By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why can a plasterer finish every patch job and still lose money?
A patching job can be quoted at a fair square metre rate, finished on the day promised, and paid in full by the builder, and still cost the business money. The reason is that wages, holiday pay, super and GST get paid on the whole day worked, not on the hours that actually went into stopping, setting or sanding a wall.
Most plasterers price the job, not the day. The square metre rate on a small ceiling patch or a water damage repair looks reasonable on its own. But a patch day rarely means one job. It usually means three or four small sites, a van loaded with offcuts of plasterboard and a bit of cornice, and a schedule built around what the builder needs finished, not what makes the drive efficient.
Where does the time go between the quote and the invoice?
The time disappears in travel between sites and in the waiting on drying time, both of which are paid hours that never show up as billable work on any single job. A plasterer can be on the clock for a full day and have only a fraction of it actually go into sheeting, stopping or sanding.
Picture a renovation patch run: drive to the first site, set the stopping, drive to the second while it dries, do a cornice repair, drive back to the first to sand once it has cured, then a run to the wholesaler for more plasterboard because the job turned out bigger than expected. None of that driving or waiting appears on the invoice. It is paid time with no square metre attached to it, and across a week of patch work it adds up to a serious cost that the job pricing never accounted for.
What does your own data show that memory can't?
The number that tells the truth on patching work is the billable hours on each job set against the hours actually paid for that day, not the revenue total or how busy the diary looks. Memory says the day was full and the invoices went out, which feels like a good week. The data says something different.
This is what data first means for a plastering business: instead of deciding from how the week felt, the decision starts from what the hours actually did. A plasterer who looks at a month of patch jobs this way can often see the same pattern repeat, the same cluster of small sites, the same wait on drying coats between a stop and a sand, eating into margin that the square metre rate was supposed to protect.
How can AI agents take the non-billable work off your plate?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it yourself, using your prices, your wording and your rules, and it can take on the scheduling and admin that currently eats into a patch day without ever appearing on an invoice. That is where the hidden cost in patching work actually gets found and fixed.
For a plasterer running between small jobs, that can mean an agent that groups patch jobs by location so the drive between sites is shorter, or one that texts the builder a drying time window so the crew isn't sitting on site waiting for a coat to cure. AI agents don't replace the plasterer on the tools. They take the running around and the chasing off the plasterer's day so the paid hours line up closer to the billable ones.
Should you quote patching jobs differently to protect your margin?
A single fixed price on patching work often punishes the plasterer, because every patch job is a different size, a different amount of plasterboard, a different number of coats and a different amount of drying time between them, and none of that is the plasterer's fault when it runs long.
Picture a plasterer who kept wearing the extra cost on custom patch work, jobs where the water damage turned out worse once the old sheeting came off, or the cornice run was longer than the builder described over the phone. He stopped giving one fixed number for jobs like that. Instead he started quoting a price window, so the uncertainty in a patch job, the bit that is genuinely out of his control, was priced in rather than absorbed.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, built by Greg Allan, starts from a plasterer's own job and finance data through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from a description of the business. On patching work, that means looking at billable hours against paid hours first, because that is usually where the real cost is hiding, not in the square metre rate itself. Greg puts it plainly: “the job still gets done, you still charge the money, so you think you're doing okay.” The how, the agents, the scheduling, the systems, is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member for every member, and that is why who joins matters.
Looking for a business coach who starts from your numbers? Plasterer Business Coach or every answer for plasterers.
