By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why is my bricklaying business busy but not making money?
A bricklaying business can have the crew on site most days of the week, every invoice going out on time, and still watch the bank balance drop. The real answer sits in one number most bricklayers never check: labour efficiency, the hours a crew bills against the hours it gets paid for. Scaffold waiting, wet weather, loading out and cleaning down are paid hours that never reach a quote, and that gap is where the money disappears.
Most bricklayers price by rate per thousand bricks laid or by day rate, and once the brickwork or blockwork goes up and the invoice goes out, the job looks done and dusted. But that day rate was built assuming a labourer and a brickie are laying brick and block for most of the day, not standing under a dripping scaffold waiting for it to dry out, or loading out mortar and blocks before anyone's trowel touches a wall. When those hours get paid but never billed to a job, the business carries a cost that no quote accounted for, and nothing on the invoice ever shows it.
Why does a full day rate on site still end up costing the business money?
A day rate covers the hours a crew is paid, not the hours it actually lays brick, and that difference is where a bricklaying business quietly loses its margin. A job can be finished, cleaned down and invoiced on schedule while the real cost of running it blew well past what was quoted, and nothing about the finished wall shows that happened.
Think about what actually happens on a typical job. The labourer is mixing mortar and loading out blocks before the brickie starts, the crew sits out a weather day waiting for a footing to dry, a retaining wall job gets held up because the scaffold lift isn't ready, and at the end there is cleaning down to do before the builder will sign off on progress. None of that is wasted time, it is real work a bricklaying business has to do. The problem is that most pricing, whether it is rate per thousand bricks or a day rate, assumes those hours barely exist. When they run longer than assumed, on a feature wall, a cavity job with damp course detail, or a subcontract where the builder's program keeps slipping, the gap between what was quoted and what was paid out grows without anyone noticing until the figures are done.
What number actually tells you if a job made money or not?
The number that tells the truth is labour efficiency on that specific job, billable hours against hours paid, checked while the job is still running rather than guessed at from memory once the invoice has gone out. Your own job and finance data holds that number already, it just isn't usually pulled together in one place where you can see it.
Most bricklayers judge a job by feel: the brickwork went up without dramas, the builder paid on time, so it must have gone fine. That feeling is about the finished wall, not about what it actually cost to get there. A data first way of looking at the business starts from the job itself, mortar and material cost, labourer and brickie hours paid, scaffold and weather delays, and lines that up against what the job actually billed. Once you see that number job by job, busy and profitable stop being two separate questions, because you can see which jobs are carrying the business and which ones are quietly costing it money while looking fine on the surface.
What changes when an AI agent tracks the non-billable hours for you?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way you would, using your prices, your wording and your rules. In a bricklaying business, one of the first jobs worth handing to an agent is pulling wages and overhead against each job automatically, so the true cost of running it is known without anyone sitting down with a spreadsheet at month end.
Picture a bricklayer trying to work out the real cost of running the business, and getting two answers that both felt wrong. Counting every non-billable hour, the scaffold waiting, the weather days, the cleaning down, against each job made every job on the books look like it lost money. Stripping those hours out altogether made the cost of running the business look far too low to be real. Neither number told him anything he could trust. An AI agent built on the business's own wages and overhead data worked out the true cost of operations with billable hours properly factored in, and put the overhead and non-billable cost into its own bucket instead of spreading it across jobs that never caused it. From there the agent keeps that costing current as the crew's hours change, job by job, without him having to go looking for it.
Should you cancel your job costing app and build something of your own?
Not necessarily. Some off-the-shelf costing or quoting apps suit a bricklaying business well enough, and the right move is to look at what your own data shows about where they fall short, rather than ripping everything out. For many bricklayers the gap isn't the software, it's that nothing is pulling scaffold waiting, weather days and loading out hours into the costing at all.
There are tools built to handle invoicing, or to track a crew's hours, or to manage a subcontract across several builders at once, and some of them do that well. The question a bricklaying business needs answered isn't which app has the most features, it's which parts of the current setup are shaped around how this crew actually works, laying face brick for a builder one week and building a retaining wall the next, and which parts were built for every trade at once and never quite fit. AI agents can sit alongside the tools already in use, handling the office work of pulling job and wage data together and flagging where non-billable hours are eating into a job, so the systems a bricklayer keeps are the ones that earn their place on the owner's own numbers, not on a sales pitch.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching starts from the bricklaying business's own numbers, run through the Trade Business Intelligence, rather than from how busy the owner feels the crew has been. For a bricklayer, that usually means looking at labour efficiency job by job, where mortar time, labourer hours and weather days actually sit against what was billed, because that is where a margin problem is more likely to start than in the quote itself. Greg built this after noticing the same pattern in his own trade business: “I wasn't tracking profitability on jobs. I was just going, yeah, I made some money there.” The how, working out where each bricklaying business's own gap sits and what to put in front of it, is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member who is open minded, innovative and willing to share what they find.
