By Aaron McLeish · 7 min read
Picture this: your surveyor spends an hour on a boiler survey, drives half an hour each way, spends another hour back in the office writing up the quote, and it gets sent out into the world. Three weeks later, the homeowner phones a competitor. Your quote is dead.
That survey just cost you money. Real money. Fuel, time, admin. Yet most trades I work with have never actually calculated their wasted quoting costs. They just accept that some quotes don’t turn into jobs and move on.
Here’s the thing. That acceptance is costing you thousands every year, and you probably do not even know it.
In this post, I’ll walk you through how to see the real cost of quotes that do not convert, why that number matters more than you think, and what to do about it. If you run a trades business, this is the maths that changes how you think about quoting forever.
What actually happens when you write a quote
Let’s start with the basics. Every quote has a cost to produce it, whether you think about it that way or not.
Consider this: a call comes in. Your admin team answers. Time cost: £10. Your surveyor drives out. Fuel, vehicle cost, their time: £25. They spend an hour on site assessing the work: £50. They drive back: £25. Back in the office, they add up materials, work out labour, write it up, send it. Two hours of their time and admin support: £50.
You are now £160 down before that quote even hits the customer’s inbox. That is a floor figure. It does not include the advertising cost that brought the lead in, or the lost opportunity if your surveyor could have been on a paid callout instead.
The real number is usually higher. For a plumber, that could be £180. For a heating engineer, maybe £200. For a builder quoting a kitchen, potentially £300.
Now let’s do the maths that actually matters.
Why do your wasted quoting costs spiral so fast?
If your conversion rate is 50% — meaning one in two quotes turns into a job — then half of that cost is sunk every single week with nothing to show.
Quote 10 jobs a week at £160 per quote. You win five of them. You have just spent £800 on quotes that went nowhere.
That is £800 per week of your own money, gone. Not revenue. Not cash you can reinvest. Gone.
Over a year, that is £41,600. Over five years, that is £208,000. Over the lifetime of your business, if you never improve your conversion rate, the number is eye-watering.
And here is what makes it worse: most traders absorb this as normal. They assume a 50% hit rate is what quoting is. They never question it. They never measure it. So they never fix it.
Let me explain why this matters so much. Your wasted quoting costs are not a rounding error in your accounts. They are real profit that could stay in your pocket if you understood where they come from and how to reduce them.
What is your real cost per failed quote?
A heating engineer I work with was sending out maybe 12 quotes a month. His conversion rate was roughly 40%. So he was winning about five jobs and losing seven.
His cost per quote to produce was about £180. That meant every month he was spending £1,260 on quotes that did not turn into work.
When I showed him that number, he went quiet.
Over a year, that was over £15,000 of his money going to dead quotes.
He asked me one question: what if I could get that conversion rate to 55%?
If he pitched 12 quotes and won seven instead of five, he would only be losing five quotes. Instead of £1,260 wasted per month, he would be wasting £900. That is £360 a month, £4,320 a year, he gets to keep instead of handing to the quoting machine.
Except here is the bit nobody talks about: if you also increased your average job size by 5%, or improved your materials markup by 2%, the gap between “quote 12 and win 5” and “quote 12 and win 7” becomes a question of whether your business thrives or just survives.
The hidden fact is that most traders do not know their actual wasted quoting costs. They do not know their conversion rate. They do not know what happens after they send a quote. They just know they have some jobs and some gaps, and they fill the gaps by sending more quotes, which costs more money, which increases the waste.
How much are you losing on quotes you don’t win?
Let me give you a framework to work this out for your own business right now.
Here is what you need to find:
1. How much does it cost you to produce one quote (surveyor time, fuel, admin, materials samples, follow-up)? Add it up honestly. Do not guess low.
2. How many quotes do you send in a week or month? Count them.
3. Of those quotes, how many convert to jobs? Divide jobs by quotes. That is your conversion rate as a percentage.
4. Now multiply: (Total quotes per month) × (Cost per quote) × (1 minus your conversion rate). That is your monthly wasted quoting costs.
When you see that number, something usually shifts. Because now it is not an abstract problem. It is real money.
A builder I worked with discovered his wasted quoting costs were £18,000 a year. His first reaction was anger. His second was action. He started asking simple questions. Which types of quote have the highest conversion rate? Which have the lowest? Is he wasting time quoting jobs that are not really his market? Is he underpriced, so people shop around?
Once you measure wasted quoting costs, you can start to change them.
So what can you actually do about this?
The most important thing is to stop treating quoting like a volume game. Most traders who are sending 10 quotes to win one are playing the wrong game. They are competing on price with every other tradesperson, so they assume they need to quote more to win more.
Here is the reality. If you could improve your conversion rate from 50% to 60%, you would cut your wasted quoting costs by one-fifth without sending a single additional quote.
That usually comes down to a few simple things.
Are you quoting the jobs that are right for you, or quoting everything? If 80% of your lost quotes are for extensions or specialist work outside your core offer, stop quoting them. You do not have a conversion problem. You have a focus problem.
Are you following up on quotes? Many traders send a quote and wait. The customer never hears from them again. A simple email 48 hours later asking if they have questions can change the game.
Is your quote clear? Or do you make the homeowner do the maths? A quote that walks through the work step by step, explains why you are charging what you are charging, and is easy to read, converts better than a quote that just lists line items and a total.
Are you quoting to the right person? Sometimes the admin team is taking the call, booking the surveyor, but the person who makes the financial decision is never in the room. That quote is dead before your surveyor even leaves the van.
These are not complicated fixes. They are just focus. And focus is free.
The real takeaway
Your wasted quoting costs are probably the biggest leak in your business you have never looked at. You have no idea how much money is leaving your bank account every month on quotes that go nowhere, so you cannot fix it.
The first step is always measurement. Count your quotes. Know your conversion rate. Calculate your waste.
Once you know the number, you will be motivated to change it. Because no trades business owner, once they truly see £15,000 or £20,000 a year walking out the door in dead quotes, wants to keep doing it the same way.
Your quoting process is not just a cost centre. It is where your profit actually gets decided. If you want to read deeper into how the best trades businesses structure their quoting, when to quote and when not to, and how to build a quoting system that actually converts, check out The Quote Handbook. It is exactly built for this — the systems and the thinking that separates traders who quote smartly from those who waste time and money.
If you want to talk through your own quoting numbers or how to improve your conversion rate, reach out. Email us at info@togetherwecount.co.uk or connect with me on LinkedIn at https://linkedin.com/in/aaron-mcleish.
Aaron McLeish, Managing Director.
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