How do I stop doing my quotes at night after a full day on the tools?

Daniel Lukic runs a property maintenance business across Penrith and the Blue Mountains. He told Yahoo News Australia that after a full day on site, dinner with the family, and then the quotes and paperwork, his evenings can run anything from an hour to four or five hours. He is not slow. Quoting is a second shift that nobody pays for.

Often most of that time is not pricing. You know what a job is worth. The slow part is writing it up from nothing: remembering what you saw, working out the order, typing the same sentences you typed last week, at the end of a day when you have nothing left.

So move the remembering to the job. Standing at the ute after the look, talk your notes into your phone: what the job is, what it needs, anything odd about the site. Said out loud while you are still looking at it, the detail is right the first time.

Then stop starting from a blank page. Pick one quote you were proud of and make it the layout every quote follows: same sections, same order, same tone. If you are happy to use a chatbot, the free ChatGPT app can turn your spoken notes into a quote in that layout. Tell it to leave every price as a blank and list the blanks at the end, because the prices come off your price list and your suppliers, not out of its head. Read every line before it goes.

If you would rather not use AI, a template saved as a note in your phone does the same job. Write your common jobs, call-out and labour rates into it once, with blanks for the job, the parts and the labour, and fill it in from tonight's photos.

Either way, aim to send it before you drive off, or the same evening at the latest, while the customer still remembers why they called you. A quote that arrives while the job is fresh in their mind is easier to say yes to.

The pricing judgement stays yours. What goes is the typing from memory at the kitchen table.

A Three Fixes report looks at how you quote today and writes the steps for the tools you already use, including the words to give a chatbot if you want one and a phone template if you do not.