By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why do most business coaches not work for a bricklaying business?
Most coaches sold to tradies have never laid a brick, run a crew through a wet week, or chased a builder for a progress claim. They hand the bricklayer a worksheet built for a shop fitter or a landscaper and call it a plan. A bricklaying business runs on rate per thousand bricks against day rate, scaffold lifts, labourers mixing and loading out, and weather days that stop a job cold.
A coach who has never quoted a retaining wall, priced a feature brick job, or costed cleaning down at the end of a site does not know where the money actually leaks on a bricklaying job. The advice sounds sensible in the room and falls over on site, because it was never built from the bricklayer’s own numbers in the first place.
What goes wrong when a coach treats a drop in profit as the problem instead of a symptom?
An owner notices the bank balance is tighter this quarter and assumes the fix is to quote higher or push the crew harder. Often the real cause sits somewhere else entirely, and generic coaching never finds it because it never looks.
A run of feature brick jobs quoted on a day rate that should have gone on rate per thousand, a crew held up on scaffold lifts waiting on the builder, labourer hours on mixing and loading out that never made it onto the job cost, a subcontract bricklayer brought on without the margin being checked first. Treat that as a pricing problem and raise rates, and the same squeeze turns up again next quarter because nothing in the business actually changed.
What should a good coach for a bricklaying business look at first?
Your own numbers, before anyone starts handing out advice. The figure that matters most, and the one a good coach returns to every month, is your gross profit margin, not a one off quote calculation but a number to protect and grow across brickwork, blockwork and feature work alike.
A coach worth paying tracks where that margin moves. A job slips when scaffold hire runs long, when weather days eat the program, when a subcontract labourer is costed at the wrong rate against the job. A coach who has run a trade business, the way Greg Allan did before building Data First Coaching, tends to ask for your numbers before they ask for your card details. If your coach cannot point to your own data and show you where the margin is thinning, they are guessing the same as you were.
What should you ask before you sign up with a coach?
Ask whether they have run a trade business themselves, whether they start from your own job and finance data or from a template built for every trade, and whether you will spend each session describing your business to them or whether your numbers do the talking instead.
Ask how they would approach a progress claim sitting unpaid from a builder, a crew idle on a weather day, or a retaining wall that blew its quoted hours. If the answer to every question is “hire a project manager” or “hire an office person”, they are handing out the same fix regardless of what your own numbers actually show about this bricklaying business.
What are the warning signs of the wrong coach for a bricklaying business?
A coach who leads with a sales pitch before they have seen a single number from your business is a warning sign on its own. So is a coach who has never stood on a lift of scaffold or quoted face brick against blockwork, and cannot tell day rate work from rate per thousand work.
Watch for advice that would read the same whether you lay brick, fit kitchens or install aircon, because it was written once and sold to every trade at once. And watch for a coach who treats every slow week as a marketing problem, when the real cause might sit in how jobs are quoted, how crew time is costed, or how long builders are taking to pay on progress.
How can AI agents take weight off a bricklaying business, and is that part of good coaching?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it, with your prices, your wording and your rules. For a bricklaying business that can mean chasing a progress claim the way you chase it, or pricing a retaining wall using your own rate per thousand and your own loading for weather days, without you or your office person doing it by hand every time.
That is data first thinking: start from what your own numbers show, not from a tool built for someone else’s trade. A good coach looks at whether off the shelf software fits how your jobs run, or whether a system built around your own crew, your own customers and your own data would do more. AI agents can also keep track of which crew is loaded out where and flag before a job runs over its quoted hours, so action happens before the margin slips rather than after.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, built by Greg Allan, starts by asking a bricklaying business for its own numbers before it asks anything else: job margin by type, crew cost against day rate and rate per thousand, how long builders are taking to pay on progress. The Trade Business Intelligence reads that data alongside ten years of coaching trade businesses, so it can show a bricklayer where a problem on the tools actually started, rather than where it turned up in the bank account. The how, the systems and the AI agents built from it, is worked through inside the Academy with other members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member for every member, and that only works with owners who are open minded, innovative and willing to share what they learn.
