How to Build a Reputation for a New Trade Business in Perth

This article draws on an episode of Unlocking Business, the Hypotential podcast hosted by Kane Tyler-Smith, with Mitch Suleau from MBS Building Company. Mitch started his carpentry and outdoor living business after moving from Tasmania to Perth with no established residential customer base in the city. Their conversation explored his first two years in business, including finding early work, hiring, introducing systems, using social media and building trust with Perth homeowners. The lessons provide useful examples for any newer trade business trying to establish a reputation in a competitive local market.

A strong trade reputation is built when customers repeatedly see evidence that your business can be trusted with their home, money and time. In the early years, that evidence comes from the jobs you complete, how you treat customers, the people who recommend you, your reviews and increasingly, what potential customers can see online.

Advertising can help more people discover the business, but it cannot manufacture that reputation. For a newer trade business, the priority should be creating enough positive customer experiences that marketing has something credible to amplify.

What actually builds a good reputation for a trade business?

A good trade reputation is built through consistent workmanship, communication, reliability and customer experience. Customers need to feel confident about both the technical result and the people delivering it.

Mitch’s approach to MBS Building Company was influenced by growing up and working in a much smaller Tasmanian community. In a town with only a few thousand people, poor workmanship could follow a tradesperson quickly because people knew each other and talked.

Perth gives businesses more anonymity, but customers still talk. The difference is that those conversations now happen through Google reviews, Facebook groups, social media, referrals and local community networks as well as between friends and neighbours.

That makes every early job valuable beyond its invoice.

When Mitch first started, he was willing to take work that would not necessarily fit the business today. That included small jobs such as gutter cleaning simply because he needed to establish himself and generate work.

Kane described a similar period in Smartfix’s early days, when the business would respond to small leads through platforms such as hipages that would no longer make sense for the company today.

There is a practical lesson here for new businesses.

You do not need to know exactly what your business will look like in five years before taking the first job. Early work gives you customers, experience and information about what people will actually pay you to do.

Over time, you can become more selective.

Why are referrals so valuable when you are starting out?

Referrals are particularly valuable for new trade businesses because they reduce one of the biggest barriers to winning work: trust.

A homeowner looking for a carpenter, electrician or plumber is not simply comparing technical ability. In most cases, they cannot accurately assess technical ability before the job begins.

Instead, they look for other signals.

Who recommended you? What do your reviews say? Does your business look established? Do you communicate clearly? Have you completed similar work before?

A referral answers some of those questions before you have even spoken to the customer.

Mitch described referrals as a significant source of work for MBS Building Company. His focus on completing work properly and looking after customers creates a natural opportunity for those customers to recommend the business to somebody else.

This is particularly powerful for higher-value residential work.

If a homeowner is considering spending tens of thousands of dollars on a deck, pergola or outdoor area, the decision carries more perceived risk than booking a small maintenance job. A recommendation from someone they already trust can therefore carry considerable weight.

The mistake is assuming referrals happen automatically because the workmanship was good.

Customers also remember whether you arrived when expected, explained the job properly, respected their home, communicated changes and dealt professionally with problems.

Your reputation is the complete experience, not just the finished job.

How can social media help a trade business build trust?

Social media can help a trade business build trust by allowing customers to see the people, workmanship and processes behind the business before making an enquiry.

This has become particularly valuable for MBS Building Company.

Mitch began creating content around an outdoor project in Spearwood, showing parts of the construction process rather than simply posting a polished photograph of the finished result.

One of the first videos reached around 30,000 views and added approximately 250–300 followers to what had previously been a relatively small account.

The follower count was not the most important result.

Mitch subsequently had two customers specifically mention seeing the business’s videos and posts before engaging MBS Building Company. Those projects were worth roughly $20,000–$30,000 each.

That does not mean every tradie should expect their first Reel to generate a $30,000 project.

The useful lesson is why the content helped.

Potential customers could see how MBS worked. They could see Mitch, see members of the team, watch parts of the construction process and understand more about what they were paying for.

For residential trades, this can remove some of the uncertainty involved in inviting an unfamiliar business into your home.

A polished before-and-after photograph shows the result. Content showing the process provides evidence of how you got there.

You do not need a huge following

A local trade business does not need tens of thousands of followers for social media to be commercially useful.

The majority of a Perth carpenter’s potential customers do not care whether the business has 400 followers or 40,000. They care whether the work looks credible and whether the business appears trustworthy.

That changes how tradies should think about content.

