By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why do most business coaches fail a bricklaying business?
Most coaching built for "small business" treats a bricklayer the same as a café owner or a retailer, and that is the problem. A bricklaying business runs on rates per thousand bricks against a day rate, builder progress payments, scaffold lifts, weather days and a crew of labourers mixing and loading out. A coach who has never stood on a site waiting on a crane or chased a builder for a progress claim will miss what actually drives the margin.
Most generic coaching also starts with the owner explaining the business before any advice is given. For a bricklayer that conversation is already out of date by the time it happens, because the next job, the next weather day or the next late payment has changed the picture. The explaining costs time, and the advice that follows is built on a memory of the business rather than what it is doing this week.
What is the real problem a bricklayer is trying to solve by hiring a coach?
Most bricklayers who go looking for a coach think the problem is pricing, or cash flow, or finding good labourers, but that is usually a symptom. The real question is where the gross profit margin on jobs is actually sitting once mortar, scaffold hire, cleaning down and rework are counted, and whether that margin is being protected on every job or just the ones the owner happens to remember.
A bricklaying business can look busy on site and still be quietly losing ground, because a few jobs with blown labour hours or a retaining wall that needed extra footing work can eat a season's profit without anyone noticing until the activity statement lands. The owner's own job data holds that answer. Memory and a feeling about how the year has gone do not.
What should you look for in a coach for your brickwork business?
You want a coach who has actually run a trade business, who starts from your own numbers rather than a template, and who looks for where a problem in your brickwork business begins rather than treating the same symptom every season.
Ask whether they work from your quoting, job costing and bank data, or whether every session starts with you explaining what happened since last time. Ask whether their advice changes for a bricklayer doing face brick and blockwork for builders compared with one doing feature retaining walls direct to homeowners, because if the advice is the same either way, it was written for nobody in particular.
What questions should you ask before you sign up?
Ask a prospective coach to explain, in plain terms, how they would look at your own job data before giving you a single piece of advice. Ask what they would look at first: your gross profit margin by job type, your day rate against your crew cost, or the pattern in how builders are paying you.
A coach worth paying for a bricklaying business will answer that question with specifics about brickwork, not with a general line about mindset or goal setting. If the answer could apply to a plumber, an electrician or a landscaper without changing a word, that is a sign to keep looking.
What are the warning signs of the wrong coach?
The biggest warning sign is a coach who answers every problem the same way, usually "hire someone" or "raise your prices", without first looking at where the problem in your bricklaying business actually starts. The second is a coach who has never run a trade business and is selling before they are teaching, where the first few conversations feel like a sales pitch dressed up as a strategy session.
Greg Allan built Data First Coaching after running his own trade business, and the method starts from the owner's own data rather than a sales conversation, because a coach who has never had to chase a builder for a progress payment or cover a wet week with a crew still on the clock is working from theory, not from the site.
How can AI agents change what your coach actually helps you with?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would, using your prices, your wording and your rules, and it matters here because it changes what coaching time is spent on. Instead of a session where you describe what happened on site last week, a data first approach starts from your own job and finance data, so the time goes on fixing the actual problem rather than describing it again.
For a bricklaying business, AI agents can take on non-billable office work such as chasing builders for progress payments, preparing quotes from past jobs, or keeping job costing up to date as the crew moves between sites. That frees the owner and the office to spend more time with builders, crew and the next job, which makes the business more human to deal with, not less.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, built by Greg Allan, starts with the bricklayer's own job and finance data through the Trade Business Intelligence, looking first at gross profit margin by job type, crew cost against day rate, and how builder payments actually land through the season. That is where most problems a bricklayer brings to coaching actually start, long before pricing or marketing.
The how, the systems and the step by step work on fixing what the data shows, happens inside the Academy, with members working alongside each other. The Academy is for bricklayers who are open minded, innovative and willing to share what they learn, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member, for every member.
