You Are One of Seven Quotations

The arithmetic nobody says out loud

Five to eight firms competing means a base conversion rate somewhere between one in five and one in eight. Do nothing different and roughly fifteen per cent of the quotations you write become jobs.

Everything you spend an evening on, the site visit, the measuring, the pricing, the formatting, is spent against those odds. Which is why the cost of writing a quotation matters as much as the quality of it: a firm that takes three hours per quote and wins one in seven is spending twenty-one hours a job before any work starts.

The client cannot judge your work, so they judge your quotation

A homeowner comparing seven firms cannot assess joinery they have not seen, site management they have not watched, or subcontractors they have not met. They have seven documents and a feeling about seven conversations.

That is not a reason to despair about it, it is a reason to take the document seriously. It is the only work sample most clients ever see before committing, and it is being read directly against six others.

Speed, and what speed actually means

Being first is worth something, but being first with something thin is worth less than being second with something considered. The prize goes to the first quotation that looks like it was written by a firm that has done this before.

That is a preparation problem rather than a typing-speed problem. If your rates, your terms and your branding are already set, the quotation is an hour. If you assemble all three every time, it is an evening, and the evening is why it goes out on Thursday.

• —Rates ready before the site visit, not after
• —Terms and exclusions written once, applied automatically
• —The document produced in the same shape every time

Itemised beats lump sum, especially when compared

Against six other quotations, a lump sum has nothing to be compared on except the total, and on total alone you are competing with whoever was most optimistic about the scope.

An itemised quotation changes what the comparison is about. The client can see quantities, units and rates, and when your number is higher they can see what it buys. It also survives the conversation where they take your price to somebody cheaper, because a cheaper quote missing three lines is visibly missing three lines.

The exclusions win jobs, which is counterintuitive

A stated exclusions list feels like an invitation to be asked why. Against six competitors it does something else: it is the only document in the pile that is honest about what is not included, and homeowners have been told repeatedly by every guide they have read to look for exactly that.

The firm that says "the PE endorsement for hacking that wall is not included, expect $800 to $2,000" is not losing the job on price. It is the only firm that sounded like it had done the job before.

What to do about the cheaper quote

You will be shown one. The instinct is to discount, and discounting is the most expensive response available: a ten per cent discount on a job carrying a 23% margin removes nearly half the profit, because every cost stays exactly where it was. The arithmetic is worked through in markup is not margin.

The cheaper alternative is to compare the two documents line by line with the client. Either the other quotation is genuinely for less work, which you can show, or it is for the same work at a lower rate, which is a decision the client can make with their eyes open. Both are better outcomes than paying for the job yourself.

Quote the ones you do not expect to win

At one in seven, the temptation is to be selective and only quote the promising ones. That instinct is usually wrong, because you are a poor judge of which enquiry converts and the cost of an extra quotation should be small.

If it is not small, that is the thing to fix. A tool that charges by the quotation gives you a reason not to quote, which is the opposite of the point, and it is why nothing in CatchQuote is metered.