Every trade owner knows the 8pm quote: kids in bed, laptop open, working out prices for a job you visited that afternoon. It feels free, because the only thing it costs is your evening. But "your evening" has a price — and it's higher than it looks.
Put a number on it
Do the arithmetic once. Say a quote takes you 90 minutes to write up properly, and you produce 6 quotes a week. That's 9 hours a week of unpaid admin — close to a full extra working day, every week, on top of the job.
Now value that time at what your hour is actually worth on the tools — not minimum wage, but your charge-out rate. Even conservatively, that evening work is costing you a five-figure sum a year in time you could bill, rest, or spend at home. The quote isn't free. You're just paying for it in a currency you don't track.
The hidden cost: the jobs you don't win
The bigger cost isn't the time — it's the timing. A quote written at 8pm and sent the next day is competing against anyone who quoted on the spot. The research is unambiguous: the average business takes 47 hours to respond to an enquiry, and speed is one of the strongest predictors of who wins the work. Your late quote might be better — and still lose to a faster one.
So the 8pm quote costs you twice: the unpaid hour to write it, and the job it was too slow to win.
Three ways to win the evening back
You don't need to buy anything to start clawing back that time:
- Templatise everything repeatable. Standard scopes, standard line items, standard messages. Most of your quote is the same every time — stop rebuilding it.
- Quote as much as possible on-site. Even a rough fixed number given on the spot, refined later, beats a perfect quote sent in three days.
- Stop re-keying data. The single biggest evening time-sink is copying the same customer and job details between your notes, your quote, your invoice and your accounting. Enter it once.
That last point is where connected tools earn their keep — it's the reason Mastro turns a signed on-site quote directly into a tracked job, and syncs with bexio so the contact and invoice aren't retyped. But the principle is free: every piece of information should be entered once.
The real question
The 8pm quote isn't a work-ethic badge. It's a symptom of a process that makes you do valuable work for free, slowly, at the worst time of day. Put a number on it, and the case for fixing it usually makes itself.
Related: why quoting on-site wins more jobs.