Getting quotes out the same day, from your phone

You are on site until five, then there is stock to sort and a van to unload, and the quotes get done at the kitchen table after tea, if they get done at all. By the weekend there are four of them waiting, and the oldest one has gone cold.

By the time yours lands, the customer has already had two others. Yours might be better priced and better thought through. It arrives third, from someone who took four days to reply, and a fair share of the time that is the deciding fact.

There is a version of a quote that is a small work of art: a branded document, photographs of similar work, a page about the company, terms in full. It takes an hour to put together. There is another version that is four lines, a clear price, what is included, what is not, and when you could start. It takes two minutes.

The second one wins more often than the first, and it is not because customers prefer scruffy paperwork. It is because they are still deciding when the fast quote lands. Being early puts you in the conversation. Being beautiful only helps once you are already in it.

We are not going to hand you a percentage here, because nobody has measured your trade and neither has anyone who quotes a figure at you. What we would say is this: look at the last ten jobs you quoted and lost, and check how long each one took to go out. Most owners see the pattern in about ten minutes, and it is not a comfortable ten minutes.

Speed does not come from typing faster. It comes from having fewer decisions to make. Almost every quote you send is a rearrangement of things you have priced before, and the time goes on rebuilding them from memory each time.

Before you change any software, write these down once.

Once it exists, a quote becomes a matter of picking four or five lines, adjusting a quantity, and adding one sentence about anything unusual on this particular job. Everything else is already written and already agreed with yourself.

It also has a side effect that owners tend not to expect. Writing the exclusions down properly, once, in plain words, settles a good number of the arguments that normally turn up at the end of a job. You stop discovering halfway through that you never actually said who was taking the old one away.

The best moment to send a quote is while you are still sitting outside the property, or in the ten minutes before the next call. The measurements are in your head, you can still see the job, and the customer has just met you and liked you.

That means the tool has to work properly on a phone, not as a shrunken copy of a desktop screen. In practice: pick the customer or type a name and a number, pick line items from your list, change a quantity, add a photo of the thing you are quoting for, send. If it takes more taps than that, it will not happen on site. It will happen at the kitchen table, and you are back where you started.

Two small things matter more than they look. The quote should send as a link as well as a document, so the customer can read it on their phone without downloading a file that half of them never open. And you should be able to see when it was opened. That one piece of information turns your follow up from guesswork into a decision.

This is where most setups quietly fall apart. The quote goes out from one place, the customer says yes by text or on the phone, somebody writes the job into a diary, and later somebody types the same lines a third time into the accounts package to raise the invoice.

Every retype is a chance to get a figure wrong, and the time they take together is rarely small. The fix is that the accepted quote is the job. The lines you priced become the lines on the invoice. The address you typed once is the address on the schedule.

The chain we set up for most small firms looks like this.

Most quotes are not lost to a competitor. They are lost to silence. The customer meant to reply, got busy, and the whole thing faded out. Nobody rang.

A short message three days later, and another a week after that, tends to recover a share of those. It does not need to be clever. A line asking whether they have any questions and whether the price was in the right area is enough. If it goes out automatically unless you stop it, it will actually happen. If it depends on you remembering at half past nine at night, it will not.

It also gets you the honest answer sooner. A clear no is more useful than a maybe you are still quietly counting as pipeline.

Quoting faster does not make you cheaper and it does not win work you were never going to get. If your price is well above the room and nothing in the quote explains why, a fast quote just gets rejected sooner. That is still useful, because you stop carrying it around, but it is not a win.

It also will not survive a price list nobody maintains. Standard line items go stale, materials move, and within a year you are quoting last year's costs quickly, which is worse than quoting this year's costs slowly. Put a recurring half hour in the diary to review the list. Quarterly is usually enough.

Start on paper. Write your common line items, inclusions, exclusions, lead time and terms on one page and use it for a fortnight with whatever you already have, even if that is a notes app and an email signature. You will find out fast which parts are wrong, and it costs nothing to find out. Only then is it worth putting into something that sends from your phone and carries the numbers through to the job and the invoice.

Our Admin Rescue setup is built around exactly this chain, and it starts at £2,400 to set up with £150 a month after that. If you would rather just be told whether the tools you already pay for can do it, send us what you use now and we will give you a straight answer.