How To Quote Jobs Faster: Price A Whole Job In 5 Minutes

You can quote a job in 5 minutes. Not by rushing it. Not by guessing at it. By picking it off a list you built once, months ago. And the reason most people can't do that has got nothing to do with how fast they work. Before I show you how, let me be straight about who this is for. If all you ever do is the same job over and over, this isn't really your problem. If you only fit EV chargers, or you only do solar, just duplicate the last quote. That's fine. I'd do the same. But only if that first quote was right. And here's where that usually falls down. Say your first quote had one line on it. Three and a half grand for the solar panels. Inverters, everything, all in that one number. You've got nothing to reuse there. You can't check it. You can't change one part of it. Next job the panels are different, the inverter's different, and you're straight back to guessing. So if you're going to duplicate a quote, the one you're duplicating has to be itemised properly. Every material on its own line. Now, for everyone else. If you're quoting different jobs, but the work inside them is work you do all the time, you want a catalogue. Call it a price list if you prefer, it's the same thing. You sit down and you get your prices into it. And this is the bit most people skip. You get your fit times in there as well. A price on its own doesn't quote a job. A price with a time on it does. And you don't put everything in there. If it's a genuine one off, something you'll not touch again for a year, leave it out. That's not what the catalogue's for. It's for the work that keeps coming back. And they don't all have to be single items. You can build them as packages. Say you've got 3 metres of basket. That one item can carry the tie wraps, the hold down clamps, the unistrut, all of it. You pick 3 metres of basket and everything that goes with it comes too. But it's always got a time on it. Always. Now I'll be honest with you about this. When you start building it, that feels like a lot of effort. And it is a lot of effort. There's no way round that bit. But there's no end of jobs coming. Every hour you put into that catalogue comes back to you on every quote you send after it. So here's where it pays you back. Say you're quoting a big job off a drawing. You sit there with the drawing in front of you and you just work down it counting. You come out with ten lights. You go into your catalogue and you pick ten lights. The time's already sat on it, so you've not worked anything out. The cable's priced by the metre and the clips are priced by the clip. You're not pricing that job any more. You're reading a drawing and picking off a list. And think about what that used to be. Same drawing, no catalogue, and you're working out every light on it from scratch. How long a light takes you, what the cable's costing this month, whether you've allowed enough clips. That's an evening. This is twenty minutes with a brew. And that's the bit that changes your business. You don't need to teach anybody how to quote. And you don't need to teach anybody how long the work takes. It's already in the list. Because here's what happens when it isn't. One of my lads will come to me and say he's had a quick query, and he's priced it up on the spot. Yeah, I promise you, that one's going to make money. Five hundred quid of materials on it. And I'm not checking up on him. But when it comes round to invoicing it, I'm sat there going, what happened to this. That's not him being careless. He priced it out of his head, same as everybody does. There was nothing there for him to pick from. With a catalogue that conversation is a different one. You can say, can you quote that job for me while you're there. They go in and pick each item straight off the list. You review it before it goes out. And it leaves at your prices and your times, not theirs. That's how you quote a job in 5 minutes. Sometimes faster. You're picking, not calculating. You're not sat there working out how long anything takes, because you already did that once. One more thing, and this is what keeps the whole lot honest. When that job's done and the numbers come back in, go and look at it. If it lost money, you want to know why. Did you lose it because the uplift was wrong for that site? Or was the fit time wrong? Those are two different problems and they've got two different fixes. And whichever it was, you change it in the catalogue once. Every quote after that is better than the one before. Understanding this isn't the hard part. The hard part is sitting down and building the thing in the first place. Because if your prices and your times are in your head, there's nowhere to put what you learn. This is half the reason I'm building FieldHive. Your catalogue items hold the description, the cost, the markup, the sell price and the fit time. You can build them as packages, so one pick brings everything with it. You quote by selecting, and when a number needs changing you change it in one place. FieldHive won't tell you what your fit times should be. That comes off your own finished jobs. But it'll stop you working the same job out twice. Spend the time on the catalogue. It's a lot of effort once, and then it's five minutes a quote for as long as you're trading. Now, there's a shortcut people take that looks exactly like this and isn't. Copying an old quote. Sometimes that's absolutely fine, and sometimes it costs you a fortune. That's the next one.