Why your quotes take a week to leave the building

Follow one quote through an imaginary but familiar building services firm.

Monday. A property manager emails asking for a price to service twelve air-conditioning units across two sites. The office logs it and forwards it to the estimator.

Tuesday. The estimator is on a site visit all day. The email waits.

Wednesday. The estimator prices it in about an hour. Because the total is above what he usually sends without a second look, he forwards it to the owner for approval.

Thursday. The owner is at a supplier meeting and then catching up on payroll. The quote sits in her inbox under forty other emails.

Friday. She opens it, changes one line, and asks for a cover note. The office writes the cover note but the estimator has gone home, so they wait to check the revised figure with him.

The following Monday. The quote goes out. The property manager replies that they accepted another firm's price on Thursday.

An hour of work, spread across a week of waiting. Nobody in that firm was slow. Every delay came from something reasonable: a site visit, a busy owner, a missing person at the end of the day.

Where the time actually goes

Measure this in your own firm and the preparation time will often be the smaller part. The waiting is the bigger part, and the longest wait tends to be the same one: approval by the one person who is allowed to say yes.

That person is usually the owner, and the rule about what needs their approval is usually unwritten. "Anything big" or "anything unusual" in practice means anything the estimator feels unsure about, which on a busy week is most things.

Write the limits down

The fix is a short written rule about who can approve what. For example:

• Standard services from the price list, under an agreed value: the estimator sends directly.
• Anything with a discount above an agreed percentage, a new customer above an agreed value, or a non-standard scope: the owner approves.
• Anything involving a fixed completion date with a penalty: the owner approves, and operations confirms capacity first.

Fill in your own values. What matters is that they are written, agreed, and the same every week. The owner's attention goes to the quotes that need it, and the routine ones stop queuing behind them.

That rule belongs in the company's written memory, next to the price list and the reasons behind it. Once it is there, an AI assistant becomes useful in a specific way. It can draft the quote from the price list and the enquiry, check the draft against the approval rule, and route it: straight to the estimator to send, or to the owner with a one-line note on why it needs her. It can also draft the cover note at the same time, so Friday's wait disappears.

The approval step stays. The AI does not decide that a quote is within limits and send it on its own authority. It prepares, a named person releases. What changes is that the owner sees two quotes a week that need her judgment instead of twelve that do not.

It also helps the estimator. When he knows exactly which quotes he can send himself, he stops forwarding everything out of caution, and the owner stops being asked to approve a standard service visit.

Where written limits fall short

Some quotes genuinely need a site visit, and no rule speeds up a visit. Some customers want a call before a price, and that call takes time to arrange.

Written limits also require the owner to trust them. In the first month it is tempting to keep checking the routine quotes anyway, which brings the queue straight back. If that happens, lower the limits rather than ignore them, and raise them again once the estimator's routine quotes have gone out cleanly for a while.

This week

Take your last twenty quotes. For each one, write down the date the enquiry arrived and the date the quote went out. Then, for the five slowest, find out where each one waited longest. If most of them waited on one person, you have found the rule you need to write.

The operations drag check puts rough numbers on delays like this across the business. Book 20 minutes at pgco.world/book.