By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why do most business coaches not fit a waterproofing business?
Most business coaching is built for a generic service business, not for the way a waterproofing business actually runs. A coach who has never priced a wet area job, chased a flood test certificate, or argued a defect claim with a builder's site manager is coaching from theory, not from the trade. The advice ends up the same for every business in the room, which is the opposite of what a waterproofer needs.
A waterproofer's work does not sit still long enough for generic advice to help. One week the crew is in a bathroom doing a shower membrane before the tiler arrives, the next it is a basement job fighting a leak that has already damaged someone's flooring, and the week after that it is a roof deck recoat chasing cure time against a wet forecast. A coach without that background tends to talk about marketing funnels and mindset, while the actual problem sits in the program, the materials, or the paperwork between the waterproofer and the builder.
What is actually costing a waterproofer margin when the real problem looks like something else?
What looks like a pricing problem is often something else entirely. A waterproofer might blame a thin margin on a bathroom quote, when the real cost sits in rework after a flood test fails, a cure time that was not allowed for in the program, or a defect rectification job carried out under warranty with no record of what was actually agreed with the builder at handover. Gross profit margin is the number that shows this, tracked job by job and month by month, not worked out once on a quote and forgotten.
A waterproofing business can look busy and still be losing ground. Insurance work and remedial jobs often carry different margins to new build wet areas, and a coach who only looks at total revenue misses which type of job is actually paying the wages. The owner's own numbers, read properly, usually point back to one or two causes: a certificate process that is not tight enough, or a warranty period with no system for tracking what was promised.
What should a waterproofing business coach look at first?
A coach worth paying should start from your own job and finance data, not from a conversation about your business. They should understand why a shower membrane job and a balcony or roof deck job price and program differently, and they should look at your gross profit margin by job type before suggesting anything changes.
This is what data first coaching means in practice. Instead of you explaining your waterproofing business to a coach, out of date within weeks, the coaching starts from what your jobs and finances already show: which builders pay on time, which remedial callbacks are eating your margin, and where cure time delays are quietly costing you program days. AI agents can take on a lot of the non-billable office work that sits around this, from chasing certificate paperwork to keeping warranty records straight. An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it, with your prices, your wording and your rules, so your time goes back onto the tools and the customers rather than the admin.
What should you ask a coach before you pay them?
Ask direct questions before you sign anything, because the answers tell you whether the coaching will fit a waterproofing business or a generic one.
- Have you run a trade business yourself, and what did it do
- Will you start from my own job and finance data, or will I spend our first sessions explaining my business to you
- How do you handle a business where margin differs between new build wet areas, remedial work and insurance jobs
- What happens when the answer to a problem is not “hire someone”
- Can you show me how you have helped fix a root cause, not just suggested a worksheet
A good answer to each of these sounds specific to the trade, not rehearsed.
What are the warning signs of the wrong coach for a waterproofing business?
Watch for a coach who sells before they ask anything about your business, because that usually means the program is the same for every client regardless of trade. Watch too for a coach who has never run a trade business, or whose answer to every problem is to hire another person rather than fix what is actually broken.
If every session feels like a worksheet handed out regardless of what your numbers actually show, that is generic coaching wearing a trade business label. A waterproofing business has its own patterns, cure times, flood tests, warranty exposure, builder relationships, and a coach who cannot speak to those in your own words is unlikely to change much for you.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, created by Greg Allan, starts from the waterproofing business owner's own data through the Trade Business Intelligence rather than from a conversation about the business. It looks first at gross profit margin by job type, at remedial and warranty exposure, and at where the program is losing days, to find where a problem actually starts rather than where it shows up. The how, the systems and the agent builds that come from that, are worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member for every member, and the Academy is built for owners who are open minded, innovative and willing to share what they learn.
