5 Leadership Lessons for Tradies from The GO Company’s Jasmyn Smith

Guest: Jasmyn Smith

Episode: Season 2, Episode 10

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Jasmyn Smith is a Tasmanian sparky and co-founder of The GO Company, a business built around a problem that’s sat quietly on worksites for years: access to basic hygiene for tradies.

Here’s what Jazz has learned about speaking up and advocating for change as a tradie.

Lesson 1: Being a Role Model Is An Early Form of Leadership

Jazz was the first female apprentice at her business and one of only two women she encountered throughout her four-year apprenticeship, which meant she stepped into a role-model position long before she felt equipped for it.

It wasn’t until she’d qualified and taken on her own female apprentice that she consciously thought about what kind of tradesperson and leader she wanted to be.

“I guess my role as a leader sort of started quite early because I was being that role model to other women coming into the industry,” she says. Looking back, she reflects that she didn’t have to have it all figured out to embrace the leadership of being a role model.

Lesson 2: Recognising a Problem Is the First Act of Innovation

The GO Company began after a young female apprentice in Jazz’s business repeatedly had to ask her male colleagues to drive her home from site for sanitary needs, costing the business time and money, and quietly signalling that her needs weren’t fully considered onsite as a woman in trade.

Rather than let it slide, the team sat down together and worked out a practical fix.

“We wanted it to be a positive sort of situation,” Jazz says of the hygiene packs they built for every van, a solution born from one uncomfortable but necessary conversation.

That one uncomfortable conversation has since grown into an industry-wide shift, entirely because she named the problem instead of working around it.

Lesson 3: Taking a Leap When Starting a Business

After connecting with fellow electrician Logan over the same problem in her own workplace, Jazz didn’t spend months deliberating. The two met twice and, by their second conversation, were signing a business contract to scale The GO Company.

It’s the kind of leap that only makes sense once you’ve decided the problem is worth solving properly.

“We can’t be the only people here with this issue… we ended up signing a business contract together, buying our first thousand packs,” she says. Whereas others may have planned, Jazz and Logan trusted their gut and their shared goal, and took a leap of faith in each other and their business to get started - and it paid off.

Lesson 4: Overcoming Resistance to Workplace Change

Jazz has found men on site are typically far more receptive to the conversation than assumed, especially once they understand it’s about hydration, hygiene and productivity rather than “just periods.”

The sharpest pushback, surprisingly, has come from older women, often the wives of business owners, reluctant to see money spent on something they consider unnecessary.

“It’s actually the older women who have the biggest pushback… it’s actually been really, really positive with the conversations with men,” she says.

These insights have taught Jazz to rethink her assumptions, and emboldened her to normalise this conversation even more, but she always approaches resistance with curiosity about their perspective to understand how to influence their views.

Lesson 5: Building a Support Network as a Tradie

Running a growing business alongside a full-time trade isn’t something Jazz pretends to have balanced neatly, she’s upfront that both she and Logan lean heavily on supportive partners and employers to make it work at all.

Her current boss has gone out of his way to support the venture, seeing the mutual benefit in supporting more women into the industry.

“We’re definitely not balancing it in a healthy way, but we’ve got very supportive partners,” she says. Finding people who believe in you, and are willing to offer a helping hand, makes the hard times worth it.

Jazz’s Advice on Everyday Leadership

“Remind yourself where you are and what you've done."

She admits it’s something she personally struggles with, but recalling a childhood memory of waving at tradies from her mum’s car, and realising she’s now one of them, was the reminder that progress is worth noticing.

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