Stop Letting Your Techs Quote Jobs in the Field
Stop Letting Your Techs Quote Jobs in the Field
Two neighbors. Same street in Parma. Near-identical jobs. Two different numbers from two different techs — and I found out about it the worst possible way.
The lady on the left called the office to confirm her quote. The lady on the right had already texted her about it on Nextdoor. By the time I got back to the shop that afternoon, I had two unhappy customers and a pricing credibility problem I'd spent two years building toward without knowing it.
That's the article. Let me back up.
The Problem Nobody Talks About Until a Customer Calls and Compares
When I took over Whittaker Plumbing from my dad in January 2020, the first thing I figured out — in about three weeks, the hard way — was that the whole operation ran on Mike. His gut. His relationships. His memory of what he charged the Kowalski family in 2008. None of it was written down. When that phone stopped getting answered, the shop almost died.
Field quoting is the same problem. Different driveway, same result. The tech's on site, he can see the job, customer's right there — why not get a number out and close it? That logic works until you realize what you've actually handed over.
Then the customer calls the office to confirm "the price Dom quoted." And the number is wrong. Too low to make money on. Or different from what my other guy quoted the neighbor on the same street last Tuesday for the same job.
That phone call is never fun. I've had it more than once.
What You're Actually Handing Over When You Let a Tech Quote
Dom's been with me two years out of his apprenticeship. Good hands. Reliable. Customer likes him. He doesn't know what copper fittings cost this month versus six months ago — that number's moved three times since summer and I'm the one watching it. He doesn't know what we're paying on the van we added in 2022, or what that does to what we need to clear per job. That's not on Dom. That's just not his job. His job is to diagnose the problem and do the work right and treat the customer like she's somebody's mom.
The pricing is my job. Or Becca's.
I learned this watching it happen from the inside. From 2012 to 2018 I worked at Crestwood Plumbing of Cleveland, thirty trucks, real operation. Techs quoting add-ons in the field, no check with the office, job gets done, invoice doesn't match the work order. The office finds out three days later. By then the customer's paid what the tech said, or the tech gave away a billable hour to be nice, and nobody caught it until the numbers looked wrong at the end of the month.
The office at Crestwood eventually built an approval process. Took them three years of pain. I watched the whole thing happen and then came back to Whittaker and didn't implement it for two more years. Got busy. Told myself my guys knew the numbers well enough. I was wrong.
Your Tech Isn't the Problem
I'm not here to tell you your guys are quoting badly because they're bad.
My Local 55 apprenticeship ran from 2003 to 2007. Nobody handed me a price book. I learned by riding with Mike, watching what he said in kitchens, absorbing his logic. What I absorbed was pricing based on the customer, on the neighborhood, on whatever felt right. Mike had thirty-six years of Parma in his head. Every block. Every house era. His gut worked because of all of that. My guys don't have thirty-six years. Neither do yours.
So when your tech goes low because he's trying to close the job and doesn't want to be the guy who lost it — that's not a character flaw. That's a guy doing his best with no real guidance on what "best" looks like in dollars. That's on you. It was on me.
What Happened When Two Neighbors Compared Notes
Parma. Older homes. People who've lived on the same block for twenty years, who talk across driveways, who share contractors like snow blowers. And Nextdoor — which moves faster than any Google review I've ever seen, and most shop owners aren't posting anything, aren't watching it, aren't thinking about it until somebody's already posted about them.
Two houses, same street, three days apart. Near-identical jobs — main shutoff valve replacement, older homes, always a little drama. Two different guys. Neither called the office before quoting. Both thought they knew the number.
The quotes were $340 apart.
The jobs weren't perfectly identical. One had a gate valve in a tighter spot, different access, we addressed a couple extra shutoffs while we were in there. But try explaining gate valve access to the woman who calls you and says her neighbor got the same thing done three days ago for $340 less. She doesn't care about the access. She cares that she got a worse deal because she called on a different day.
She was right to feel that way. I'd built the situation.
I gave money back. Not because the work was wrong — it wasn't. Because I'd created a shop where two techs could quote the same job that far apart without anyone checking, and that's a shop problem, not a customer problem.
After that I rebuilt the approval process from scratch. Should've done it eighteen months earlier.
How the Approval Loop Works at Whittaker Right Now
Simple: nothing gets quoted in the field above the threshold without calling or texting the office first. Tech presents the number after I or Becca confirms it. That's it.
Becca's in the office two days a week. The other three, Dom texts me. A good CSR is worth two trucks — I wrote that once and I meant it literally. The approval loop only works because somebody is reachable during business hours who knows what the numbers need to be. If your office is a voicemail box, fix that first.
The threshold right now is $400. Under that, the tech can quote it. At or above, he calls before the customer hears a number. I drew that line after the neighbor incident, not before. I'm not proud of that. But a wrong threshold beats no threshold, and if you haven't drawn the line yet, draw it today. You can move it later.
The reason I'm rigid about this goes back to spring 2020. Card table in the garage, Hank on my lap — he was two — running dispatch for a shop I'd owned for sixty days while my dad was in the hospital with a knee replacement that turned into a six-week complication. I learned in eight weeks that office communication is infrastructure. Same as your main line. You don't think about it until it fails, and when it fails everything backs up.
What You Do Starting Monday
Set a threshold today. Pick a number. Write it down. Tell your guys. Anything above that, they call before quoting. I can't tell you what number because I don't know your overhead or your market. Cleveland prices aren't Columbus prices, and they're sure as hell not Dallas prices. Look at your last sixty days of tickets. Find the jobs that hurt — thin margin, customer unhappy, number changed mid-job. What did those jobs have in common? Start there. Move it as you learn.
Build the script. Your tech needs exact words for while he's waiting on a callback, because the dead air in somebody's kitchen is where confidence goes to die. Here's what Dom says now: "Let me confirm the materials pricing real quick — things have been moving around and I want to give you an accurate number, not a rough one." That's it. Customer hears a careful guy from an organized shop. Because that's what they're getting.
Close the loop on paper. When the office confirms a number and the tech quotes it, that number goes in the work order before the job starts. Invoice matches the work order. When it doesn't match, you find out why. If something changed on-site, the tech calls in again before he tells the customer the new number. Tech calls, office confirms, number gets quoted, number's in the system. That's the whole thing.
You're gonna have a guy who pushes back. "I've been doing this twelve years, why do I need to call?" Because two customers on the same street got two different numbers and I had to give money back and rebuild the process. That's why. It's not about whether I trust him. It's about whether we're the same shop no matter who drives out.
Right now, for a lot of you, it's not the same shop. It doesn't have to stay that way.
The One Objection Worth Addressing
The question I actually get — not from customers, from other owners — is some version of: won't this slow the call down and hurt your close rate?
In my shop, no. The script is the whole answer. If Dom handles the pause right, the customer doesn't read it as hesitation. They read it as a guy who isn't going to hand them a number he has to walk back later. Where shops get hurt is when the tech looks uncertain or apologetic while he's waiting, which makes the customer feel like something's off. So train the words, not just the policy.
Some customers will read the pause as hesitation no matter what and go call somebody else. I've seen it. Those customers were going to shop around anyway — probably the type who posts on Nextdoor asking for three quotes before they've even called anyone. You're not losing a customer. You're finding out earlier.
What I can't fix for you is the customer you lose because your tech gave a number on the spot and then you had to change it. That one doesn't come back. The one who waited fifteen minutes for a confirmed number usually does.
Enjoyed this article?
Get articles like this in your inbox every Monday. Free, no spam.