Home › Business Coach for Tradies › Business coach for concreters in Australia

Business coach for concreters in Australia

By Luke Tadich · The Tradie Owner

If you run a concreting business, you already know the work is not the hard part. You can pour a slab, dress a driveway and get a finish that lasts. The hard part is that you can be flat out all year and still wonder where the money went. That gap between busy and profitable is what a business coach is for.

Who this is for

This page is for owners of Australian concreting businesses turning over $1 million or more. You've got crews, utes, a pump or a regular pump hire arrangement, and usually more work than you can comfortably schedule. You're well past survival. You're stuck at the ceiling where the whole business runs on you being on site or on the phone every single day.

If you're still a one-man band chasing your first big jobs, coaching at this level is too early. But if you're over $1M and the growth has stopped feeling like progress, that's exactly the problem worth paying to solve.

What a good business coach for concreters actually does

A good coach knows concreting economics, not just generic business theory. They can look at your numbers and your day and tell you where the profit is leaking, then help you plug it. Anyone can talk about mindset. You want someone who understands what a washed-out pour costs you.

Look for a coach who gets the things that actually run a concreting business:

• How you really price. Most concreters quote per square metre off habit, or off what the bloke down the road charges. A good coach helps you build your rate off true cost: concrete supply, pump, reo, formwork, labour hours, wastage, travel and a real margin on top.
• Weather and scheduling risk. Rain writes off a pour, heat brings its own problems, and every washout stacks jobs into the next window. A coach helps you build a schedule and a deposit structure that survives a bad fortnight.
• Cash flow that swings. Concreting is feast or famine. Big supplier bills land before the client pays a cent. A coach helps you smooth that so a slow month doesn't put you under.
• Crew productivity. The difference between a crew that pours and strips on time and one that doesn't is thousands of dollars a job. A coach helps you measure it and lift it.

Where concreting businesses leak money

Most concreting owners aren't losing money because the work is bad. They're losing it in the same handful of places, over and over. Here's where it usually hides.

1. Pricing per square metre instead of true cost. You win the job on price and lose it on margin. A rate feels competitive until you count the pump, the reo, the wastage on an awkward pour and the hours your crew actually burned. The fix is knowing your true cost per square metre before you quote, every time.
2. Deposits that don't cover your outlay. If your deposit doesn't cover the concrete order and the pump, you're funding the client's job out of your own pocket. Stage the payments so materials are paid for before they're poured.
3. Weather downtime nobody prices in. Wet weeks and heat delays aren't bad luck, they're a cost of doing business in this country. Build a buffer into your rate and your schedule so a washed-out fortnight doesn't wipe the month.
4. Crews waiting and rework. A late supply truck, a pump that doesn't turn up, a form that lets go. Every hour a crew stands around, and every slab that has to be redone, is money gone. Small systems around scheduling and quality control win it back.
5. The owner being the bottleneck. If every quote, every problem and every payment runs through you, the business physically cannot grow past your own hours. Getting that off your plate is usually the single biggest win on the table.

How The Tradie Owner works

The Tradie Owner is run by Luke Tadich and it's built for exactly this. There are three steps, in order.

Step one: the first session. This is a paid working session where we go through your business and find the money. The guarantee is simple. We find you at least $100,000 of opportunity in that first session, or you don't pay. For most concreting businesses over $1M, the leaks above add up to well past that.

Step two: the 60-Day Game Plan. You walk away with a written plan. Not theory. The specific moves to make over the next 60 days, in order, so the opportunity we found turns into cash and headspace.

Step three: ongoing coaching. From there it's a flat monthly rate to keep working the plan with you, hold you to it, and handle the next problem as the business grows.

You can read more about the whole approach on our [trade business coach](/trade-business-coach) page.

Why an operator beats a career coach

Most business coaches have never run a trade. They'll sell you a funnel and a morning routine. That's not the same as knowing what a bad pour costs, or how to price a job you can actually make money on.

Luke has done it. He started as a paramedic, then built and scaled Australia's leading sports-court construction company from the ground up. Concrete, crews, weather, deposits, quoting, chasing payment, the lot. In 2023 he was named Melbourne and Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year. He isn't coaching from a textbook. He's coaching from a business he built on the tools and then got himself out of.

That's the difference. You get advice from someone who has stood in the same problems you're standing in right now, and worked his way out of them.