Oxford, Ohio · Butler County & Greater Cincinnati
Every quote priced by hand is an evening you do not get back
Most of the shops I talk to around Hamilton and Fairfield price the same way they did twenty years ago. A drawing lands in an inbox, someone reads it, someone measures it, someone looks up material cost, someone types a number into a template. Then the spec changes and it all happens again.
This is probably you if
- Your most experienced person spends mornings writing quotes
- Quotes go out days after the request came in
- A spec revision means starting the estimate over
- You have lost work because someone else quoted faster
- Nobody can tell you how many quotes are open right now
What it actually costs you
The obvious cost is the hour or two per quote. The real cost is who is doing it. In almost every small manufacturer I have looked at, quoting is done by the most experienced person in the building, because they are the only one who can read the drawing and know what it will really take.
That means every quote is billed at the opportunity cost of your best engineer or your owner. And because it is slow, quotes go out late, and the ones that go out late lose.
What I build instead
A system that takes whatever arrives, a PDF drawing, a photo of a spec sheet, an email describing the job, and pulls out the things that determine price: dimensions, materials, tolerances, finish, quantity, deadline.
It prices that against your own rate sheet, not some generic model. It checks your shop calendar for a realistic lead time. Then it puts a draft quote in front of you with its reasoning shown, so you can see why it landed where it did.
You change what is wrong and send it. Nothing reaches a customer without you reading it first.
When the spec changes
This is the part people underestimate. A revision usually means re-pricing from scratch, which is why revisions get deprioritised and customers wait.
When the quote was generated from structured inputs, a revision is a re-run. New drawing in, updated number out, with a diff showing what moved and why.
Questions people actually ask
- Will it just make up prices?
- No. It prices against your rate sheet and your material costs, and it shows its working. If it cannot determine something from the drawing, it flags the gap instead of guessing. You approve every quote before it goes out.
- We quote from paper drawings. Does that work?
- Yes. A phone photo or a scan is enough for most jobs. Hand-marked dimensions are usually readable. Where it is genuinely ambiguous, it asks rather than assumes.
- How long before we see it working?
- Days, not months. I build against a handful of your real past quotes first, so you can compare what it produces against what you actually charged before you commit to anything.
Worth a conversation?
Fifteen or twenty minutes about how your business actually runs. No deck, no discovery fee. If I do not think there is anything here worth building, I will tell you that.
Book a callWorking with businesses in Oxford, Hamilton, Fairfield, West Chester, Liberty Township, Middletown, Monroe, Trenton, Mason and Cincinnati.
Last reviewed .