Most tradies hit a wall around the quarter-million revenue mark. You're booked solid, turning down work, but somehow there's less money in your account than when you were smaller. You've hired blokes who need constant supervision, your margin on materials keeps shrinking because suppliers know you're desperate, and you spent last Sunday redoing a job your apprentice botched. Nobody tells you this part when you go out on your own. A tradie business coach steps in precisely at this breaking point, when you're too deep in the day-to-day chaos to see what's actually broken.
The real problem isn't that you're disorganised. It's that you're using systems designed for a one-man band when you're running a crew. A tradie business coach who's actually worked in trades will spot this immediately. They've seen how a chippy in Perth lost an entire day's productivity because his blokes were waiting on materials he forgot to order, or how a concreter in Adelaide was haemorrhaging money because his crew didn't know which jobs to prioritise. The fix isn't another app or software subscription. It's rebuilding how information flows between you, your crew, and your clients so nothing falls through the cracks.
Growth kills more trade businesses than recessions do. You take on bigger jobs before you've got the cash flow to cover materials upfront. You hire too fast and end up with blokes sitting around costing you money between jobs. Or you stay small and safe, watching younger tradies overtake you because they're willing to take risks you're too scared to consider. A coach worth paying walks you through the expansion that broke other tradies in your area and shows you how to avoid their mistakes. They know which equipment hire places will give you trade terms, which jobs to tackle when you're between two and three employees, and when to stop quoting residential work entirely.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: you're subsidising some clients with profits from others and you don't even realise it. That regular client who always pays on time? You're probably losing money on their jobs because you quote them the same rate you did three years ago. Meanwhile, the difficult client who haggles and pays late is actually more profitable because you quoted them properly out of spite. A tradie business coach makes you track this stuff properly. They'll show you that your profit per hour on commercial maintenance is double what you make on residential renovations, even though renos feel more impressive. Or that the suburbs you're traveling to cost you so much in time and fuel that you'd earn more staying local and charging less.
Time management advice for tradies is usually garbage written by people who've never run a job site. You can't "batch process" when a plumbing emergency comes in, and you can't "delegate" when you're the only licensed person on site. What actually works is learning to recognise which clients will respect a firm timeline and which ones will have you returning for endless tweaks. It's knowing that quoting on a Friday afternoon means you'll spend your weekend fielding questions, or that some jobs aren't worth taking no matter how slow work is because they'll consume three times the hours you estimated.
Your first employee either makes your business or confirms you should've stayed solo. Most tradies hire because they're desperate, not because they're ready. They bring on their mate who's "pretty handy" or an apprentice because the government subsidy makes it seem cheap. Six months later they're doing damage control on botched jobs and wondering why their insurance premiums jumped. Proper coaching means learning to hire for reliability over skill, because you can teach technique but you can't teach someone to show up. It's understanding why paying above award rates actually saves money when you factor in reduced turnover and better quality work.
Working with a tradie business coach means confronting the gap between how you think your business runs and how it actually runs. The good ones don't let you blame the economy, difficult clients, or cheap competitors. They make you accountable for the decisions that got you here and the changes needed to move forward. For tradies stuck in the cycle of being busy but broke, or growing but drowning, coaching provides the outside perspective that breaks the pattern. It's not comfortable, but it's considerably cheaper than learning these lessons through business failure.
