threats, they treat them as collaborators, referring work when they're overbooked or lack the right kit for a job.

"If you consider them more as peers rather than your competitors, it works in everyone's favour," Cat says.

Their Advice on Everyday Leadership for Tradies

Asked what they'd tell any tradie wanting to lead better, Dave and Cat kept it simple: remember where you started and offer someone else the same opportunity you were given. Their team includes several work-experience students and apprentices today, a reminder, Cat says, that everyone starts at the bottom rung of the ladder, and that someone gave them their first shot, too.

Catch the full conversation with Cat and Dave McCarthy on Tradies Who Lead, out now wherever you listen to podcasts.