By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why does a profitable month of wet area jobs disappear by the time warranty call-backs are done?
A run of shower, bathroom and balcony jobs can look like the best month a waterproofer has had, every certificate signed off, every flood test passed, invoices paid. Then weeks later a tiler rings about a leak, and the crew is back on site chasing a membrane failure instead of quoting new work. Zoom out over the quarter and the profit from that busy month often cancels itself out against the hours spent on remedial work.
This is the boom-bust pattern that catches a lot of waterproofers out. The job was marked complete, the cash came in, and on paper the business looked strong. What does not show up anywhere is the crew's time back on a balcony or roof deck re-testing a detail that should have been right the first time, because that time rarely gets booked against the job that caused it.
Why can a fully booked waterproofing business still be losing money on remedial work?
Being flat out on new wet areas does not mean a waterproofing business is profitable. A crew can be booked solid on bathrooms, balconies and basements while quietly losing weeks of unbilled time attending leak calls, re-membraning a shower recess, or sitting through a defect inspection with a builder who is not happy.
Most waterproofers only find this out when the year's numbers come in soft, not when it is happening. The remedial hours get absorbed into general overheads, the materials for a second membrane pass get coded as a normal supply cost, and the certificate that failed never gets connected back to the quote that sold it. Insurance work and rectification jobs are even easier to lose track of, because they often get treated as separate from the original contract instead of as the true cost of it.
What number actually shows where warranty claims are eating a waterproofer's margin?
The number that tells the truth is gross profit margin, checked job by job at the point of quoting and then tracked again once remedial hours and materials are booked back against that same job. If a bathroom or balcony job looked healthy at quoting but the margin disappears once the warranty call-back is included, that gap is the real cost of the job, not bad luck.
This is not a once-off calculation done when the quote goes out. Gross profit margin needs protecting and growing every month, across the whole book, because a single strong month can hide a pattern of jobs, builders or detail types that keep coming back. Tracking buildable hours separately from hours actually paid on a job is what makes the difference visible, whether the business is still in its foundation phase or growing a bigger crew.
How do AI agents help separate remedial hours from normal production hours?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way the owner would, following their prices, their wording and their rules. For a waterproofer, that means an agent can tag every hour on the tools and every roll of membrane against the specific job and certificate it belongs to, instead of letting it sit in a general labour or materials line.
Once that is happening, AI agents can also flag which builder, which detail type, or which wet area design keeps generating remedial work, so the pattern shows up against real job data rather than memory. A waterproofer does not need to remember which balcony job it was that leaked six months ago. The data already knows, and the agent has kept the record clean without anyone having to chase it up after the fact.
Should every builder, wet area or detail type be priced and warrantied the same way?
No. Once the data shows which jobs and which builders are generating the remedial work, pricing and warranty terms can reflect that risk instead of treating every job the same.
Picture a waterproofer whose busiest renovation season was bringing in more urgent leak calls and remedial requests than the crew could comfortably handle, priced the same flat rate as a routine inspection regardless of how urgent or risky the attendance was. Once the data first view showed how much of that peak season time was going to unbilled remedial work, the business set a separate rate for urgent leak attendance during the rush, and explained the difference to builders and tilers on the phone as a reason to book new installs and inspections outside the busiest stretch. It also stopped taking supply-only membrane jobs where somebody else did the install, and only warranties the wet areas and balconies its own crew fits.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts from the waterproofer's own job data through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from a conversation about which jobs felt hard. It looks at gross profit margin job by job, then checks what happens to that margin once remedial hours and materials are tracked back against the certificate that caused them, because that is usually where the real problem starts, not in the month it shows up.
As Greg puts it, “when we zoom out, you realise that it's net zero”, and finding that out early is what lets a waterproofer fix the detail, the builder relationship or the pricing instead of absorbing the same cost again next season. The how is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member for every member.