The objective does not need to be becoming an influencer. It can simply be making it easier for somebody who has heard about your business to verify that you are legitimate.

A customer may receive your name from a friend, search the business, look at your Google reviews, open Instagram and watch three recent project videos.

By the time they contact you, part of the trust-building process has already happened.

Should a new trade business advertise straight away?

Paid advertising can help a new trade business grow, but it should not replace the foundations that make customers comfortable choosing you.

Mitch began advertising around the same period that he hired his first tradesperson. That represented a significant increase in business expenses at a point where the company was still young.

For other new businesses, there may be opportunities to establish some early momentum before committing heavily to advertising.

That could come through personal contacts, referrals, previous industry relationships, local networking, community groups, subcontracting or organic social media.

These sources are not necessarily enough to support a larger team indefinitely. They can, however, help prove which services customers want and begin building the reviews, photos, case studies and reputation that make later advertising more effective.

Once you do pay to put the business in front of more people, those people have something to investigate.

Advertising gets attention.

Your reputation helps convert that attention into an enquiry.

What happens to your reputation when you start hiring?

As a trade business grows, its reputation becomes dependent on employees as well as the owner.

This is one of the biggest changes between being a sole trader and building a team.

When you complete every job yourself, you control how the customer is greeted, how the work is completed, how the site is left and what happens if there is a problem.

Once another tradesperson is representing the business, those standards have to transfer.

Mitch hired a qualified tradesperson as his first employee around six months after starting the business. Although the financial commitment was greater than hiring an apprentice, he found value in employing someone who could already operate with a similar technical skill set and take on responsibility.

As the team grew, documenting expectations became more important. MBS now uses ServiceM8 and records important job information so the team has clearer instructions around the work.

Kane’s experience at Smartfix shows what happens when this challenge scales further.

Smartfix grew rapidly at one stage to just under 140 employees. Looking back, Kane identifies hiring too quickly and accepting some of the wrong people as one of the major mistakes he would change if starting again.

The reason goes beyond payroll.

If a tradesperson completes several residential jobs in a day and leaves a poor impression at each one, the business can damage multiple customer relationships in a matter of hours.

That is particularly expensive when you have already invested money in marketing to acquire those customers.

Growth therefore makes recruitment part of your marketing.

The people wearing your uniform and driving your vans become part of what customers think about the brand.

How should a trade business handle mistakes?

A strong reputation does not require pretending mistakes never happen. It requires a reliable process for taking responsibility and fixing problems when they do.

Kane gave a simple example from Smartfix.

A tradesperson could accidentally mark a customer’s wall while carrying tools through the house. The best outcome is for the tradesperson to acknowledge it immediately, tell the customer and organise for the business to rectify it.

If the customer discovers it later, the response still matters.

Smartfix’s approach is to investigate complaints and negative reviews, speak to the customer and, where appropriate, return to rectify the issue. In some cases, customers have subsequently changed their review because of how quickly the problem was addressed.

This is important for new businesses because fear of a bad review can sometimes create the wrong behaviour.

Trying to avoid responsibility can turn a relatively minor mistake into a genuine trust problem.

Customers generally understand that things can go wrong. What they remember is whether the business disappeared when they did.

How do you build a trade reputation quickly without cutting corners?

There is no shortcut to a genuine reputation, but a newer trade business can accelerate it by making good work more visible and treating every early customer as part of the business’s future growth.

Complete the work properly. Communicate clearly. Ask happy customers for reviews. Document projects. Show your team and process online. Stay connected with good customers and industry contacts. Make it easy for somebody to recommend you.

Then protect that standard as you grow.

The early years of MBS Building Company also show why you do not need the entire business figured out before starting. Mitch did not arrive in Perth with a detailed five-year plan, established residential customer base and fully developed operating system.

The business evolved as the work came in.

That meant discovering which jobs suited the business, hiring when workload justified it, adopting a CRM as the number of enquiries and jobs became harder to manage, and beginning to step away from the tools as Mitch realised his time could be better used elsewhere.

The direction becomes clearer as the business develops.

What should remain consistent is the standard customers experience.

A new trade business may not yet have hundreds of reviews, ten vans or years of history to prove itself. It can still demonstrate that it cares about the work, communicates professionally and stands behind what it delivers.

That is where a reputation starts.

Hypotential works with Perth trade business owners on the wider challenges that appear as a business moves through these early stages, from finding work and building systems to hiring the right people and working out what the owner’s role needs to become as the team grows.