The 7 Things to Find Out Before You Quote a Job

Every tradie has driven across town for a "quick look" that turned out to be nothing like what was described on the phone. Wrong job, wrong gear in the van, an hour of your day gone. The problem usually isn't the customer being difficult. It's that you quoted, or turned up, without the right information.

Get the right details up front and everything downstream gets easier, your site visit is shorter, your quote is sharper, and you waste less time on jobs that were never going to land. So here are the questions to ask a customer before quoting a job, and a smarter way to get the answers than a game of phone tag.

The 7 things worth knowing before you quote

1. What's the actual job? Not "my hot water's playing up", is it not heating, leaking, making noise, or dead? The specific symptom tells you more than the category.
2. Where is it? The suburb decides your travel, your scheduling, and sometimes whether it's worth doing at all.
3. Can you see it? A photo or two is worth ten minutes of description. Half the time you'll spot the cause before you've left the yard.
4. How urgent is it? "Sometime in the next month" and "there's water coming through the ceiling right now" are two completely different jobs.
5. Can you get access? Locked gates, dogs, units with no parking, someone who works 9 to 5, access kills more schedules than the work itself.
6. Whose place is it? Owner, tenant or property manager changes who approves the work and who pays.
7. What's the rough expectation? A patch-up versus a full replacement. You don't need a budget down to the dollar, but you need to know which conversation you're having.

Nail these seven and you'll quote faster, turn up prepared, and quietly filter out the time-wasters before they cost you a morning.

The problem with getting them by phone

In theory you ask all this on the call. In practice you're on a job when they ring, you catch them back at 6pm, they're cooking dinner, you get half the story, and you still end up doing a site visit to fill in the gaps. The information exists, it's just trapped in a conversation that's hard to have at the right time.

That's the bit worth fixing.

Let the customer tell you when it suits them

The trades who run tight don't interrogate customers on the phone. They let the customer hand over the details in their own time, in writing, with photos attached.

When someone enquires, including when they ring and you can't pick up, you send them a short intake link. They tap through it whenever suits: job type, suburb, a couple of photos, how urgent it is, access notes. Two minutes for them. And now you've got all seven answers sitting in front of you before you've spoken a word.

That's exactly what TradeStream does. A missed call (or a web enquiry) triggers a branded SMS with the link, the customer fills it in, and it lands as a tidy lead brief, with an AI read on what the job likely involves. You're not chasing details. They're waiting for you.

Why this wins you more than time

Turning up to a site visit already knowing the job does two things. It makes the visit shorter, so you fit more in a day. And it makes you look like you know exactly what you're doing, because you do, you've seen the photos, you've read the notes, you arrive with the right gear.

Customers notice that. The tradie who shows up saying "yep, saw the pics, I've got the part with me" gets the job over the one who turns up cold and starts asking questions.

The takeaway

You don't need a longer phone call to quote better. You need the right seven answers before the call, or before the visit. Collect those up front and you'll spend less time guessing, less time driving, and more time on work that actually pays.

The same details that sharpen your quote also help you win the job in the first place. It's worth seeing why the first tradie to call back usually wins, and how customers actually choose a tradie once a few of you are in the running.