From Apprentice to Builder: 21 Years of Learning What Actually Makes a Good Tradesperson
I started my electrical apprenticeship at 19 years old. That was 21 years ago now.
After qualifying, I ran my own electrical business for about six years, a mix of work for builders and private jobs for end clients. From there, I moved into a partnership business with a government contract. When the margins on that contract started shrinking, I made the shift into building. I've been a builder ever since, five years now.
So I've seen this industry from almost every angle: as a tradesman, as a small business owner subcontracting work out, inside a larger partnership, and now as a builder hiring reliable contractors myself.
The hardest part of the job
And here's the truth about my job that surprises people: the hardest part of being a builder, from my first few years right through to now, isn't keeping up with regulations. It isn't finding work, or finding profitable job sites either. The hardest part is finding and keeping reliable tradesmen.
It's especially hard when you're a newer builder. You don't know all the trades you need yet, and you end up outsourcing work to people you've never met, sourced either through word-of-mouth or from seeing them somewhere on social media. You're trusting your project, your timeline, and your reputation to someone you have no real history with.
I've worked with tradesmen who drag jobs out, blow past their own quote, damage materials on site, work roughly with little attention to detail, and never chase anything up themselves. I've also worked with the exact opposite: punctual, sharp attention to detail, easy to communicate with, genuinely knowledgeable. Every trade has both types. The problem was never that good tradespeople don't exist. It's that outside the small circle of people who already know them, they're practically invisible.
The job I turned down
I felt the real cost of that firsthand. A project came up in Rye, a good hour and fifteen minutes from where I'm based. It was viable, paying work. I turned it down. Not because I couldn't do the job, but because I didn't know any reputable tradesmen in that area. It wouldn't have fallen apart, but it would have been a lot more difficult, I'd have needed to spend a huge amount of time on site, watching trades and explaining exactly how things needed to be done, just so I could sleep well at night knowing the project was finished to the standard I expect. That's the real, practical cost of not having a way to find a reliable builder or trade outside your own network. It doesn't just cost you time, it costs you peace of mind, and it costs you work.
Why I built SiteCred
That's exactly the problem I built SiteCred to solve. With a platform like this, if a project like Rye came up again, I could take it on with confidence, because I could check a contractor's reviews and see their actual work history with the builders they've worked with before. And if I wasn't sure about a review, I could look into that builder too, how long they've been in the industry, their own track record. A builder who's been in business 20 years vouching for a plumber means something. That context matters when you're trying to hire a reliable builder or contractor you've never worked with.
Good tradespeople deserve to be known for the work they actually do, not just to the handful of builders who happen to already know them. And builders shouldn't have to turn down good work just because they don't have a trusted network in that postcode. That's what SiteCred is built to fix, for trades and for builders, both ends of the same problem.
Keep reading: how to find a reliable tradie, and how to avoid a bad builder.