Where they started
An eighteen person commercial electrical contractor in Sydney’s west. Good reputation, steady work from builders and facility managers, and an owner who wrote every quote personally because nobody else knew the pricing well enough.
Quotes took about four days to go out. The owner did site visits during the week and wrote quotes on Sunday night. A noticeable share of jobs went to competitors who quoted within a day. The office manager estimated that around a third of quotes were never followed up.
What we found in discovery
The business ran simPRO for jobs and Xero for accounts, and both held far more useful history than anyone was using. Six years of quotes with actual costs against them. Supplier pricing that updated automatically. A customer list with clear patterns in what each builder accepted and pushed back on.
The owner’s site notes were the raw material for every quote and they were consistent. Voice memos and photos, always in the same shape. The quote writing that happened later was mostly translation rather than judgement.
What we built
A workflow that takes the owner’s site notes and photos from the job platform. It drafts a quote from the business’s own pricing history and current supplier rates. It places the quote in simPRO as a draft in the company template. The owner reviews, adjusts and sends.
Alongside it, a follow up sequence for open quotes. It drafts the chase message in the owner’s voice and waits for a person to approve it.
Three things mattered.
- The pricing came from their own accepted quotes. The rates came from what this business had charged and won with, per customer type, rather than a generic labour rate.
- The owner reviewed every quote. Nothing goes to a customer without approval. What changed is that review takes ten minutes instead of an hour.
- It lived inside simPRO. The office had no new system to learn, and drafts appear where quotes always lived.
Where it landed
Quotes go out the same day as the site visit. The owner got roughly twelve hours a week back. Quote to job conversion rose by about nineteen percent in the first quarter. Most of that came from speed and from following up the ones that used to go quiet.
What we would do differently
The office manager belonged in discovery from day one. She ended up owning the follow up queue, and she had clear views on its design that we only heard in week three.