An enquiry in fabrication almost never arrives ready to price. It turns up as a photo, half a measurement and a line like “how much for something like this?” Then it sits, because pricing it means chasing the rest.
Why the enquiry is the bottleneck
The quoting itself is quick once you have the facts. The problem is that the facts arrive in pieces, across text, email and a voicemail, and someone has to gather them before anyone can price anything.
So the job sits in an inbox for two days. The customer, who messaged three shops, has already had a number back from one of them. You haven’t lost on price. You’ve lost on the two days.
The three things that always go missing
The bottleneck was never the quoting. It was the gathering.
The workflow that fixes it
Put a short intake form between the enquiry and your inbox. Not a website rebuild, just one link you send back the moment a message lands: three questions, a spot for photos, done in under a minute on a phone.
The answers come back structured. An AI step drafts them into a job sheet in your format, flags anything missing, and puts it in front of you ready to price. You still set the number. You just stop doing the gathering by hand.
The AI step is boring on purpose. Here’s roughly the instruction behind it, so you can see there’s nothing magic going on:
Turn this enquiry into a job sheet in our format. Fields: client, contact, item, dimensions, material, finish, deadline, notes. If a field is missing, write MISSING and add it to a "needs" list at the top. Do not guess a price. Keep it to the facts given.
That’s the whole trick. The enquiry becomes a job sheet the same day, the customer hears back first, and nobody stayed late to make it happen.
