The short answer
- Most enquiries go to whoever replies first with a usable number
- Pre-decide your ten most common jobs so those quotes take two minutes
- Quote a price with a date; a price alone is half an answer
- State what would change the number, so the quote survives a change of scope
- One follow-up after three working days recovers more work than any discount
Two things go wrong with quoting in most shops, and they are connected. Quotes take too long to go out, so work is lost to a faster competitor. Then the quotes that do go out are produced under time pressure, so the numbers are guesses that sometimes turn out to be too low. Speeding up carelessly makes the second problem worse. The fix is to make the decisions in advance, so that being fast costs nothing.
Why does speed win the work?
Because a customer with an enquiry is usually asking several shops at once, and a person deciding between suppliers they cannot otherwise tell apart uses whatever signal they have. The first usable answer is a strong signal: it suggests you are organised, that you want the work, and that you will be responsive later when it matters.
The word doing the work there is usable. A fast reply that says "thanks, we'll come back to you" is not a quote and buys nothing. A fast reply with a real number, even a range with a condition attached, ends the customer's search. Most people stop looking once they have something they can act on.
How do you decide the common cases once?
List the ten jobs you actually quote most often. For most decorating shops the list is unglamorous and short — a one-colour front on a tee at four or five quantity breaks, a two-colour front and back, a left-chest embroidery, a hoodie with a large front print, and so on. Between them they will cover the large majority of enquiries.
Then price them properly, once, when nobody is waiting. Build each from the actual costs rather than from the old matrix: blanks at current supplier pricing, setup at what it really takes, run time at your real speed, and a spoilage allowance from your genuine reprint rate. That work is the same exercise as building a line-by-line job cost, and doing it for ten cases covers most of your week.
| Enquiry type | Pre-decided? | Time to quote |
|---|---|---|
| One of your ten standard jobs | Yes | Two minutes |
| Standard job, unusual quantity | Interpolate | Five minutes |
| New garment, known decoration | Price the blank only | Ten minutes |
| Genuinely new | No — cost it properly | Same day, not same hour |
The value is in the top row. If most enquiries are answerable in two minutes, the ones that genuinely need thought get the time they deserve, because you are not doing all of them under pressure.
Being fast is not the same as being hasty. Fast means the thinking already happened.
What does a good quote actually say?
Four things, briefly. A price broken into its parts, a delivery date, what would change the number, and how long it holds.
The four lines
- The price, itemised — garments, decoration, setup. A single total invites haggling over a number nobody can inspect
- A date — "delivered by the 14th if approved by Friday". A price without a date is half an answer
- What changes it — "add $X for a second location, less $Y at 100 pieces". This is what stops a scope change becoming an argument
- How long it holds — blank prices move; say the quote is good for 30 days and you are protected without seeming difficult
Itemising is the line people resist and it is the one that protects margin. A customer who can see that setup is $75 and garments are $744 argues about the garments — which is a conversation about specification you can win — rather than about your price in general, which is a conversation nobody wins.
If artwork will need work before it can be printed, say so here rather than after. A charge that appears on the quote is a line item; the same charge appearing three days later is a surprise, which is exactly the dynamic that makes art time so hard to bill for.
When should you decline to quote?
Some enquiries cost more to answer than they can ever return, and answering all of them is why quoting feels like a burden. Recognising them early is worth as much as quoting the good ones quickly.
The clearest signal is an enquiry with no quantity, no deadline and no artwork. That is not a buyer yet; it is someone gathering numbers. Answer with your standard price list and a question rather than with a bespoke quote, and spend the saved time on the enquiries that named a quantity.
The second signal is a job whose specification changes on every exchange. Two rounds is normal. By the fourth, the customer is designing rather than buying, and the honest move is to say that you will hold the current price for a decision by a date, and re-quote after that.
Declining well matters. A short, warm reply pointing them at your price list keeps the door open, and people who were not ready this month often are next quarter. What costs you is neither declining nor quoting — it is the third option of quoting slowly and half-heartedly, which loses the work and the time.
Does following up actually work?
Yes, and almost nobody does it. A single short message three working days after the quote — asking whether they need anything else to make a decision, not whether they have decided — recovers a meaningful share of quotes that would otherwise go quiet. Most of those customers did not choose someone else; they got busy.
Keep it to one follow-up. A second reads as pressure and costs you the goodwill the first earned. Producing those quotes from a stored price structure rather than from memory is what our quoting and back-office tools are for. And record the outcome either way, because a shop that knows its quote-to-order rate can tell the difference between a pricing problem and a responsiveness problem. Without that number, every lost quote looks like it was about price — and it usually was not.
The same principle carries into the job itself: telling people where things stand before they have to ask is what keeps status questions off the phone. The rest of the business archive assumes you are measuring rather than guessing.
