Before the client calls you, he has already called ten other firms. He takes the cheapest quote, knocks a quarter off it, and calls you to find out how desperate you are. This is the quote that ended that conversation for me.
Every builder knows the routine. Nobody says it out loud, but everybody knows it.
Before the client calls you, he has already called ten other firms. Sometimes fifteen. He collects their quotes like coupons. Then he takes the cheapest one, knocks a quarter off it, sometimes half, and calls you with that number already in his head.
He isn't asking what the job costs. He already decided that. He's asking how desperate you are.
And plenty of people are. I watched competitors and colleagues I respected take jobs at prices that wouldn't have made me pick up the phone. They weren't stupid, and they weren't bad builders. They were afraid of the empty month. Afraid of the crew standing around with nothing to do, of wages that still have to be paid on Friday, of the bank that doesn't care how the month went. So they said yes.
Then they spent the whole job trying to claw the money back. Cheaper materials than the ones on paper. Fewer hours than the job needed. A crew in a hurry, because the next job was waiting and this one was already losing money. The client got exactly what he paid for, which was a lot less than he thought he'd bought. And the builder got a reputation he didn't deserve, earned on a price he never should have accepted.
Here's the arithmetic nobody does at the table. Say the honest cost of a job, everything included, is 100. The cheapest quote the client found says 90, which already means somebody forgot something. The client knocks a third off and asks for 60. The firm that accepts 60 isn't winning a job. It's paying 40 for the privilege of being busy. And that 40 has to come from somewhere. It comes from the materials, from the hours, from the guarantee, or from the next client.
I tried every kind of quote you can imagine.
One line with a total. The client argued with the total, because there was nothing else to argue with.
Long and beautiful, with a logo and a nice font. The client picked out the lines he didn't like and argued with those, one by one, until the quote was beautiful and worthless.
Cheap to get in the door. I got in the door, and I lost money inside.
Most quotes either protected me or impressed the client. Never both.
The one I kept started from a single assumption: the client will negotiate. Not maybe. Not sometimes. Always. It's not personal. It's what the routine teaches him. So I stopped writing quotes that pretended he wouldn't, and started writing one that expected it.
It had two pages.
The second page listed everything. Every material, every quantity, every kind of labour, at what it actually cost me. Nothing padded. Nothing hidden in the lines to give me room to drop the price later. And line by line, those prices were almost always below the competition, precisely because there was nothing hidden in them. Other firms built their margin into every line, so they'd have something to give away when the client pushed. Mine was in plain sight, on the other page.
The first page showed what the client was really paying for. The materials and the labour, yes. And then the things every firm pays and almost nobody shows.
The taxes on every hour of work. Not the wage the man takes home, but what that hour really costs the employer once the state has taken its share.
The VAT, which the client pays anyway, whether the quote admits it or not.
The overheads. The vans, the fuel, the insurance, the tools that wear out, the accountant, the office, the phone, the time spent writing quotes for clients who never call back.
And the margin. The part people are ashamed to show, as if making money were a crime. The margin is what keeps a business alive long enough to come back and fix something under guarantee. A firm with no margin can't honour a guarantee. It won't exist by the time you need it.
Add it all up and my total was often above the cheapest number on his table. Sometimes well above. But now he could see why, line by line. And every other quote on that table had the same costs inside it. They just didn't show them. Or worse, they hadn't counted them, which meant that firm would go looking for the money somewhere in the middle of his job.
When someone still tried to negotiate, my answer was always the same.
"Fine. You pay my taxes, and I'll charge you only what the job costs me."
Nobody ever took me up on it.
Think about what that sentence does. The client came to the table to shrink one number. Suddenly he's looking at a list of things he can't make disappear. He can't negotiate with the tax office. He can't negotiate the price of cement. And he can't ask me to cut the price of the work, not with proof on the table that my work is already priced below everyone else's.
The sentence isn't rude. It's an invitation to look at the same page I'm looking at. Once he looks, there's nothing left to push against. The soft part every client hunts for, the padding, simply isn't there. It's all on the first page, with its name written next to it.
Most of the time, something better happened. Once they understood what each part of the job cost and why, they forgot the other quotes altogether. Not because mine was the cheapest. Because mine was the only one they understood.
That's the part most people miss.
A short quote looks confident, but it gives the client nothing to hold except the total, and a total is the easiest thing in the world to attack. All it takes is another, smaller total.
A complete quote is hard to fight. Every line is a fact. To negotiate, the client has to find a fact that's wrong. A price that's too high, a quantity that doesn't make sense, a cost that shouldn't be there. If he can't find one, he has nothing to say. The more complete your quote, the fewer people even try.
And it covered my back.
When a client asked halfway through why something cost what it cost, the answer was already on paper, signed. When he wanted something extra, the logic for its price was already in the document: the same materials at the same rates, the same labour at the same rates, the same taxes and overheads on top. No guessing. No arguing over a number pulled from the air. No "we'll sort it out later."
When something went wrong on site, the quote told everyone what had been promised and what hadn't. It protected the client from me cutting corners, and it protected me from the client inventing promises I never made. A good quote isn't a sales document. It's the first page of the contract.
So here's what I'd tell anyone tired of being the cheapest quote minus a third.
Stop hiding your costs to look cheaper. Show them, so you look honest.
Assume the client will negotiate, and build the quote so there's nothing soft left to squeeze.
Price the work fairly, line by line, with nothing hidden inside it. Then put every tax, every overhead and your margin on top, in plain sight, each with its own name.
And when someone asks for a discount, don't argue. Show him the page.
The client who still walks away after seeing all that was never going to pay you properly anyway. Let him go to the firm that said yes. Sooner or later, he'll be calling someone to fix it.
And it might be you. At your price.