Everything waits for one desk
Requests for quotes come in steadily. Every one goes to the same person, perhaps the owner, perhaps a senior estimator who has been with you for years. They know what a job really costs: which supplier to use, how long it actually takes, what to add for access or awkward sites, which customers need a bit more margin. Nobody else does.
When they are busy, quotes queue. When they are on holiday, quoting stops. Customers wait days for a price that, for a routine job, takes that person a few minutes once they get to it.
Why the knowledge stays in one head
Pricing knowledge builds up through experience and is rarely written down, because the person who has it never needed to write it down. It lives in a spreadsheet with hidden columns, in remembered rules of thumb, and in instincts about particular customers and sites.
Attempts to share it usually fail because they ask the expert to write a manual, which they do not have time to do, or to train someone, which takes years. Meanwhile the price list that others could use is out of date or too simple to trust.
The cost of the bottleneck
| Effect | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Quotes take days | Customers accept the first reasonable price they receive |
| The expert is overloaded | Their time goes on routine quotes instead of complex ones |
| Quoting stops during absence | Enquiries pile up or are answered inconsistently |
| Growth is capped | You cannot take more enquiries than one person can price |
| Key-person risk | If they leave, the pricing knowledge leaves with them |
How we get the pricing out of one head
- Sit with the estimator while they price real jobs, and record the decisions they make: what they look up, what they add, what makes them adjust.
- Turn those decisions into explicit rules and reference data: rates, material costs, time allowances per task, uplifts for access, distance or urgency, minimum charges, margin by customer type.
- Test the rules against past quotes the estimator produced, and adjust until the tool's figures sit close to theirs for routine work, with the differences explained.
- Build a quoting tool that other staff use: they answer structured questions about the job, the tool calculates the price and produces a quote document in your template.
- Define the boundary: jobs outside set parameters, such as unusual size, unfamiliar site or a new type of work, are routed to the estimator automatically.
- Keep the reference data live: supplier prices update from price files or supplier feeds where available, and the estimator can change a rule in one place.
The tool can sit as a web app, inside your CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce, or as a structured front end on the spreadsheet the estimator already trusts, whichever is least disruptive.
After the knowledge is shared
Routine quotes go out from whoever takes the enquiry. The estimator reviews them in batches, if you want a check, and spends their real time on the complex jobs where their experience makes the biggest difference. Holidays no longer stop quoting. And the business owns its pricing knowledge rather than renting it from one person's memory.
There is a side benefit many owners do not expect: once the rules are written down, you can see your pricing clearly for the first time, and decide deliberately whether some of it should change.
Quotes also become consistent. Two customers asking for the same job on the same week get the same price, built the same way, which matters when customers compare notes or when a quote is challenged. And because every quote records which rules and rates it used, you can look back and see why a job that lost money was priced the way it was.
Is quoting stuck behind one person?
- Every quote has to go past the same person.
- Quoting slows or stops when they are away.
- Nobody else could explain how a price was reached.
- The price list others use is out of date or not trusted.
- You turn down enquiries because you cannot price them fast enough.