5 Leadership Lessons for Trade Business Owners from Kingsford Carpentry's Adrian Gillman

Guest: Adrian Gillman

Episode: Season 2, Episode 16

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Adrian Gillman is a registered carpenter and owner of Kingsford Building and Carpentry in Melbourne, a small team specialising in bathrooms, extensions and detailed internal fit-outs.

With over 15 years in the trade, he's also vice president of the West Coburg Football Club, active in both coaching and committee leadership, and brings the same patient, people-first approach to everything he does, from hobbies to work.

Here's what he's learned about leadership, culture and understanding people in the trades for trade business owners.

Lesson 1: Leadership Starts With Your Actions & Attitude

For Adrian, leadership starts with a simple standard: never ask someone to do something you're not willing to do yourself.

"I can't tell the boys that work for me how to do something if I can't do it myself, or if I'm not willing to jump in and do it with them," he says.

He's found that attitude is just as contagious as instruction.

Genuinely enjoying the work, rather than treating it as a grind, changes how the whole team shows up.

"It's hard to work with someone that's actually enjoying their work if you're grumpy," he says, describing how a positive attitude lifts everyone around it, not just the person carrying it, and it’s a form of leadership that often gets overlooked.

Lesson 2: Understand People Before You Judge Them

A career shift from the trades to a corporate role (working in a funeral home) forced Adrian to unlearn his instinct to take things personally. When staff wanted to leave for more money he couldn't offer, his old response was resentment; his new one is curiosity about what's actually going on.

"You've gotta sorta sit down and go, 'Okay, let's unpack it a bit, and let's find out what's happening,'" he says. "You gotta understand people before you can jump to that conclusion."

More often than not, the real issue wasn't the one first offered, and taking the time to ask changed how much his team trusted him.

Lesson 3: Breaking the "Grumpy Tradie" Culture

Adrian is direct, calling out a pattern he sees across every trade on a site: a macho attitude of the traditional “grumpy tradie” that everyone labels as grumpy and never looks closer.

He believes that normalising poor attitudes in trade culture is costing the industry more than it realises.

"I think that's our biggest problem, the attitude for tradies," he says.

His fix is small and deliberately low-pressure: if someone's clearly off, ask, "Are you all right?"

It doesn't mean you need to solve anything on the spot; by starting the conversation, you’ve already helped someone get it off their chest.

Lesson 4: Build Culture From the Small Things

Adrian treats culture as something built from consistent, small actions rather than a mission statement. One of his favourites came from an apprentice originally from Argentina, who suggested the team go out for lunch on birthdays, with the birthday person exempt from paying.

It's a small gesture, but Adrian's kept it as a standing part of how his team operates.

"He's as valuable as anyone else in the team, and whatever he thinks is important, we think is important as well," he says, describing culture as something built by listening to the people already in the room, and making sure they feel heard.

The same listening extends to his football club, where he's just as clear that culture only holds if everyone's genuinely on board with where it's headed.

"You will lose people along the way that don't believe in what you're trying to create," he says, "and you've gotta let them go." Culture, in his view, is built as much by who you let go as by who you listen to.

Lesson 5: Instructing the Next Generation of Apprentices

Adrian doesn't pretend today's apprentices see work the way he did when he was coming up, and he's stopped expecting them to.

Instead of demanding buy-in on principle, his approach is explaining why something matters to him personally, like sweeping the site clean at the end of the day, rather than just issuing the instruction.

"It's really important to me. So even though you don't think it's important to you, if you could do that for me, I'd be really appreciative of it," he says to his apprentices. But it only works if you’ve taken the time to connect and build a relationship with your younger team members.

Once you build a connection and get to know the person, you get buy-in from the relationship, not by cracking the whip.

Adrian’s Advice on Everyday Leadership

Adrian's advice loops back to where he started: understand people before you judge them.

"Try and understand people before you make a judgment call on what they're saying or what they're doing," he says. "If you change that perspective, it will change how you talk to people and how you act with people."

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