Quoting from the van: send it before you leave the drive

Here's the evening most self-employed trades know. You get in at six, eat, and then at nine you sit down to write up three quotes from a page of biro notes you can barely read. One of them you can't fully remember. By half ten you've done two, the third slides to tomorrow, tomorrow becomes Thursday, and by Thursday the customer's booked someone else.

The fix isn't working harder in the evening. It's not doing it in the evening at all.

Why speed wins

Two trades look at the same job. One sends a tidy quote from the drive. The other sends one four days later.

The first one usually wins, and often at a higher price. Three reasons:

You're the benchmark. The first quote in sets the frame — the scope, the inclusions, the number. Everyone after is compared to yours.

Speed reads as reliability. The customer is about to let a stranger into their house with their money. If you're slow before they've paid you anything, what are you like once you've got their deposit? Fast, tidy paperwork is the only evidence of competence they have at this stage.

You catch them while they care. The hour after you leave is peak interest. Four days later they've had two more people round and the whole thing has become a chore.

It's the same dynamic as missed calls: the trade who responds first wins a disproportionate share of the work, and it has very little to do with being the cheapest.

What stops people doing it

Be honest about the actual blockers, because they're all fixable:

• "I need my prices in front of me." Then have them on your phone.
• "It takes an hour to write up properly." Only if you're starting from a blank page every time.
• "I need to ring the merchant." For some jobs, yes. For your bread-and-butter jobs, you already know.
• "It looks unprofessional to do it on the spot." The opposite. Nobody has ever thought less of a trade for being organised.
• "I'll get it wrong if I rush." Fair — which is why the routine below is about preparation, not speed.

The survey routine

Same order, every job. It takes ten minutes and it means you leave with everything you need.

1. Walk it with the customer, and let them talk first. What they want, what's annoying them, what they've already decided. You learn the budget and the decision-maker in the first two minutes if you're listening.

2. Measure everything, once. Room, walls, floor, openings, ceiling heights. More than you think you need — a second trip for one measurement costs you an hour.

3. Photograph everything. Every wall, the ceiling, the floor, under the sink, the meter, the board, the access, the parking. Photos are how you reconstruct the job later without being there. Take twice as many as feels sensible.

4. Note the awkward things out loud. The stopcock nobody can find. The 1970s consumer unit. The wall that's 20mm out. Say it to the customer as you spot it — it manages expectations before it's a price problem, and it's the difference between an exclusion and an argument.

5. Establish scope, not just work. Who's supplying materials? Who's making good? What's the access and parking situation? Is anyone living there while you work? These change the price more than the tiling does.

6. Ask about timing. When do they want it done, and by when do they need to decide. Tells you how hard to chase and whether you should be quoting at all.

7. Say when the quote's coming — then beat it. "I'll get this over to you this afternoon." Then send it in twenty minutes.

Have your numbers ready

You can't price on site if the prices are in your head, in a drawer, and in three merchant apps.

What you need to hand, on your phone:

• Your day rate — the real one, calculated, not guessed. How to work out your day rate.
• Time estimates for your standard stages — strip-out, first fix, tiling per m², second fix, and so on. From your own past jobs.
• A price list for what you buy constantly — your top 30 or 40 items, updated a few times a year.
• Your standard percentages — materials markup, contingency, deposit, VAT position.
• Your standard scope, inclusions and exclusions text — written once, reused every time.

That last one is the biggest time saver of the lot. Most of a good quote is boilerplate: what's included, what isn't, payment terms, validity, warranty. Write it properly once and you're only ever filling in the job-specific bits. How to write a quote that wins the job covers what should be in it.

Sit in the van and do it

Not at home. In the van, on the drive, while it's fresh.

The routine:

1. Two minutes to write the scope while you can still see the room in your head
2. Estimate the days from your stage times
3. Total the materials from your list, add wastage and markup
4. Add contingency based on the age and state of the property
5. Drop in your standard terms — deposit, stages, validity, exclusions
6. Read it once — does the number feel right, or does it feel like the relieved-not-paid number?
7. Send it

Fifteen minutes for a job you understand. Longer for something unusual, and that's fine — the point isn't that every quote is instant, it's that the ordinary ones are.

The jobs you shouldn't price on the spot

Being fast doesn't mean being reckless. Take it away and think about it when:

• There's a genuine unknown — you can't see what's behind the boxing, under the floor, in the loft
• It needs a sub-trade's price you don't have
• It's a type of job you've not done before, where your time estimates are guesses
• The materials are volatile or specialist and you need a real merchant quote
• It's big enough that being wrong hurts — trust your own threshold

In those cases the fast move is still available: send a same-day acknowledgement with what you can commit to, and a date for the full price. "Thanks for today — I need a price back from my plasterer, I'll have the full quote with you Wednesday." That's still faster than everyone else, and it holds your place.

The other half: don't lose the job before you've quoted it

None of this matters if the enquiry never reaches you. You're on a job, the phone goes, you can't take it, they don't leave a voicemail — and that job was gone before you had the chance to be fast.

Answer what you can. For the rest, make sure something replies within a minute, with a real message: "Sorry, I'm on a job — what do you need and where? I'll ring you back before 5." That reply is often the first response the customer has had, and it puts you at the front of the queue before you've even seen the work.

Fast reply, fast survey, fast quote. That's three points where most of your competition is slow, and it's a far more reliable way to win work than being the cheapest.

Start with one change

If the whole routine feels like a lot, do this one thing: write your standard scope, inclusions, exclusions and terms once, properly, and save it somewhere you can paste from on your phone. That alone turns a 45-minute evening write-up into a ten-minute job on the drive.

Then add your top 30 material prices. Then your stage times. Within a month you'll be quoting from the van without thinking about it, and your evenings will be your own again.

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QuoteSnap does exactly this job: describe the work out loud in the van, and it builds a branded, itemised quote — materials, labour, VAT, deposit and terms already on it — in about a minute, ready to send before you pull off the drive. Try it free for 14 days.