Quote in an hour, not a week.

This is how we'd set up quoting for a small contractor. It's a playbook, not a report on a client.

The quote rides around in your truck

You walk the job on Tuesday. You take photos, measure, scribble notes and tell the homeowner you'll send a number. Then you go back to the job you're running. The quote gets written Sunday night at the kitchen table, if it gets written at all.

Meanwhile the homeowner called other people. Researchers have measured what an hour of waiting does to a sales lead.

37%

of 2,241 US companies answered a web enquiry within an hour when Harvard Business Review researchers tested them, and 23% never answered

Nearly 7x

as likely to reach a decision maker when firms tried within the hour instead of an hour later, across 1.25 million US leads, per Harvard Business Review

20%

of 1,050 US home service business owners say they reply to new leads within the hour, per Jobber

That research is about first replies, not finished quotes, and it's from 2011. We couldn't find anyone who has measured quote turnaround on its own with a method we'd trust. We'd still bet on speed. Leads go cold by the hour, and Jobber's numbers say 4 in 5 home service owners take longer than that to reply. A quote that lands the same day stands out.

In Canada, 154,179 of 155,709 construction businesses with employees had fewer than 100 people at the end of 2024. Most have no estimating department. The owner does the quotes, between site visits and after dark.

Why a quoting app won't fix it

Quoting apps give you a nicer template. The template was never the slow part. The thinking is. How many square feet is that deck from the photos? What did the last deck like it cost you in labour once the stairs went in?

That knowledge lives in your head and in a pile of old invoices. An app you rent doesn't know any of it, so you still work out the numbers by hand and type them into its form.

What we'd build

• After the site visit, you drop photos, measurements and a voice note into one place from your phone.
• AI reads them and drafts the line items, using your price book for materials and your labour rates.
• It checks the draft against past jobs of the same type and flags anything that looks low or high.
• You review it, change what you want and approve. It goes to the homeowner the same day, under your name.
• If they don't reply, follow-ups go out on a schedule you set, and the system tells you when they open it or ask a question.

Want to see this mapped to your business? Book a free call

AI never sends a price you haven't seen. It does the typing and the arithmetic, and you make the call. Your price book and job history sit in a database you own, which is why we push you to own your software and data. Every finished job adds to the history that AI checks the next draft against.

Speed only helps if you hear about the job. If calls go to voicemail while you're up a ladder, an AI receptionist can take the details and book the site visit.

Start small

Pick the job you quote most, like decks or bathrooms. Write down your prices for it and pull your last ten of those jobs with what they cost you. That list speeds up your own quoting even if you stop there. Then we connect it to your phone and let AI draft the next one.

Quotes piling up in the truck?

Bring your last few quotes to a free 30-minute call. We'll show you how much of each one AI could draft for you.