What contractors lose between the estimate and the job

A contracting business has two parts that get all the attention — finding work and doing it well — and a third that gets almost none. The stretch between sending an estimate and starting the job has no name, nobody owns it, and it is where a surprising share of the year's revenue goes missing.

Why this gap is worse in trades than elsewhere

The estimate itself is expensive to produce. Someone drove out, looked at the thing, worked out materials, and priced it — often in the evening, after the day's work. That cost is already spent whether or not the job happens, which makes an estimate that quietly expires the most wasteful thing a contracting business produces.

• Estimates go out at the end of a long day, when there is no capacity left for the admin that should follow them
• The person who wrote the estimate is on site all day, so the follow-up window is exactly when they cannot reach a phone
• Seasonal swings mean an estimate sent in a busy month gets no attention until a quiet one, by which point it is stale
• The customer is often coordinating with somebody else — an insurer, a landlord, a spouse — and their delay looks identical to disinterest

The number nobody has

Ask a contractor how many jobs they won last month and you get an answer immediately. Ask how many estimates they sent that nobody ever replied to, and the answer is usually a pause. The information exists — it is sitting in the job management software — but nothing surfaces it, so it is not a number anyone manages.

It is worth working out once, by hand if necessary. Take the estimates you sent in a month, subtract the ones that turned into jobs and the ones that got a clear no, and look at what is left. That remainder is not lost work. It is work that stalled.

“An estimate nobody answered is the only product in a contracting business that costs money to make and is then thrown away unopened.”

What changes it

Not a bigger sales effort. The change is making the stalled pile visible, and then making sure something happens to each item in it on a schedule that does not depend on anybody remembering at the end of a fourteen-hour day. That is an administrative problem rather than a sales one, which is good news — administrative problems are the kind that stay solved.