By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
What should an earthmoving business coach actually fix?
Most earthmoving contractors do not have a lead problem or a motivation problem. They have a margin problem hiding behind busy diaries, and a coach who starts anywhere else is treating a symptom.
A site cut that looked profitable on the quote can come in thin once fuel, servicing, an idle float day and a tipping fee blowout are counted against the machine hours actually billed. The owner remembers the job as a win because the invoice went out and got paid. The numbers, pulled from the job rather than from memory, often tell a different story. A coach who starts from a feeling about how the quarter went is starting from an old picture, because the real answer sits in gross profit margin by machine, tracked job by job, not in how the owner remembers the season.
Why does generic business coaching miss the mark for an earthmoving contractor?
Generic coaching treats an excavator business like a cafe or a cleaning franchise, and the advice shows it. Worksheets built for a service business do not know what a wet day does to a trenching schedule, or what floating a bobcat between three sites in a week does to a week's fuel and servicing bill.
An earthmoving contractor's week runs on things no generic coach tracks: dry hire against wet hire decisions, operator availability, whether an attachment change costs more time than it saves, whether rock breaking on a civil job was priced properly or absorbed as a favour to keep the builder happy. A coach who has never stood next to a plant on site tends to answer every problem the same way, usually with “hire someone” or “raise your prices”, without showing where the margin actually leaks.
What does a good earthmoving business coach look like?
A good coach for an earthmoving contractor has run a trade business themselves, starts from your own data rather than asking you to explain your business from memory, and builds systems that fix the root cause rather than handing out a generic worksheet.
Greg Allan built his own trade business before coaching others, and the method he teaches, Data First Coaching, starts from the owner's own numbers: machine hours, fuel, servicing, tipping fees and gross profit margin by job, read against years of coaching other trade businesses. A good coach for you asks what your float sitting idle on a Tuesday is actually costing, not what your mindset is. They look at whether your wet hire jobs are carrying your dry hire jobs, and why, before they suggest anything.
What should you ask before you sign up with a coach?
Ask whether the coach has run plant or a civil business themselves, whether they start from your own job and finance numbers or from you describing the business to them, and whether the fix they propose is a system you keep or advice you forget by next quarter.
Ask what they do with a thin-margin job once they find it. A coach worth paying traces it back, maybe to a tipping fee that was never built into the quote, or an operator rostered on a job that did not need that skill level, and fixes the system that let it happen again. If every answer sounds the same regardless of which question you ask, that is worth noticing before you sign anything.
What are the warning signs of the wrong coach for an earthmoving business?
The clearest warning sign is a salesperson first and a coach second: someone pushing you to commit before they have looked at a single number from your business. A second is a coach who has never run a trade business and answers every problem with the same worksheet, regardless of whether you run excavators, tippers or bobcats.
A third is advice that treats objection handling as a script to overcome resistance rather than a compelling option put in front of a builder or civil customer. If the advice would read the same for a plumber, a cafe owner and an earthmoving contractor, it was never built for earthmoving contractors in the first place.
Can AI agents and systems do some of what a coach does?
Yes, for the non-billable office work that eats an owner's week without ever appearing on an invoice. An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it yourself, with your prices, your wording and your rules, so quoting, scheduling a float or chasing a civil customer for payment can happen without you doing it by hand every time.
Some off-the-shelf tools suit some earthmoving contractors well, and your own data shows which ones earn their place and which ones you are renting without using properly. The larger shift is owning systems built on your own job and finance data, shaped around how your sites run and how your customers buy, with AI agents handling the office work, so the people in your business spend more time on crew and customers and less on paperwork built for someone else's trade.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts from the owner's own numbers through the Trade Business Intelligence, built from real job and finance data alongside years of coaching trade businesses, including earthmoving contractors. For a question about choosing a coach, that means looking first at where your margin actually sits, by machine and by job, before any conversation about mindset or motivation happens.
Greg Allan built the method from running his own trade business, and the how, the systems, the builds, the step by step, is worked through inside the Academy with members. The Academy is for owners who are open minded, innovative and willing to share, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member, for every member.
