Ask an owner what their worst admin problem is and they will usually say the double handling. The dockets, the timesheets, the same hours keyed into three screens. Fair enough, and it is worth fixing.
It is not the expensive one. The expensive one is quieter than that. It is the quote that went out four weeks ago, that nobody has thought about since, and that has already been won by someone who rang the client on the Thursday.
Double handling costs you hours. A quote going quiet costs you the job, and the job was worth more than the year of hours. This is a way to make a late quote visible before you spend a dollar on software.
Why quotes go quiet, and it is not laziness
Every system in a contracting business has a clear owner at the start and a clear owner at the end. Site owns the work. Accounts owns the invoice. Nobody owns the middle of a quote's life, which is the fortnight between sending it and hearing back.
Watch what happens in practice. An estimator spends two days pricing something properly, sends it, and feels finished, because pricing it was the hard part. The software agrees with them: in most job management packages and most accounting packages, a quote has two states, and they are sent and accepted. There is no state for sent eleven days ago and nobody has said anything, so the one thing that needs a human being is the one thing the screen never shows.
So it lives in somebody's head instead. That works fine when there are four quotes out. At thirty it stops working, and the ones that fall out of the pile are not random. The big quotes go quiet the most, because the client is taking longer to decide, which is exactly when the follow up would have been worth the most.
The one number to put on the wall
Days since sent. Not quote value, not win rate, not a pipeline percentage. One column, counting up, in plain sight where people walk past it.
It works because it needs no judgement and cannot be argued with. A quote sent on the second is nineteen days old on the twenty first whether that is fine or not, and it is a number anybody in the office can produce without a meeting.
Write the board with five columns and nothing else:
That last column is the one that does the work. Every quote on the board is either waiting on them or waiting on us, and the whole point of writing it down is that "waiting on them" with nineteen in the days column is not waiting, it is losing.
The Monday morning version, and it takes ten minutes
- Every quote goes on the board the day it is sent. No exceptions, including the ones you are sure about. The ones you are sure about are the ones that surprise you.
- Every quote has a name against it. One person, not a department. A quote owned by "the office" is owned by nobody.
- Monday morning, read the days column out loud. Ten minutes, standing up. Anything past your own line gets a call that day, and somebody says who is making it.
- Write the outcome on the board, not in a head. Won, lost, or a real date they said they would decide by. "Still thinking" is not an outcome and goes back on the board.
Pick your own line for what counts as late. Most operators we talk to land between seven and ten working days for a normal job, shorter for anything with a deadline on it. The exact number matters far less than having one, because a line everyone knows turns an awkward judgement call into a routine.
The follow up is service, not chasing
This is the part people flinch at, and it is worth being clear about. Ringing a client about a quote is not nagging them for money. They asked you for a price. The call that works is the one that makes their decision easier, not the one that asks for an answer.
The version that lands, more or less word for word:
Two things happen. Sometimes you find out they never opened it, or it went to the wrong person, or the scope moved and your price is answering last month's question. And sometimes you find out you are out, which stings for an afternoon and is still better than carrying it in your forecast for six weeks.
Either answer is worth more than silence, and neither one costs you anything except the call.
Run it on a whiteboard before you automate it
We build this for people, so it is against our own interest to say it, and we are going to say it anyway. Do not buy software for this until the whiteboard version has run for four weeks.
Two reasons. The first is that four weeks tells you your real numbers: how many quotes are actually out, how old they really get, where your line should sit. Automating before you know that means building something around a guess.
The second is the important one. Software does not chase anybody. It reminds. If nobody owns the middle of a quote's life, an automated reminder does not fix that, it just creates a new notification for the same person to ignore, and now everyone has learned to ignore the system as well. The habit has to exist first. The software is there to stop the habit depending on a good memory.
What automating it actually looks like
Once the routine is real, the work is small and boring, which is how you want it. The quote already exists in a system you own. The clock is arithmetic on a date you already have. So the board stops being a whiteboard somebody has to update and becomes a view that is simply true: every open quote, oldest first, with a name against it, in front of the person on a Monday without anybody typing it in.
Nothing about the job changes. The estimator still prices it, the owner still makes the call, the client still says yes or no. The only thing that changed is that a quote can no longer go quiet without somebody seeing it happen.
That is the job we call The Quote Clock, and it is quoted rather than priced on a list, because what it is worth depends entirely on the size of the jobs you are currently letting go quiet. If you want to know that number, count the quotes you never got an answer to last year and add up what they were worth. That is the whole business case, and you can work it out this afternoon without us.
Where this came from
Crew22 connects the software heavy industry already runs, so a job only gets entered once. It was built by someone who spent fifteen years on the tools in civil, main roads and mines. If you want the version of this done properly on your own business, that is the Audit. One day with us, one page back, and the page is yours whether you go ahead or not.
Work out where your hours go