5 Leadership Lessons for Tradies from Prolink Trade Group’s Jonno McCartney

Guest: Jonno McCartney

Episode: Season 1, Episode 10

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Jonno McCartney leads with grit and heart in equal measure, building a trade business around community, empowerment and a genuine belief in kindness as a business strategy. He extends the same philosophy through his charity work supporting veterans with PTSD, including a cover band he and five mates run purely to raise money.

Here’s what Jonno has learned about community building and leadership.

Lesson 1: Building Team Accountability Without Fear

Jonno traces his approach back to his father, who taught him that leading well means empowering the people behind you to step up and come with you, rather than simply directing from the front.

Across what he describes as 30 years of leadership, one of the practices he's found most effective is recording short video messages to acknowledge when someone on his team has done something well, as a small act of recognition that changes how people show up once they feel genuinely seen.

The clearest sign his leadership is working, in his experience, isn't affection; it's accountability.

"One of the biggest things I've always had feedback on is that they're not frightened of me, but they're frightened of disappointing me," he says. And that’s how he knows his team understand and respect the standards he holds them to.

Lesson 2: Leading by Example in a Trade Business

Another lesson Jonno carries from his father is well-known and simple: monkey say, monkey do.

If you want a team capable of courage, he believes, you have to be visibly willing to put yourself in uncomfortable, even scary, situations first to demonstrate courage, rather than delegate the hard stuff and stay comfortable yourself.

"If you're gonna lead from the front, you have to do the hard work yourself, out in front," Jonno says.

He points to events supporting Empowered Women in Trades as an example: not talking about change from a distance, but showing up to it directly. People follow what they see modelled, not what they're told.

Lesson 3: Kindness as a Winning Business Strategy in the Trades

Jonno's business does regular work in aged care, and he's trained his team not just to fix things, but actually to connect with the people they’re working for.

"I've taught my guys how to make a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, and given them a set of questions on how to actually sit with that person and ask how they're going," he says.

The feedback from occupational therapists has been striking: residents reportedly at their happiest simply from being genuinely seen and heard for a few extra minutes.

That same instinct shapes how he thinks about the business itself. Profit, he says, isn't what drives him: leading with community and genuinely caring for people come first, and the business result follows, not the other way around.

Lesson 4: How to Start and Grow a Trade Business

Asked for his top tips on starting a trade business, Jonno leans on an old analogy: like a Tupperware party, if you don't line up your next source of work from the people already in front of you, the business eventually runs dry.

His advice starts with networking hard in the first couple of years, since almost all early work comes through personal connections, and staying disciplined with the boring stuff, like tax and super, from day one.

But the piece he keeps coming back to is unglamorous.

"It's really easy to build a trade business on showing up on time, cleaning up after yourself, and saying thank you for things; that's it," he says.

Lesson 5: Why Tradies Need a Life Outside Work

Jonno pushes people to invest in something that belongs entirely to them outside of work and family, warning that parents especially can lose themselves in the ‘doing’ (driving kids to sport, managing everyone else's schedule, and the rest) only to face an empty house once the kids move out.

He tells the story of putting himself through a gruelling multi-day survival retreat on a beach, fully fasted, at one point required to crawl two kilometres on his stomach in the dark.

Exhausted and ready to quit partway through, he found unexpected calm by simply noticing the cold sand and the stars.

"You need to find something for yourself, especially when you hit your late 30s, 40s, 50s," he says, sharing that diversity of interests helps him show up as a better person inside and outside of running a trade business.

Jonno’s Advice on Everyday Leadership

"Just do it from the heart; everything comes back to it.”

Jonno also shares that a job title, like ‘electrician’, isn't an identity; he says what matters is showing up with accountability toward whatever your actual goals in life are.

Catch the full conversation with Jonno McCartney on Tradies Who Lead for more leadership lessons for tradies, out now wherever you listen to podcasts.