By Greg Allan, tradesman and creator of Data First Coaching
Why is my gasfitting business busy but not making money?
Most gasfitters who feel this way are measuring the wrong thing. A diary full of hot water installs, cooktop swaps, leak detection and compliance certificate jobs feels like proof the business is doing well, but a full schedule only tells the owner they are busy, not that they are profitable.
The gap usually opens the moment volume goes up. Each individual callout or install can look fine when priced on its own, materials plus a rate for the hours on the job. What gets missed is the cost of running the whole paid day: driving between a leak callout and a pressure test, writing up a safety check, chasing a part for a heater that was out of stock, standing by for a flue inspection that runs long. None of that is billed to a customer, but all of it is paid for out of the same business. As the number of jobs goes up, that unbilled cost goes up with it, and it eats into gross profit margin on every job whether the owner notices or not.
Why does a full diary of callouts still leave the bank account empty?
A positive number in the books is not proof there is cash sitting in the account. Work that is finished but not yet paid for is the clearest sign of the gap between what the paperwork says and what is actually available to spend.
For a gasfitter this shows up constantly. A compliance certificate gets issued, a servicing callout gets completed, an LPG changeover gets signed off, and the invoice goes out the same day the next job starts. When the diary is full of callouts and quotes, chasing payment slides to the bottom of the list. The business can be doing the work and still be short of cash, because the money for last week's gas line extension or hot water install hasn't actually landed yet.
What number actually tells you if a job made money?
The number worth watching month to month is gross profit margin, not the invoice total and not how many jobs got ticked off. It is the one figure that shows whether the price on a cooktop install, a leak callout or a servicing job is actually covering what it costs to run that job, once travel, paperwork and standby time are accounted for.
Most gasfitters price job by job, and each one can look efficient on its own, time on tools against time billed. The problem is that figure only ever looks at one job. It never asks what the rest of the paid day cost across every bayonet fitting, meter check and carbon monoxide safety check that didn't make it onto an invoice. Watching gross profit margin across the whole week, not one job at a time, is what starts to show where the money is actually leaking.
How do AI agents change the office side of a gasfitting business?
An AI agent is software that does a job the way the owner would, with their own prices, wording and rules. For a gasfitting business that means the office work that never makes it onto an invoice, chasing an unpaid compliance certificate, following up a quote for a gas line extension, checking in a crew member arriving on site, can be handled without pulling the owner off the tools.
Picture a gasfitter running two vans between hot water installs, leak callouts and regular servicing work. For a while, staff time on jobs wasn't being captured properly: a crew member arrives early to set up for a pressure test, finishes a safety check late because the customer wanted questions answered, and none of that extra time ever gets recorded against the job. Paid hours slip through the cracks without anyone deciding they should. What changed was how the team checks in and out of a job, so time on site is recorded consistently from arrival to departure, not just the billable hour written on the invoice. That one change means the real cost of a job starts showing up in the numbers instead of hiding in the gap between hours paid and hours billed.
AI agents can also sit on the unpaid invoice problem directly, following up a customer for payment on a finished install the same way the owner would, without it depending on finding a spare ten minutes between callouts. That is data first thinking: starting from what the job and finance numbers actually show, rather than from how full the diary feels.
Is this a pricing problem or a systems problem?
It is rarely one or the other. Some gasfitters are pricing jobs too low for what they actually cost to run, and some are pricing fairly but losing the margin to unbilled time and uncollected invoices. The only way to tell which is happening is to look at the business's own numbers, not a general rule about what a hot water install or a compliance certificate should cost.
Off-the-shelf job management software can help some gasfitters track time and invoices, and for some that is enough. For others, a system built around how their own jobs actually run, their licence requirements, their regulator paperwork, their mix of natural gas and LPG work, shows more than a generic tool ever will, because it is shaped around their business instead of every trade at once.
How does Data First Coaching approach this?
Data First Coaching, created by Greg Allan, starts from the gasfitting business's own job and finance data through the Trade Business Intelligence, not from a conversation about how busy things feel. It looks at where gross profit margin is actually sitting across the real job mix, hot water installs, leak detection, servicing callouts, compliance certificates, and at what is owed but not yet collected. Greg has seen the same pattern across trade businesses: “there's money being owed to them that they haven't gone and collected”, and a full diary hides it every time. The how is worked through inside the Academy, with members, because the Trade Business Intelligence is powered by every member who joins open minded, innovative and willing to share.
