By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Should a bricklayer price per thousand or by the day?
Most bricklayers treat this as a straight choice, chasing a better rate per thousand when a job feels tight, or switching to day rate when a rate-per-thousand job runs long. Neither choice fixes the real problem on its own. A rate per thousand can look generous on the quote and still lose money once labourer time, scaffold lifts and load out are counted properly. A day rate can look safe and still pay almost nothing once the actual hours on site are tallied against what the job was ever worth.
The pricing method is not what protects margin. What protects margin is whether every cost that hit that job, mixing, scaffold, cleaning down, weather days, was loaded onto it before anyone called it profitable. Many bricklaying businesses settle on one pricing method in their first year and never test it against the numbers again, so a method that once worked on project home blockwork quietly stops working on custom retaining walls and feature brick.
Why does a job on day rate still look busy and still lose money?
On day rate, the trap is not the rate itself, it is whether the crew actually achieves the time the job was allowed. When a retaining wall or a face brick feature wall takes extra days because of weather, a scaffold delay or a builder changing the brief partway through, those extra days often get absorbed as just how the job went, rather than tracked back against what was quoted.
The bricklayer is on site and billing hours, so it feels like the job is covering itself. Whether it actually is depends on hours worked against the hours the job was priced to take, not on whether the crew looked flat out. A bricklayer can run a full week on site, invoice every hour, and still have given the job away, because nobody compared the time allowed to the time it actually took.
What happens when bricklayers price to match the next quote?
Pricing a job to undercut the next brickie's quote, rather than pricing it against what the work truly costs to run, can leave a bricklaying business working flat out all year with little left at the end of it. Builders will often get several quotes on a job and push for the lowest rate per thousand, and it is tempting to chase the work by shaving the rate rather than working out what the job costs.
A bricklayer who wins subcontract work this way can be busy on site every week, scaffold always up somewhere, crew always loading out, and still be left with almost nothing once materials, labourer wages and the slow jobs are accounted for. Being the cheapest quote and being a profitable job are two different things, and only one of them shows up in the bank account at the end of the year.
How can a bricklayer price a job when every site is different?
Picture a bricklayer whose work swings between straightforward blockwork on project homes and custom retaining walls, feature gable ends in face brick, and awkward corners that never fit a standard rate. Every job differed in size, brick count or complexity, so a single fixed price quoted up front often turned into extra costs the bricklayer wore alone once the real quantity or the real difficulty showed up on site.
Dropping the single fixed price in favour of a price window, a low figure and a high figure built from what the job could realistically take, meant the bricklayer no longer absorbed every surprise once the scaffold went up and the brick count was confirmed. The builder still had a number to plan against. The bricklayer stopped wearing costs that were never his to wear.
What number should a bricklayer actually watch to protect margin?
The number that tells the truth is gross profit margin on each job, not the rate quoted for it. Gross profit margin is what is left from a job once the direct cost of running it, labourer wages, scaffold hire, mortar and material wastage, mixing and load out time, is taken off what the builder paid. Tracked job by job, it shows which jobs actually made money and which ones only felt busy.
This is a data first way of looking at the business, because memory of how a job went is usually wrong by the time the invoice is paid. A bricklayer who only checks the bank balance at the end of the month is reading a result, not a cause, and the cause is sitting in the gap between the time a job was allowed and the time it actually took.
Can AI agents take the job costing and quoting admin off a bricklayer's plate?
An AI agent is software that does a piece of the office work the way the bricklayer would do it themselves, using their own prices, their own wording and their own rules, rather than a generic template built for every trade. For a bricklaying business, that can mean an agent handling the quoting back and forth, tracking labourer hours and scaffold hire against each job, or flagging a job that is drifting past the time it was allowed, so the owner is not doing this at night after a full day on site.
Some off the shelf quoting or job management tools suit some bricklayers well enough, and the business's own data is what shows which ones earn their keep and which ones are being paid for and barely used. The choice most bricklayers are not told they have is building systems around how their own jobs actually run, rather than renting software built for every trade at once.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts from the bricklaying business's own numbers, through the Trade Business Intelligence, rather than from a guess about whether per thousand or day rate is the better method. It looks at gross profit margin job by job, against the time each job was actually allowed, because that is where a pricing problem usually starts, long before it shows up as a tight bank balance.
Greg Allan has sat with bricklayers who were certain the issue was their rate, only to find, in his words, “You've got a pricing problem. You're actually not making profit.” Working out exactly where that starts is done inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is built by every member who is open minded, innovative and willing to share what they find.
