What numbers should a concreter track every week?

Why can a concreting business be fully booked and still finish the year with nothing in the bank?

A concreter can have driveways and slabs booked out weeks ahead, invoices going out every week, and still find the bank balance barely moves. Being busy and being profitable are not the same thing. Most owners only look at the top line, jobs won, metres poured, invoices sent, and never check whether the hours those jobs actually took matched what was allowed for in the price.

Gross profit gets built into every quote: a price for the labour, a price for the pour, a margin on top. What often goes unmeasured is whether that margin ever makes it through to the bottom line. A business can be fully booked every single week of the year and still end up with no net profit, because the gap between what was quoted and what was actually worked never gets tracked.

What is actually eating the margin between a concrete quote and the money in the bank?

The margin disappears in the small, ordinary things that happen on every pour day: a pump truck running late, a batching truck arriving behind schedule, crew standing around waiting instead of working, an extra yard run for forms or steel that was not allowed for, finishing that drags on longer than planned.

None of this shows up on the invoice. The customer is charged what the quote said. But the labour hours paid out that week can run well past what the quote allowed, and if nobody is measuring that gap, it just quietly repeats, job after job, week after week.

What two numbers should a concreter track every week?

The two numbers are job efficiency and operational efficiency. Job efficiency measures the hours a specific pour or slab actually took against the hours allowed for it in the quote. Operational efficiency measures the whole crew's billable hours for the week against the total hours paid for, across every job, every truck, every yard run.

Very few concreters track either of these every week, even though together they are one of the clearest ways to see whether a quoting price is holding up in the real world. A concreter can beat the time on one driveway and still lose on operational efficiency if the rest of the week was spent on yard runs, travel between sites or jobs that ran long. One number without the other hides half the picture.

How does job efficiency reveal where a pour or a slab is losing money?

Job efficiency shows whether a specific job made the margin it was priced to make, by comparing the hours actually worked against the hours allowed in the quote. When a crew comes in under the allowed time, extra profit is made on that job. When it runs over, because of a late pump truck, a tricky pour, or finishing that took longer than planned, the margin starts eroding before the invoice is even sent.

Tracked job by job, this tells a concreter something a bank balance never can: whether the pricing on driveways, footings or decorative work is realistic, or whether the business is quietly underquoting the time a pour actually takes.

How does operational efficiency show what is happening across the whole crew?

Operational efficiency looks at the whole week rather than one job, comparing every billable hour worked against every hour the business paid for. It catches the time that never lands on a job at all: yard runs, travel between sites, waiting on deliveries, or a qualified tradesperson spending hours in the office instead of on the tools.

Picture a concreter whose most experienced hand, a qualified foreman, was spending several hours a week working up technical quotes for footings and slab specs at a desk instead of running a pour. That time was real, it was paid for, but it was not billable to any job, and when the crew was only measured as a team the leak stayed hidden. Once that concreter started tracking efficiency for each person individually rather than the crew as a whole, the low number against that one name stood out straight away. It led to a direct conversation and a change: some of that technical quoting moved elsewhere, and he went back out onto pours where his time actually earned.

Can a concreter track this without it becoming another job for the office?

This is exactly the kind of tracking AI agents can take on, because it is repetitive, it needs doing every week, and it is non-billable office work that otherwise falls on whoever runs the business. An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would do it yourself, using your own prices, your own wording and your own rules, rather than a generic template built for every trade.

A data first approach means the agent pulls from your own job and crew hours each week rather than a guess or a gut feel about how the week went. Some off-the-shelf job management or timesheet apps already capture part of this well, and the data will show which of those are worth keeping rather than replacing everything at once. What matters is that the two numbers, job efficiency and operational efficiency, get checked every single week, not once a year when the accountant asks why net profit is thin.

How does Data First Coaching approach this?

Data First Coaching starts from your own job and crew data through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from a conversation about how business feels. For a concreter, that usually means looking first at job efficiency and operational efficiency, because they show where a quoted margin is actually going, rather than where an owner assumes it is going. Greg Allan built this after seeing, in his own numbers, “if you haven't allowed for enough time, there's a problem with your pricing”, which is exactly what these two figures expose. The how, the setup and the weekly discipline of it, is worked through inside the Academy, among members who are open minded, innovative and willing to share, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member for every member.