The Jobs You Never Knew You Lost

A homeowner called a plumbing shop on a Tuesday. His water heater was going, and he wanted a quote on a new one. Somebody took the call, wrote it on a sticky note, and meant to pass it to the estimator.

The note sat. Wednesday, then Thursday. By Friday, when it finally surfaced, the homeowner had already hired the shop that called him back that same afternoon.

The owner never knew the call happened. No bad review, no cancelled job. Nothing on any report to mark it by. A job that was there on Tuesday and gone by Friday,and no one in the building ever found out.

Where do jobs actually get lost?

Most jobs are lost before they ever exist on paper. A lost quote request is a job that ends before it’s ever priced: the customer asks, nobody gets back to them in time, and they hire someone faster. There’s no bad review and no cancelled job, so your count of work you won stays exactly the same while the work itself goes down the street.

This isn’t a struggling shop. The phone rings and the crews are good. Your business works. It just works harder than it should.

Why do quote requests go cold?

A quote request goes cold when it comes in with nowhere to land and no one owning getting it done. It gets written on a sticky note, or texted to an estimator who’s already three quotes deep and out on a call. The business is running on memory and sticky notes instead of systems that were actually built. It happens the same way the next week, and the week after. Same problems. Different week.

What does a slow quote cost?

A shop losing two quote requests a week to slow response gives up roughly $40,000 to $83,000 a year in work that never gets tracked. Run the math on your own numbers. Two a week, some weeks more. Put an average ticket on them. A few hundred dollars on the small jobs, a few thousand on the bigger ones. Two a week at a conservative $800 is about $83,000 a year. Even at one a week, you’re past $40,000. None of it shows up as a loss, because none of it ever showed up at all.

How fast do customers expect a quote back?

Most customers hire the first shop that gets back to them. Speed beats price more often than owners expect. By the time a homeowner has called two or three places, the one who answered the same-day usually has the job, and the rest never learn they were in the running. The window is hours, not days.

Isn’t this a pricing problem?

Most jobs lost to slow quotes were never lost on price. A customer who hires the shop that called back first never saw your number. You can sharpen your pricing all year and still lose the job that went cold on a desk Tuesday afternoon. Fix the response time first. Price only matters while the customer is still listening.

That homeowner on Tuesday didn’t compare prices. He hired the first shop that got back to him. Somewhere in last week, your shop had a call just like it. You just never got to hear about it.