Insights
What does an unchased estimate really cost?
More than almost any other leak in a service business — because an unchased estimate is money you already paid to earn. The lead cost you marketing. The site visit cost you a truck roll. The quote cost you an evening. Everything expensive already happened; the follow-up was the nearly-free last step. Skipping it doesn't save the cost of chasing. It forfeits the cost of everything before it.
Most shops know this in the abstract and still don't chase, which tells you the problem was never conviction. It's arithmetic nobody's run and logistics nobody owns. This piece runs the arithmetic with your numbers, shows why the chase dies operationally, and lays out what a working chase looks like — DIY-able, all of it.
How do I put a number on my own leak?
Four figures, all in your job software or estimate book from last quarter. How many estimates went out. How many closed — your baseline close rate. How many of the ones that didn't close ever got a single follow-up touch. For most shops that answer is a low one, and it arrives with a wince. Your average estimate value.
Now the honest math, with deliberately conservative assumptions — use your own figures, not mine. Say forty estimates a quarter went out, twenty-five didn't close, and twenty of those never got chased. You don't get to assume chased quotes all close; you get to assume chasing closes some portion that silence wouldn't have — even one additional close in ten chases, on a $2,000 average ticket, is $4,000 a quarter recovered for the cost of some text messages. Run it at one-in-twenty if you want to be brutal. The number survives brutality, because the base — twenty untouched warm buyers a quarter, every quarter — is large, and the cost of the touch is nearly nothing. That asymmetry is the whole case.
One more line for the ledger: the customer who got quoted and never heard from you again didn't just not-buy. They logged the silence. Whether they read it as "too busy for me" or "didn't want the job," it prices your next interaction with them — and what they tell a neighbor. That line has no clean number, which is why it never makes the spreadsheet, and why the spreadsheet undercounts.
Why do estimates go unchased in real shops?
Not laziness — structure. Four reasons, all fixable once named. It's nobody's job. Sending the estimate belongs to whoever quoted it; chasing belongs to no one, and work that belongs to no one loses to work that belongs to someone, every day, forever — it's the seam problem again, work falling between systems and between roles. The timing is anti-human. The right chase window opens two or three days out and stays open for weeks, exactly when the quoting shop is busiest with won work; follow-up loses to installed jobs every time priorities collide. It feels like begging. Owners tell me chasing reads as desperate — so hear the reframe, because it's true: the customer asked for a price. Following up on a thing they requested is service, and the data point every shop that chases learns quickly is how often the reply is "so glad you texted, we'd been meaning to call." Memory is the tool. In most shops the chase list is the owner's recollection, and the owner's recollection is the most oversubscribed system in the building.
What does a working chase actually look like?
A cadence, written down, boring on purpose. A serviceable DIY version: touch one, day two or three — short, human, useful: "wanted to make sure the quote came through — happy to answer anything." Touch two, about a week out — add something real: an option, a scheduling note, an honest "we can fit this in the week of the 12th." Touch three, two or three weeks out — the graceful close: "no pressure at all; if timing's off, want me to check back in the spring?" Then an archive state that isn't a black hole — quoted-not-won customers become next season's reactivation list, not a forgotten folder.
Rules that keep it honest: every touch offers an easy no. Nobody gets more than the cadence — persistence past three reads exactly as bad as you fear. And every touch gets logged, because a chase that lives in memory dies in memory. Timing beats cleverness throughout, so don't burn evenings polishing message wording; the difference between a good chase and no chase is enormous, and the difference between a good chase and a perfect one barely registers.
You can run this by hand — a spreadsheet, three columns, a standing Friday half-hour. That's a real system and some shops sustain it. What breaks it is the same thing that broke the original follow-up: the half-hour belongs to a person with busier priorities. The automated version exists precisely to remove the person from the remembering — the system watches the estimate age, fires the cadence in your voice, logs every reply, and hands the conversation to a human the moment it turns live. It's the Follow-up pattern in the six builds, and mechanically it's the least exotic thing I make.
But run your arithmetic first — the four figures, your tickets, your wince. Then the real question isn't whether the leak is worth plugging; your own numbers just answered that. It's whether this leak outranks your others, and whether the plug should be your Friday half-hour or a system that never gets busy — that's an hours question, and the ranking is the call that pays. It's the work I do: bring me your four numbers — book a conversation — and we'll see where the chase sits in your shop's order.