Quoting Before You Leave the Flat

Why the gap costs you

A homeowner is typically comparing five to eight firms at once. The document that arrives while they still remember walking you round the flat is read differently from the one that arrives on Friday, after three others.

The delay is also where accuracy goes. A measurement written on a phone at 3pm and priced at 11pm four days later is a measurement you are trusting more than you should, and the corrections arrive later as variations you have to explain.

The evening is spent on three things, and none of them is the quote

Ask a firm what takes the time and the answer is rarely the pricing itself. It is looking up what tiling cost last time, retyping terms from an old document, and reformatting until it looks acceptable.

All three are setup masquerading as work. Done once, they stop existing, and what remains is the part that genuinely needs you: the quantities and the judgment.

• —Rates: your own supplier lists, imported once, with your markup per trade
• —Terms: intro, inclusions, exclusions, warranty, payment stages, written once
• —Branding: logo, colour, template, set once and applied to everything

What to do while you are still in the flat

Structure the quotation as you walk it. Add the areas in the order you are standing in them, kitchen, living, each bedroom, each bathroom, and put the works into each as you go. The structure is the part people leave until later and it is the part that is easiest on site, because the flat is right there telling you what is in it.

Photograph the floor plan while you are there. Even if you draw nothing that day, the photograph is what lets you trace it to scale later without going back, and a dimensioned plan removes most of the arguments about quantity.

Price from a list, not from memory

Quoting from memory is how a rate from last year survives into this year, and it is also the slowest way to do it, because every line becomes a small act of recall.

Inserting priced items from your own supplier presets is faster and more accurate at the same time, which is unusual. The markup is already applied, so the number you put in front of a client is the number you meant, and the cost stays off the document.

Send it before the tea goes cold, or say when

If it can go out the same day, send it the same day. If it genuinely cannot, say when it will, on site, out loud. "You will have it by tomorrow evening" costs nothing and is remembered, and it is a promise nobody else in the comparison is making.

What loses is silence followed by a document four days later, which reads as a firm that is busy with more important clients.

A phone is enough

This does not need a laptop in a dusty flat. The work is adding areas, inserting priced lines and exporting, all of which happen on a phone, and the export is the same A4 document either way.

Whether you send it from the car or from the desk an hour later matters far less than whether the client is still thinking about the visit when it arrives.