You’re Not Too Expensive. Your Quote Might Just Be Bad.
It’s easy to blame price when you lose a job.
You quoted R38 000. Someone else got it for R34 500. There’s the answer.
Before you decide you need to start quoting cheaper, open the quote you sent and read it as if you’d never been to the site.
A surprising number of contractor quotes give the customer almost nothing to work with.
Bathroom renovation. Labour and material. R38 000.
You know what R38 000 covers because you stood in the bathroom, measured it and worked the job out in your head.
The customer remembers parts of that conversation. Probably not all of it.
Two days later your quote is sitting on their phone next to another one and you’re no longer there to explain why you allowed for waterproofing, why the old tiles need to come off or why you’ve included getting the rubble off site.
All they can see clearly is R38 000.
Your site conversation won’t follow the quote home
Think about what happens during a normal site visit.
You walk through the job with the client. They show you the cracked tiles. You notice another issue while you’re there. There’s a discussion about whether they’re buying the new fittings. You explain that the shower needs to be opened properly because you don’t want to patch over whatever is causing the problem.
Everyone understands each other while you’re standing there.
Then you leave and go to the next job.
The quote gets sent later.
If the quote has boiled that whole conversation down to “labour and material”, the customer has to fill in the blanks.
For the same shower job, something as simple as this gives them far more to work with:
Remove tiles in the affected shower area. Prepare the exposed surface and repair the waterproofing where required. Retile the repaired section, grout and reseal. Labour, specified installation material and rubble removal included.
You haven’t written an essay.
You’ve put the job you discussed onto the page.
This becomes especially important when your price is higher.
Say you’ve priced painting at R31 000 and another contractor is sitting at R26 500.
You’ve allowed for prep work on some damaged areas, primer where it’s needed and the paint you normally use. The cheaper quote might cover exactly the same work. It might not.
If yours simply says Paint interior and exterior, the homeowner can’t see any of the difference you priced in.
They’ll compare R31 000 with R26 500 because those are the clearest pieces of information you gave them.
Write down the parts that can cost you later
Quotes also save arguments once the job starts.
You don’t need to specify every box of screws, but anything that could change the price later deserves some thought.
If the client is supplying the tiles, put that in.
If painting will be priced separately, say so.
If your price assumes the existing plumbing stays where it is, the client should know that before asking you to move the basin to the other side of the room halfway through the job.
Rubble is another simple one. Contractors regularly think they’re leaving it because removal wasn’t priced. Homeowners regularly think nobody would possibly leave a pile of broken tiles on the property.
A few words on the quote settle it.
The payment arrangement belongs there too.
If material needs to be paid for upfront, show that. If you’re working with stage payments on a bigger project, the customer should understand when those payments become due before the job is approved.
It makes the job easier to run because there’s less to renegotiate once tools are already out.
And when the client adds something, deal with it while everyone still remembers what changed.
A WhatsApp saying, “No problem, I can add those two extra walls. That wasn’t in the original quote, so it will add R3 200,” is a lot easier than putting an extra R3 200 on the final invoice and explaining it for the first time then.
None of this requires expensive quoting software or a designer.
A plain quote that explains the work properly will do more for you than a beautiful template with a big logo, three slogans and one line describing a R60 000 job.
Pull up a few quotes you sent over the last month, especially jobs you thought you had a decent chance of getting.
Read the description of the work without relying on what you remember from the site visit.
If the quote only makes sense because you already know what you meant, there’s something to fix before you touch your prices.
The customer wasn’t there when you worked out the number. Give them enough on the page to see what went into it.
