By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
What goes wrong when a locksmith business owner picks the wrong coach?
Most locksmith business owners who hire the wrong coach end up with advice built for a generic trade, not the calls they actually run. The coach sets pricing targets or scripts for ‘the trade’ as a whole, with no real sense of how a lockout callout, a rekey, or a restricted key system actually gets quoted, priced and billed.
The result is usually a list of actions that treat a symptom rather than the cause. An owner is told to raise prices across the board, without anyone looking at which jobs actually carry the margin: an after hours emergency callout, a commercial access control fit out, or a routine residential lock change. Those are different jobs with different costs and different customers, and lumping them together hides where the real problem sits.
Picture a locksmith who takes on a coach who has never carried van stock, never quoted a master key system for a strata building, and never dealt with a property manager chasing an invoice. The advice sounds confident, but it is not built from the business in front of it, and within a few weeks the owner is back where they started.
Why does generic business coaching rarely fit a locksmith business?
Generic coaching rarely fits because a locksmith business runs on several different rhythms at once: emergency lockouts and after hours work, scheduled rekeys and lock changes, commercial contracts for access control and restricted key systems, and real estate or strata work with its own billing cycle. A coach who cannot see those differences is working with one picture when there are several.
A safe job, a digital lock install for a commercial client, and a weekend lockout all have different margins, different compliance obligations and different customer expectations. Insurance requirements and security door standards also sit in the background of commercial and strata work in ways residential jobs rarely touch. Coaching that is the same for every trade tends to miss all of this, because it was never built to look at it.
What should you look for in a coach for your locksmith business?
A good coach for your locksmith business has actually run a trade business, starts from your own numbers rather than a general template, and works on fixing the cause of a problem with a system, not by handing you another worksheet. If every answer to a problem is “hire someone”, that is not coaching, it is avoidance.
Look for someone who asks about your gross profit margin on different job types before they talk about marketing. Someone who wants to see how your after hours and emergency pricing compares with your routine rekey and lock change work, and who is curious about how your van stock and key cutting margins actually sit, rather than assuming. Coaches like Greg Allan, who built and ran his own trade business before coaching others, tend to ask these questions because they have lived them, not read about them.
What questions should you ask before signing with a coach?
Before signing with any coach, ask what they will look at first, and in a locksmith business the honest answer should be your own job and financial data, not a questionnaire about your goals.
- Have you run a trade business yourself, with crew, vans and an after hours roster
- Will you start from my own numbers, or from a template built for every trade
- How do you tell the difference between a pricing problem and a cash flow problem
- What happens to the office work, the quoting, scheduling and invoicing, while we work on this
- Can AI agents, software that does a job the way you would, with your prices, wording and rules, take on any of that non-billable work
What are the warning signs of a coach who is wrong for your locksmith business?
The clearest warning sign is a coach who sounds like a salesperson before they sound like someone who understands your work. If the first conversation is about joining fees rather than your margins on rekeys, restricted key systems and commercial contracts, treat that as a signal.
Other warning signs: a coach who has never run a trade business and cannot explain how, a coach whose advice would read exactly the same for a plumber, an electrician or a builder, and a coach who answers every problem the same way, usually by telling you to hire more people or spend more on leads, without ever asking what your own data shows about where the time and the margin are actually going.
How can your own numbers and AI agents change the coaching conversation?
Your own numbers change the conversation because they show what is really happening in your locksmith business this week, not what you remember from a busy month some time ago. A data first approach starts there, because memory is usually an old picture of the business.
AI agents, which are software that do a job the way you would, with your prices, wording and rules, can take on the quoting for a rekey, the follow up after a lockout, or the scheduling around an after hours callout. That frees you and your crew to spend time with customers and on the tools, which makes the business more human, not less, while the numbers behind it stay current.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, created by Greg Allan, starts by looking at your own job and financial data through the Trade Business Intelligence, not by asking you to explain your locksmith business from memory. It looks for where a pricing problem, a margin problem or a cash flow problem on your rekeys, callouts or commercial contracts actually starts, because the first symptom an owner notices is rarely the root cause.
The how, the systems and the step by step, is worked through inside the Academy, with other members. It is built for owners who are open minded, innovative and willing to share, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member, for every member.
