By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why do most business coaches miss what's actually happening inside a waterproofing business?
Most business coaches have never quoted a flood test, chased a tiler's defect, or waited out a membrane's cure time before a job can be signed off. A waterproofing business quotes in layers that few other trades carry at once: the membrane itself, labour, a remedial allowance for whatever the substrate turns up, the flood test, and the warranty sitting behind the certificate once the job goes back to the builder.
A coach who has never run a trade business tends to look at the total on the quote and assume that if the price was right, the job made money. That assumption is exactly where a waterproofing business can lose money without anyone noticing. A multi-line quote can look profitable line by line and still bleed once the real overhead of the job, and the delay a cure time or a defect causes, gets attributed to it.
Why can a waterproofing job pass the flood test and still make nothing?
Passing the flood test and issuing the certificate means the membrane held water on the day. It does not mean the job made money. That gap between what the quote said and what actually landed in the bank is the real number most waterproofers never see until well after the job is closed.
Picture a waterproofer who prices a bathroom wet area correctly, membrane and labour both on the mark, passes the flood test, hands over the certificate, and books the job as done. Months later a tiler calls back about a leak at the hob, the balcony above it needs remedial attention under warranty, and the crew goes back on site for no extra charge. None of that remedial time was ever attributed to the original job's cost, so the business books look fine and the actual job made far less than the quote suggested.
What should a waterproofer look for in a business coach?
You want a coach who has actually run a trade business, ideally one that carried the same kind of exposure a waterproofer carries: warranty callbacks, remedial work, builders and tilers as customers who expect the job redone at no cost when something fails. A coach without that background will often treat every problem the same way, with generic advice that reads the same for a sparky as it does for a waterproofer.
Look for a coach who starts from your own numbers rather than asking you to explain your business from memory. Your memory of how last quarter's jobs went is already out of date, because the real picture changes every week as jobs close, remedial work comes back, and new quotes go out. A good coach builds from the data you already have, not from a conversation about how things generally go.
What questions should you ask before signing up with a coach?
Before paying for coaching, ask how the coach's process begins. If the answer is a long intake call where you explain your business, that is time spent describing a business that will look different again in a few weeks. Ask whether they look at gross profit margin by job type, wet area against balcony against remedial and insurance work, or just at total revenue, because those jobs rarely carry the same margin and a blended number hides that.
Ask what happens when a problem shows up. A coach who answers every issue with “hire someone” is handing out a worksheet, not finding where the problem actually starts. A coach worth paying for treats splitting income into separate buckets, cost of sales, operating costs, tax, profit, as something that only protects a waterproofing business once the gross profit feeding those buckets is honest. If labour on remedial jobs or warranty callbacks is mis-booked against the wrong job, the split is protecting a number that was never real in the first place.
What changes when AI agents take on the office work for a waterproofing business?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it, using your prices, your wording and your rules, instead of a generic template. For a waterproofing business, that can mean the certificate paperwork, the defect log, the warranty tracking and the job costing getting done consistently, in your own language, without someone in the office doing it manually between site visits.
That matters because the hours spent chasing paperwork on remedial jobs or re-issuing a certificate after a defect fix are hours not spent quoting the next wet area or being on a roof deck checking a membrane before a flood test. When AI agents take on that non-billable work, the people in the business spend more time with builders, tilers and customers, and less time on admin that was never billable anyway. This is what data first coaching is built on: starting from the numbers a waterproofing business already produces, rather than from memory of how a job went.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, built by Greg Allan, starts from a waterproofing business's own job and finance data through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from the owner explaining the business from memory. For a waterproofer, that means looking at gross profit by job type, wet area, balcony, remedial, insurance work, to find where a job that looked fine on the quote actually lost money once warranty callbacks and cure time delays were counted against it.
The how, the actual systems and the step by step, is worked through inside the Academy, with other members. It is built for waterproofers and other trade owners who are open minded, innovative and willing to share what they find, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member who joins it.
