By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
What should a roofer ask a business coach before hiring one?
The one question that matters more than price or years of experience is whether the coach will build your targets from your own numbers, not a benchmark borrowed from another trade or a bigger roofing business down the road. Ask how they plan to separate your re-roof work, your repair work and your insurance work, because lumping them together hides which part of the business actually carries the margin.
A coach worth paying, someone like Greg Allan who ran his own trade business before coaching tradies, will ask to see your numbers before handing out advice. If the first conversation is about price, or about a generic revenue goal, that is the warning sign, not reassurance.
Ask too how they talk about your quiet months. A coach who only ever frames a slow patch as a staffing problem, or a storm surge as proof the business is thriving, is reading the top line and missing the real test underneath it.
Why does a storm season surge not mean the roofing business is healthy?
After a storm moves through, a roofing business can fill the diary overnight with insurance work, re-roofs and urgent repairs, and that month's revenue looks strong. But a flood of jobs says nothing about whether each job, a re-roof, a guttering replacement or a flashing repair, held its margin once materials, labour and lost weather days are counted. Revenue is a symptom; margin is where the truth sits.
A run of weather days right after the surge can wipe out the diary just as fast, and the same owner who felt flush a fortnight ago can feel like the business is failing, when neither feeling is based on the margin underneath. Most generic coaching treats busy and quiet periods as a staffing or workload question. The real test is whether the business communicates clearly and prices consistently through the swing, not whether the owner reacts to each month's mood.
Why can two roofers with the same turnover be in completely different positions?
A roofing business running restorations, leak repairs, guttering and insurance work side by side can show healthy turnover while one of those job types is quietly losing money. Without separating and measuring each type of work properly, re-roofs against repairs, insurance claims against private jobs, a roofer is making decisions blind, even with a full order book and a busy crew.
Two roofing businesses can turn over the same amount in a year and sit in completely different positions, because one has let the insurance work subsidise underpriced repair jobs without knowing it. A coach who never asks to see the split by job type is working on guesswork, same as the owner was before.
What should you ask about how a coach uses your own numbers?
Ask whether the coach starts with your current margin, broken down by job type, before setting any target, or whether they hand you a growth number pulled from a template. A coach working data first will want your actual cost structure, not an industry average, because a benchmark built for a bigger roofing business in a different market tells you nothing about your crew, your scaffold and edge protection costs or your supplier pricing.
A good coach today should also be able to show you where AI agents, software that does a job the way you would do it yourself, with your prices, wording and rules, could take the quoting follow up, the weather day rescheduling messages or the insurance paperwork off your desk. That matters most in storm season, when the office work piles up fastest and the crew needs you on the roof, not buried in admin.
What should you ask about quoting and margin before signing up?
Ask the coach to walk through how they would test a quote, a flashing repair, a valley replacement or a full re-roof, for whether labour and material cost are captured honestly before overhead is even added. If a coach cannot talk about pricing at that level of detail, the margin they later report back to you is built on guesswork, not fact.
This matters because a quote that under-counts the hours on a steep metal roof, or misses the cost of scaffold and edge protection on a two storey job, looks profitable on paper and loses money in the field. A coach who checks this before talking about growth is protecting the number that actually keeps the roofing business alive: gross profit margin, not the number on the invoice.
What are the warning signs you should walk away from?
Walk away if the coach talks price or contract length before asking a single question about your margin, or if every piece of advice sounds the same regardless of whether you run guttering repairs or full restorations. A coach who has never run a trade business, who answers every problem with hire someone, or who cannot explain how storm season affects your cash flow, is selling a programme, not coaching a roofer.
A salesperson will push urgency and a bonus for signing today. A coach will ask to see your numbers first, because the right plan for a roofing business only makes sense once the margin on each job type, and the effect of weather days on cash flow, is on the table. A coach worth hiring will also be comfortable talking about where AI agents fit into a roofing business, not as a buzzword but as a real way to take non-billable office work off your plate during a surge.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts the same way for every roofing business: with the owner's own numbers, not a conversation about goals. Greg Allan looks first at margin by job type, re-roofs, repairs, guttering and insurance work kept separate, because that split usually shows where a problem actually starts, long before storm season or a quiet month gets the blame. The Trade Business Intelligence reads that data alongside years of coaching trade businesses, so the plan is built around that roofer's business in front of it, not a template. The how, the systems and the step by step work through all of this live inside the Academy, among members who are open minded, innovative and willing to share, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member.
Looking for a business coach who starts from your numbers? Roofer Business Coach or every answer for roofers.
