5 Leadership Lessons for Trade Businesses from Multiply Me Founder Luke Canham

Guest: Luke Canham

Episode: Season 2, Episode 15

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Luke Canham has spent over 30 years leading people across high-risk industries, including construction and scaffolding, managing hundreds of staff across multiple sites. After a serious workplace accident changed the direction of his career, he sold his scaffolding business and founded Multiply Me, helping business owners build safety culture through short video training delivered straight to workers' phones.

Here's what he's learned about leadership, safety and culture in the trade businesses.

Lesson 1: Good Leadership Creates Willingness Over Compliance

For Luke, leadership comes down to two things: getting a group of people to move in the same direction willingly, not just comply, and the leader living and breathing whatever they're asking of everyone else.

"A lot of leaders can get people to do something or comply, but most of the people that are complying are thinking, 'well, we don't even believe in this,'" he says. That's the real difference between leadership driven by a title and leadership driven by influence, he's found: whether people actually believe in what they're being asked to do.

Lesson 2: Create Guidelines Not Rules

Early in his own business, Luke was the worst kind of teacher, showing someone exactly how he'd do a job, then expecting them to copy it precisely. It took time to realise people need room to try it themselves and make their own mistakes.

"It's kind of like a footy field, right? You've got your two sidelines, you've got a goal at the other end," he says. "You just gotta score at the other end, but you've got some guidelines."

Setting the boundaries and the outcome, rather than dictating the method, made his team both more capable and more willing to buy in.

Lesson 3: How To Let Go of Control as a Business Owner

As his business grew, Luke had to let go of decisions he used to make himself, but he's found that letting go without context just creates fear disguised as freedom. His fix is explaining exactly what's at stake before handing a decision over.

"It's not a bad Google review, it's a damaged $100,000 pipeline," he says, describing the kind of context he now makes sure his team understands before they're trusted with the call themselves.

Nine times out of ten, once someone understands the real stakes, they grow into the responsibility fast.

Lesson 4: A Strong Safety Culture Needs a Strong Team Culture

Luke draws a hard line between safety enforced through fear and safety people actually believe in. Rules followed only because there's a penalty get quietly bent the moment no one's watching; rules people understand the reasoning behind get followed regardless.

"You can have a strong safety culture, but the people are gonna be unhappy unless you have a great culture behind it to support, 'hey, this is how we roll and why,'" he says.

Lesson 5: Closing the Gap Between Compliance and Reality

Luke is blunt about what leading a real trade crew actually involves: employing people in and out of jail, managing addiction, theft, and unreliability, while regulators expect a workforce that shows up flawless every day. That gap between the paperwork and the floor is where he's watched good people get burned.

"We're seeing business owners that I think are reasonable people, but they didn't know the compliance properly, being sent to jail," he says. It's the gap that pushed him to build Multiply Me, helping business owners meet the standard without pretending the reality underneath it doesn't exist.

When businesses and trade leaders understand their personal liability, it’s motivation to lift the standard of behaviour in teams.

Luke's Advice on Everyday Leadership

Luke's advice comes from watching his own business break and rebuild at every growth stage, from three staff to six, six to twelve, each jump forcing him to find new systems and support rather than keep doing things the old way.

His bigger point is about accepting where you sit between the regulator's safety standard and the reality of running a business with real people in it.

"Just finding that spot and then being okay to keep going there, instead of beating yourself up," he says, aiming for as close to the standard as realistically possible without pretending perfection is the baseline.

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