The tech finishes the diagnosis, stands in the driveway and says the words every homeowner half expects: “I’ll put together a price and get it over to you.” The homeowner nods. The tech gets in the truck. There are two more calls before lunch.
What happens next decides whether that job exists. Too often, the answer is nothing, or nothing for four days, which is nearly the same thing.
We have written before about estimates that are sent and never followed up. This is the leak one step earlier: estimates that are promised and never sent, or sent so late that the customer has already moved on. It is harder to see, because an estimate that was never written leaves no record behind it.
How an estimate gets stuck
The path from “I’ll get you a price” to a quote in the customer’s inbox has more handoffs than it looks. A typical version:
- The tech notes the scope on site: a notebook, the tablet, a photo of the equipment label, or memory.
- Someone prices it. Sometimes the tech, sometimes the owner, sometimes the office, depending on the size of the job.
- Someone checks parts or equipment availability and cost.
- Someone writes it up in the format the customer receives.
- Someone sends it, and ideally tells the customer it is coming.
Each of those steps has a person who is busy with something more urgent. The tech is on the next call. The owner prices at night when the kids are asleep. The office is answering the phone. There is no step where anyone is asked, “which estimates did we promise today that have not gone out?”
The usual places they die
Stuck estimates tend to collect in a few predictable spots.
- The notebook in the door pocket. Scope written on paper waits until someone types it up. On a busy week that someone is nobody.
- The “owner needs to price it” pile. Bigger jobs go to the owner, and the owner is also the person with the least spare time. Replacements and repipes sit here longest, and they are the most valuable.
- Waiting on a supplier. The tech needs a price on a unit or a panel. The supplier calls back tomorrow. The estimate waits, and nobody tells the customer why.
- The half-finished draft. The field software has a draft estimate started on site and never completed. It does not appear anywhere an office person would look.
- The option problem. The tech wants to offer good, better and best, and building three versions takes three times as long, so none of them goes out.
None of these is carelessness. Each is a reasonable decision made by someone with too much to do. The pattern only shows up when you look at all of them together.
Why speed matters more than polish
Owners sometimes hold an estimate back to make it better: a cleaner layout, a sharper price, a nicer photo. The instinct is sound. The timing usually is not.
The customer’s attention on the problem is highest while the tech is in the driveway and fades over the following days. Meanwhile, if they asked for more than one quote, and on bigger jobs they often do, someone else’s price may already be in their inbox. A plain, accurate estimate sent the same day tends to do better than a beautiful one sent next week, simply because it is there while the decision is being made.
It is the same logic as answering the phone quickly, applied one step later. We wrote about that in the five-minute window.
Putting a number on it
You can size this leak with records you already have. Here is an illustrative example with invented round numbers; use your own.
Say a four-truck HVAC shop runs 60 diagnostic or estimate visits a month where the tech says a quote is coming. Going through the field software and the techs’ notes, the owner finds:
| What they counted | Count |
|---|---|
| Visits where a quote was promised | 60 |
| Quotes sent the same or next day | 30 |
| Quotes sent after three or more days | 18 |
| Quotes never sent | 12 |
Twelve customers were told a price was coming and never got one. Eighteen got it late. If the shop’s typical replacement or major repair is worth, say, $6,000, and even a fraction of those thirty would have gone ahead with a prompt quote, the revenue at stake is large enough to be worth an afternoon of counting. It is at stake rather than lost, because nobody knows how many would have signed; that depends on a close rate the shop can measure going forward.
If you want to try your own figures, the revenue leak calculator works from the numbers you supply and does not assume a close rate you have not given it.
A simple fix
The fix is not a new estimating tool, though a good one helps. It is a rule and a list.
The rule: every estimate promised on site gets a promised send time, said out loud to the customer. “You’ll have it by 5 today” or “by tomorrow noon”. A specific time turns a vague intention into a commitment someone can check.
The list: at the end of each day, one person, usually the office manager, goes through the day’s visits and asks, for each one where a quote was promised, “has it gone out?” If not, what is it waiting for, and who is doing it?
A few supporting habits help:
- Capture scope on site, in the software. Photos of the equipment label, the panel, the roof section. A draft started in the driveway is easier to finish than a note in a pocket.
- Price common jobs in advance. A price book for the fifteen jobs you quote most means the tech can send those on the spot, and only the unusual ones wait for the owner. Check its arithmetic while you are at it; markup is not margin.
- Tell the customer when something is waiting. “We’re confirming the unit price with our supplier; you’ll have it tomorrow morning” keeps the job warm in a way silence does not.
- Send the one option you have. If the good-better-best version will take two days, send the one you are confident in today and follow with the others.
Once estimates go out on time, the follow-up cadence in our earlier post has something to work with. Until then, it is following up on quotes that do not exist.
This is also the kind of thing we look at in a revenue leak remediation engagement, but you do not need us to start. Pull last month’s visits tomorrow and count how many promised quotes actually went out.