Three quotes in an hour

Quotes are where the money is and where the evenings go. You sit down after tea with a job you walked round at four, and by the time you've found the last one that looked like it, worked out what's changed, and made it read like you, it's ten o'clock. Then you do the same tomorrow for a job that's nearly the same.

The waste isn't in the pricing. It's that you're starting from a blank page each time, and chapter 4 of The AI Manager is blunt about blank pages. Instructions are the answer. Write them once, reuse them for a year.

The six lines

Chapter 4 gives six lines that turn a request into a brief. Here they are for a quote. Yours will be shorter.

1. Who's writing. "A kitchen fitter with twenty years in, who'd rather lose a job than win it on a price I can't keep."
2. What this is for. A customer who's got two other quotes on the table and wants to feel safe choosing.
3. What good looks like. Paste in your best quote from last year. The one that won and didn't cost you.
4. What bad looks like. No jargon, no padding, no price invented. Nothing the customer has to ring up to understand.
5. Challenge it. "Read this as the customer's partner, who thinks it's too much. What would they ask?"
6. Proof. Every figure comes from my price list or the notes from the visit. Mark anything you had to guess.

Ten minutes to write. Thirty seconds to use.

What you hand it

A quote needs four things from you and nothing else: your notes from the visit, your price list, the six lines above, and the best quote you ever sent. Give it those and ask for a draft in your format.

What comes back is a quote that reads like you on a good day, in a few minutes. Don't send it yet. Chapter 7 is called Make It Prove Itself for a reason.

Make it prove itself

Ask it two things before you read the draft properly.

First, which figures did you take from my price list, and which did you work out? Anything worked out gets checked against the list, because the one thing these tools do with total confidence is produce a price from nothing.

Second, solve it again without my notes. What would you have quoted for this job cold? Where the two drafts agree, move on. Where they differ, that's where your attention goes, and chapter 9 says the same about running two tools: spend your effort only where the answers part company.

That's your check. It takes less time than reading the quote twice and it finds the thing that would have cost you.

The second and the third

Here's where the hour comes from. The second quote of the evening uses the same six lines, the same price list and a different set of visit notes. The third, the same. You're no longer writing. You're reading, checking the figures, and adding the one sentence about the job that only you could know. "I noticed the extractor's venting into the loft. I've allowed for sorting that."

That sentence is the quote. Everything else was typing.

The part I won't pretend about

It'll get a price wrong, and it won't look wrong. A quote that reads well is the one you check least, and that's the one that gets you. The job that does it is the one where it read "allow for making good" and allowed nothing, because your price list had no line for it.

So your price list is the thing to look after, not the machine. Every job that cost more than the quote gets a new line in the list that week. Within a season the list knows your business better than your memory does, and the quotes stop surprising you.

From chapter 4 of The AI Manager, Instructions Are the Answer, and chapter 7, Make It Prove Itself. Free to read.