Quoting work you have not seen: how to price site-unseen without losing money

"Can you give me a rough idea?"

Every service business that travels to the customer gets this, and both obvious answers are bad. Refuse to quote without an inspection and you lose the enquiry to whoever did. Pull a number from the air and you discover the access problem, the extra floor, or the twenty years of neglect once you are committed to it.

The way through is not better guessing. It is a quote that states what it assumes, so that when an assumption turns out to be wrong, the conversation is already framed.

Get the five things that actually move the price

For most trades, the variance in a job comes down to a handful of factors. Know yours and ask about them before quoting, rather than asking for a general description.

A removalist needs to know stairs, lift access, parking distance, and whether anything is unusually heavy or fragile. A cleaner needs floor area, bathrooms, whether it is occupied, and when it was last done properly. A gardener needs area, access width, green-waste volume and slope.

The customer will not volunteer these. They do not know which ones matter. A short, structured set of questions at enquiry does more for quote accuracy than any amount of experience, because experience cannot tell you what you were not told.

Photographs close most of the remaining gap. Three photos from a phone will answer questions you would not have known to ask, and people send them readily when asked directly.

Quote a number with conditions, not a range

A bare range — "somewhere between $400 and $900" — reads as evasion and makes comparison impossible. The customer cannot act on it, and the business that gave a firm number wins the job.

Better is a specific price with explicit assumptions:

$560 — based on a two-bedroom, single-storey property, ground-floor access within 20 m of parking, standard condition.

If the job differs from this, I'll call you before doing anything that changes the price:

• Stairs or lift access: +$90
• Heavy items over 80 kg: +$60 each
• Waste removal beyond one trailer load: +$140

That does three jobs at once. The customer has a number they can compare. You have named the variables that hurt you. And the variation conversation, if it comes, is a reference to something they already agreed to rather than a surprise you are springing on them.

Price the risk you are carrying

Site-unseen quoting carries real risk, and the answer is not to absorb it silently.

If a certain job type goes over your estimate a third of the time, that is not bad luck, it is a pricing input. Either build a contingency into the number for that category, or make an inspection a condition above a certain value.

The threshold is worth setting deliberately. Many businesses find a point — often somewhere around a day's work — above which a quick site visit or video call pays for itself every time. Below it, quote from photos and move fast.

Make the quote easy to accept

Response speed beats polish. The business that replies within the hour wins a disproportionate share of jobs, simply because the customer is still thinking about the problem.

Then make acceptance a single action. A quote the customer can accept online — one tap, no printing, no signing, no reply-to-confirm — converts noticeably better than one requiring an email that says "yes please", because the email gets postponed and then forgotten.

And put an expiry on it. Thirty days is normal and it protects you from a customer accepting a figure you quoted before your materials costs moved.

Follow up once, properly

Most quotes are never followed up, which is where a lot of revenue quietly goes. Most of the ones that are followed up get a single "just checking in", which adds nothing and is easy to ignore.

One follow-up, three to five days out, that gives the customer something to respond to: "Hi Jo — happy to hold the 14th for you if that still suits, or I can look at a cheaper option if the number was higher than you expected."

That offers two concrete things and an easy way to say the real reason. A noticeable share of unanswered quotes are a price objection the customer was too polite to raise.

Track what you win and why

If you cannot say what proportion of your quotes turn into work, you cannot tell whether your prices are right.

A very high acceptance rate usually means you are underpricing — you are winning everything because you are the cheapest, and the margin is going somewhere other than you. A very low one means you are either quoting the wrong customers or losing on something that is not price.

The useful discipline is simply recording the outcome against each quote, and the reason where you know it. Three months of that is more informative about your pricing than any amount of comparison with competitors, because it reflects your actual customers.

Trimsy keeps quotes against the customer file, lets people accept online in one tap, and turns an accepted quote into a booking or an invoice without re-typing it — so the follow-up and the win rate are both things you can see.