By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why does a gasfitter who's flat out all week still not know if the business is making money?
Because being busy and being profitable are two different things, and most gasfitters only ever track the first one. A week full of appliance installs, compliance certificates and callouts can look like a good week on the calendar and still be a loss once the real time on each job is counted.
Revenue goes out the door on every invoice regardless. What decides whether that revenue turns into profit is how many of the hours worked that day were actually billable. A gasfitter can run five jobs in a day, invoice all five, and still finish the day behind if two of those jobs ran long and nobody adjusted for it.
This is the trap: the invoice says the job earned what it was quoted. The bank account tells a different story, and most owners never sit the two side by side.
Where does the margin actually disappear on a callout or pressure test?
It disappears in the time that never gets written down anywhere, because it isn't a separate line on the invoice. A pressure test that fails and needs re-running, a drive back to the supplier for a fitting or a regulator that wasn't on the van, a leak that takes twice as long to trace as expected, all of it sits buried inside the job's overhead, dragging down a margin the owner assumed was fine.
Picture a gasfitter who quotes a straightforward hot water unit swap at a fixed price. On site, the old outlet doesn't line up with current compliance rules, the flue needs modifying, and a job priced for an hour and a half runs past three hours. The invoice goes out the same either way. The hours worked did not.
Multiply that across a week of installs, servicing calls and safety checks, and a gasfitter can be fully booked and still watching the margin shrink, without a single number on the quote ever looking wrong.
What does a good business coach actually look at first?
A good coach for a gasfitting business looks at the gap between quoted time and actual time on real jobs, not at motivation or mindset. If a coach's first move is a worksheet or a pep talk rather than a look at your own job costings, that is a sign they are treating a symptom instead of finding where the problem starts.
Someone who has actually run a trade business knows that a gasfitter's margin is protected or lost at the moment of quoting, and again at the moment a job on site runs long and nobody flags it. They will want to see your own numbers, not a template, because a leak diagnosis that regularly overruns tells a different story to a compliance certificate that always comes in on time.
Greg Allan, who built Data First Coaching after running his own trade business, puts the financial and pricing side of the business at the centre of this, because it is the part that, once an owner actually understands it, protects margin on every single quote that goes out.
What should a gasfitter ask before signing up with a coach?
Ask whether they start from your own job and finance data or from a generic framework, because a framework built for no trade in particular will never catch the time lost on a failed pressure test or a mis-booked callout. Ask what they have actually run themselves, and ask what they do when a problem keeps coming back rather than just once.
A warning sign is a coach who answers every problem the same way, usually "hire someone", without first checking whether the real issue is unbillable time eating the day, not a lack of hands. Another warning sign is a coach who sounds like a salesperson before they sound like someone who has quoted a job, failed a test, and had to explain the overrun to a customer.
The right coach treats your busy weeks and your quiet weeks as something to understand, not just survive, because a gasfitting business has its own predictable cycles and a quiet month can be a cashflow problem or a margin problem, and those two need very different fixes.
How do AI agents change what a coach can see in a gasfitting business?
AI agents let a coach see the gap between quoted and actual time on every job without the owner having to dig it out by hand. An AI agent is software that does a job the way the owner would, using their own prices, their own wording and their own rules, so it can sit quietly inside the quoting and invoicing work a gasfitter already does.
Instead of an owner trying to remember which callout ran long last month, an AI agent working data first can flag it as it happens, so the pattern shows up while it is still useful rather than after the quarter is closed. That is what lets a coach go straight to where the margin is actually leaking instead of guessing from memory.
Used this way, AI agents also take on the non-billable admin that eats a gasfitter's evening, chasing paperwork for a compliance certificate or following up on an invoice, freeing that time for the jobs that actually pay.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts from the gasfitting business's own numbers through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from a description of how busy the owner has been. It looks first at the gap between what jobs are quoted at and what they actually return, because that gap is usually where the real problem starts, not where it shows up. Greg Allan has said plainly that once an owner loses that efficiency, "You've lost efficiency, you've lost all your profit." The how of fixing it is worked through inside the Academy, with other members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member who is open minded, innovative and willing to share what they learn.
