Why Nobody Will Quote Your Windows

I bought a house close enough to the road that I can hear traffic from the lounge.

I did not really clock it until after I had signed.

So I started calling around for double-glazing quotes.

Four months later, one company had gone quiet after the first call.

One took six weeks to answer an email.

One finally arrived, measured the windows and asked for a genuinely not-insignificant amount of money to fix the problem.

Fergus, Tradify, ServiceM8, simPRO and NextMinute all sell some version of faster quoting: load a price book, reuse templates, produce a professional document, send it from the field and follow it up.

Those are useful products. They remove duplicate entry and reduce the time between a measurement and a document.

They also preserve one assumption: the trade business supplies the person who does the quote.

With windows, that person still has to visit.

Same goes for many kitchens, retaining walls and renovation jobs.

Somebody has to inspect the site, notice the frame condition, find the awkward access, understand what the customer means and decide which risk belongs in the price.

Software can make that person faster.

It cannot give a two-person business a third person.

Roofing is the useful exception because a large part of the site visit can be replaced by imagery.

Roofr and RoofScope sell measurement reports: a paid service sitting beside the quoting software.

The roof is unusually suited to it. Aerial imagery exposes the relevant geometry. A remote technician can turn that imagery into a report without driving to the property.

The labour is pooled centrally and sold one report at a time.

There are limits. Imagery can be old or obscured. Complex roofs fall outside some delivery guarantees. A report does not inspect every substrate or replace every on-site judgment. Roofr’s own guarantee excludes especially complex roofs and reports that need more information. The exclusions are set out in its delivery terms.

I think the quoting platforms have stopped at a business-model boundary.

Software revenue can be delivered repeatedly with relatively little labour attached to each additional account. Field estimating does the opposite. Every new suburb creates travel. Every new trade creates training and liability. Every quote creates a unit of work that has to be scheduled, checked and paid for.

This is all a guess, and I dont have a crystal ball into the internal plans of Fergus or ServiceM8. Either company could launch a managed estimating service tomorrow.

The point is that the incentives lean the other way: build features that help customers perform the work, then let customers carry the labour.

Windows do not have a clean aerial shortcut. Somebody still has to stand in the room.

The more interesting model pools the person, not the software.

Think ‘Head Of Quoting’, but an army of them.

One estimator that covers a tight area for several non-competing trades.

The morning might be windows, then a kitchen, then a garage. Each client gets variable estimating capacity. The estimator gets a route dense enough to resemble a working day instead of a collection of paid windscreen hours.

This is still a hypothesis.

Quote formats may be too different.

Liability may make trade businesses unwilling to outsource judgment.

Customers may want the installer, not a neutral estimator, because trust is part of the sale. A shared estimator may also leak commercial knowledge between clients unless the operating rules are strict.

So What.

If one person can turn six neglected enquiries into six usable quotes, the value does not depend on inventing new software, it depends on training, and building operations, which is often the harder part than ‘build a quoting app’.

I am still waiting for the double-glazing job to start.

Getting somebody to take your money is its own kind of hard.

Shout out to all the legends I've ripped info from for this piece:

Roofr | RoofScope