The Quote Clock Assessment
Twelve questions, three minutes. A scored result on where quoting costs you jobs. Everything that qualifies you is inside the questions.
Your result is on screen. Forward it if it is useful.
You are not the shop we are for, this year.
Your quoting is spread across enough people, your clock is short enough, and you can answer the questions. Pull the twelve numbers on the checklist anyway — question 2 catches most shops out — but do not buy anything. Our engagement floor is $4,900 and below real volume that is your money wasted. Come back if the estimator retires or RFQ volume steps up.
One buildable bottleneck, and it is probably not where you think.
Break a quote into its nine steps. Two are judgment: estimating the routing and setting the price and the date. The other seven are reading, extracting, looking up prior job cost, filing and logging. Your three highest-risk gaps are usually: RFQs that never got quoted at all (nobody counts them, and they never appear in your win rate); repeat parts sitting in a queue rather than being estimated; and a single point of failure with a name and a birthday. Start free with the Quote Clock — 30 minutes, your last 30 days of RFQs, you keep the numbers. If the volume is there, the Agent Blueprint is $4,900 and two weeks.
The office is the constraint and the exposure is concentrated.
One estimator, a hand-keyed PO process, and quotes sitting long enough to lose work. Add a supplier quality agreement nobody has read and you have two separate problems arriving through two separate doors. Order: measure the clock, then Blueprint quote intake ($4,900), then Build ($10,000, or $14,900 together). If you answered E2 or JobBOSS² at question 10, integration is scoped and priced separately — Connect, $3,900 — because we do not quote a fixed fee against an API we have not tested.
A shop at capacity does not need faster quoting this year.
If you answered E2 or JobBOSS² at question 10, integration is scoped and priced separately — Connect, $3,900 — because we do not quote a fixed fee against an API we have not tested.
In every band, the line is the same. The agent does not price the job, commit a lead time, accept a change order, or touch the shop floor, a traveler in process, or any quality disposition. It reads, extracts, drafts, files and escalates. A named person signs. There is no audited industry benchmark for any of this — the only number worth arguing with is your own.