Getting quotes out before the customer rings somebody else

There is a quote sitting in my head right now for a terrace and a walkway. Two thousand euros. They have chased me for it twice, and both times I told them I was waiting on the tile price from the builders merchant.

I was not. I just had not written it.

I do not enjoy writing that down. I put it here because if you run a small firm you have almost certainly done the same thing, and everybody in this position thinks they are the only one who does it.

Why quotes actually get stuck

It is worth separating these, because they have completely different fixes and most advice on the subject treats them as one problem.

It needs a decision, not information

Nine times out of ten the missing tile price is not missing. You know roughly what tiles cost. What is actually missing is the decision about how much to charge for a job that has an awkward corner in it, and decisions take a clear head, which is the one thing an evening after a full day on site does not give you.

It is competing with work that is already paid for

Quoting is unpaid, speculative and can be put off without anybody ringing you about it for at least a week. Everything else on your list is none of those things. So it loses, every single day, to things that are objectively less valuable.

It is being rebuilt from nothing every time

If every quote starts with a blank page, every quote costs you the same forty minutes, even when it is the eleventh version of a job you have done ten times. That is the part that is genuinely fixable in an afternoon.

The customer has gone quiet, so it feels less urgent

This one is exactly backwards and it catches everybody. A customer who has stopped chasing has usually not stopped wanting the work. They have got a price from somebody else. Silence at their end is the last signal before the job is gone, not permission to take another week.

The two-part fix

The bit that works is separating the reply from the price. Those two things arrived welded together in most people's heads and they do not need to be.

Part one: the same-day answer

Within a couple of hours of any enquiry, something goes back that does four things. It confirms you have got it. It says when a real price will land, with a date on it. It asks the one or two questions you always end up asking anyway. And it says what you would need to see in order to be certain, which is usually a photograph.

That is not a quote and nobody thinks it is. What it does is stop the clock. The customer stops ringing round, because somebody has engaged with them, and you have bought yourself two days without the awkwardness compounding.

Write it once. Draft that message properly, once, and keep it somewhere you can reach in ten seconds from a phone. If it takes you longer than ten seconds to find it, you will not use it on the day you most need it, which is the day you are already three jobs behind.

Part two: stop starting from a blank page

Write down the ten things you quote most often and what they generally come to. Not a price list to hand out. A crib sheet for yourself, with the assumptions written next to each one so future you does not have to reconstruct them.

Most firms find that this covers somewhere close to all of it, and that what was genuinely bespoke was three or four jobs a year. Once the common ones are written down, the forty minutes becomes ten, and a job that takes ten minutes stops losing to whatever is on fire.

Then decide who chases

A quote that goes out and is never followed up is roughly half a quote. The follow-up is the least enjoyable job in a small business and it is therefore the first one to be quietly dropped.

It needs to be somebody's actual job, with a day of the week attached to it, or it needs to happen without a person being involved. There is no third option that survives a busy month. If you are the only person in the business, it is the second one, because the first one is what you have been trying for years.

1. Set a rule and say it out loud. Every enquiry gets a human answer the same working day, even when the answer is "Thursday".
2. Write the holding reply once and keep it one tap away.
3. Write the ten prices down, assumptions included.
4. Put every quote you send on one list with the date it went out.
5. Pick the day you go down that list. Same day every week. It is duller than it sounds and it is where the money is.

Where a system takes over

Everything above is a decision plus an afternoon, and if you do it properly you will get most of the value without spending anything. The reason it is worth automating afterwards is not that any single step is hard. It is that all five of them depend on you having a good week, and the weeks when enquiries stack up are precisely the weeks you are not having one.

An assistant answering the enquiry the moment it lands does part one without you. Something watching the list of sent quotes and nudging on day three does the chasing whether or not you remembered. Neither of those is clever. They just do not get tired.