Are You The Only One That Can Estimate Jobs?

Are you the only one that can estimate jobs in your company?

If yes, let me guess…

You know what it’s like to miss dinner and let that pizza go cold.

This is article 3 of 4 on my series of hurdles that contractors have to overcome to own a business rather than the business owning you.

The first two hurdles I covered were

• someone other than you must be able to answer the business phone/email.
• someone other than you must be able to keep the job going and lead the crew.

And now…

• someone other than you must be able to estimate jobs.

Why?

Because.

Ok, I’ll quit trying to be funny 😂

But seriously, your future self will thank you.

Out of the 4 hurdles I’m writing on, I suspect this one will get the most pushback.

“Why should I try to get someone else to estimate jobs?”

“I never intend to grow to the point where I need dedicated sales people.”

I get it.

Let me ask you this:

You like winning and closing jobs, no?

Of course.

What is one thing that wins and closes more jobs?

Getting estimates back to clients quickly.

Before your competition does.

You like saving time, no?

Of course.

Who doesn’t?

Well…

Building your estimating process to the point where someone other than you can estimate those jobs, will not only provide benefit in that you are no longer the bottleneck, but it will also provide benefit in that your own estimating process will be so much simpler, faster, and repeatable.

Even if you never actually hire a dedicated salesperson.

By how much you ask?

Well, instead of estimates taking hours, they take a mere minute or two.

And when you can do that, you get them back to your clients more quickly, hence winning more jobs.

Am I making my point?

Even if you never hire a salesperson to estimate jobs for you, you yourself will benefit tremendously by pretending as though you will.

And then you actually have the option of handing the estimating off to someone, as you just made it dramatically easier.

Ok, I rest my case.

Let’s switch to the practical “how” this is actually accomplished.

What is necessary so that you can have someone else estimate jobs for you?

Pretty simple actually.

• create templates
• create production rates.

If you do those two things, anyone that can take measurements can then estimate a job for you.

Because if templates and production rates exist, all you need to do is plug in measurements, and bingo, you have your price.

How do you create templates?

You could do this in spreadsheets, or even better, in SynkedUP, an estimating software dedicated to making this easy.

Start by taking the type of work that you do day in and day out, and could build an estimate for in your sleep.

List out all the materials, equipment, and labor you need to do such a job.

And then write out a nice professional proposal description for that job

A template is basically a list of the resources needed, and the proposal description, saved in a reusable form.

Production rates though, is where templates really come alive.

Instead of doing the calculation manually every time to come up with how much base rock you need for a patio, you do the calculation once, turn that into a formula so that you can input the measurement such as sq ft, and bingo, you got magic at your fingertips.

Not to mention far less opportunity for human error.

Example – let’s say I figured out manually that this 500 sq ft patio I’m bidding is going to need 12 ton of base rock.

I take the 500 divided by 12, and figure out that 1 ton of base rock covers 41.67 sq ft.

Turn that into a formula in a spreadsheet or SynkedUP estimating template, and now forever in the future, I only need to enter in the sq ft, and it’ll instantly calculate how much base rock I need for a 250 sq ft, 800 sq ft, or any number sq ft patio.

If you’d like, I made a template spreadsheet you can use to find and build your own production rates.

You can get a copy of that production rate calculator right here.

One of the biggest things that prevent contractors from getting to this state of having their own tried and true library of templates and production rates is the addiction to the urgent, and ignoring of the important.

Addiction to the urgent will never give you the business you envisioned and dreamed of.

Never.

You have to muster of the resolve, discipline, and courage to push back against that temptation, and take the time to invest into your business processes.

Every day you delay, is another day you are a slave to your own business.

But there’s no time like the present, is there!?

This is your sign!

Rip off the band-aid, and invest into your future business, where you own it, and it doesn’t own you.

Cheers,

Weston Zimmerman

SynkedUP founder & CEO