How to hand over
quoting and estimating
You cannot delegate what you charge. You can delegate almost everything that happens before you decide it — which is most of the hours and the reason quotes go out late.
In most trade and service businesses the person who prices the work is the owner, and the owner is the bottleneck. Quotes go out late or not at all, and revenue is capped by quoting capacity rather than by demand.
The instinct is that quoting cannot be delegated because pricing is judgement. That is true and it is also a small part of the job. Measuring, chasing three suppliers for rates, reformatting into a client template, version-controlling a tender that changed twice — none of that is judgement.
Split the preparation from the pricing decision and quote volume roughly doubles without the owner doing more. Since hit rates are relatively fixed, that is the most direct growth lever available.
Who this is for
✓Worth your time if
- Quotes go out late, or you decline to quote for lack of time
- You have a rate library and templates, or could write them down
- The same inclusions and exclusions apply to most jobs
- Nobody follows up quotes after they are sent
✕Probably not if
- Every job is genuinely bespoke with no repeatable structure
- You have no templates and will not create any
- You want someone to set prices or margin
- Your drawings or scopes only exist as verbal descriptions
What preparation covers
Everything here happens before you decide a number. None of it is a pricing decision.
Measured from your drawings or scope in your software, structured the way you want it, with every assumption written down.
Requests out to your list, chased until they return, and tabulated like-for-like for comparison rather than buried in email.
Your pricing dropped into your template, standard inclusions and exclusions applied from your schedule, formatted and ready for review.
Standard scope language assembled from your library so exclusions are consistent rather than remembered.
Your rates kept current as supplier pricing moves, so the next quote does not start from last year's number.
Addenda tracked, revisions filed, the current set unambiguous, submission checklist maintained.
Every quote logged, follow-up scheduled and outcomes recorded — so you can finally see your real hit rate.
What was quoted, won, lost and why, monthly. Most businesses have never seen this.
What stays with you
The commercial decisions. All of them, permanently.
- Price and marginWhat the job is worth and what margin it carries is yours. They assemble; you price.
- Risk loadingWhat you allow for risk on a difficult job is judgement built on experience.
- Method and buildabilityHow the work gets done, and whether it can be done as drawn, stays with you or your site people.
- Signing and submittingQuotes and tenders are prepared for your review and signature, not sent on your behalf unreviewed.
The order to hand it over
Start on jobs where you already know the answer.
Have them measure jobs you have already priced
Three or four completed jobs. You know the right numbers, so you find out immediately whether they can read your drawings and follow your conventions — at zero risk.
Write down your conventions as the gaps appear
Their questions are the specification. Which allowances you make, how you treat wastage, what your standard exclusions are. An hour of writing prevents most of what goes wrong later.
Move to live take-offs with early checking
Real jobs, with your estimator checking measurements before pricing. Assumptions get listed rather than assumed.
Add supplier chasing
Now they know the jobs, chasing rates is mechanical — and consistent chasing is where a lot of the delay disappears.
Then quote assembly and the follow-up register
Assembly once they know your template. The register is the sleeper: most businesses cannot state their hit rate, and follow-up alone converts quotes that were simply forgotten.
No written conventions, so reasonable guesses become your quotes
The technical skill in take-offs is real but learnable. What is not learnable by observation is the set of conventions living in your head — how much wastage you allow, whether access is priced separately, what your standard exclusions are, which supplier you use for what. A capable estimator with no written conventions will make reasonable decisions that produce quotes slightly different from yours. On a fixed-price job, slightly different is the margin. Spend an hour writing the conventions down before the first live take-off, and add to that document every time they ask a question you have not documented. Within a month it becomes the most valuable operational document in the business — and it makes the next hire trivial.