Responding to a new inquiry — the reply that keeps you in the running

Most of the guides on this site start at the moment a job is already worth quoting — writing the quote, pricing it, getting paid once it is done. This one is about what happens just before that: a stranger calls, texts, or emails, and for a few minutes, whether you get the job at all comes down to how you handle exactly that message.

The job is often won before the quote exists

A quote can be well-priced, well-written, and still arrive too late to matter. Most people asking for a trade’s help are asking more than one business the same day, and the first reply back tends to shape everything after it — not because it is the cheapest or the most detailed, but because it is the one still in the conversation once the others have gone quiet. By the time a slower business gets around to a proper number, the job is often already scheduled with whoever answered first.

This part of the job rarely gets tracked, which is exactly why it slips. A missed follow-up on an existing invoice shows up as a red flag somewhere; a new inquiry that sat for two days before anyone replied just looks like a job that never came in. Nothing about the inquiry stage announces that it is time-sensitive the way an overdue invoice does — the clock is running either way.

Reply first, quote second — never quote or silence

The instinct with a new inquiry is to treat it as a two-outcome decision: either you have enough to send a number, or you say nothing until you do. That framing is what causes the delay. The actual choice worth making immediately is much smaller — reply now, with no price attached, and work out the number afterward. A reply that says “got this, here is what happens next” takes two minutes and does most of the work a full quote would have done at keeping the job alive.

That is a different message than the one you eventually send once the job is priced, and it does not need to pretend otherwise. It only needs to do three things: confirm the inquiry arrived, say what you need from the other person before you can put a number on it, and give a rough sense of when they will hear back. Everything else — the actual price, the actual visit — can wait a step.

The alternative — waiting until you have thought it through properly before replying at all — feels responsible in the moment and reads as indifference on the other end. A client cannot tell the difference between “I am working out a fair number for you” and “I have not looked at this yet,” because both look exactly the same from an empty inbox. The reply is what tells them which one it actually is.

The first reply, in three lines

Here is what that looks like once it is personalized. Send it the same hour if you can — a same-day reply that arrives without a number still beats a same-week reply that arrives with one.

The rest of the pack — a one-line text version for when you are not at a desk, the qualifying questions, the rough-price answer, and confirming the visit — is ready to personalize the same way at the full new-inquiry pack.

The five things you need before you can price it

A fast reply buys you time, but it still has to be followed by questions that turn a vague ask into something you can actually quote. Five things cover almost every job:

• What exactly needs doing, and where. The same specificity a proper scope of work needs later, just gathered a step earlier — vague now means guessing later.
• Access. Stairs, parking, a locked gate, a tenant who needs notice — anything that changes how long the job takes before a single tool comes out.
• Timing. Whether it is urgent, flexible, or tied to something else (a move-in date, an inspection), which tells you how much this job can wait behind others.
• Who actually decides. Quoting the person on the phone is wasted effort if someone else has to sign off before it is real.
• A rough budget, if they will give one. Not everyone will, but a range saves you from quoting a version of the job nobody was going to buy.

Ask all five in one message rather than trickling them out over several — a single email with four or five questions reads as someone who quotes properly, while the same questions spread across three separate replies reads as someone stalling. It also saves a genuinely busy client from three separate rounds of back-and-forth before anyone gets to a real number, which is its own reason to get it right the first time. The printable new inquiry sheet lays these five out in the order you’d ask them over the phone, with room to write the answers down as you go.

Not every job needs all five answered before you can move. A small, familiar job — a repair you have done a hundred times, on a property type you know — might only need the first two. A bigger or unfamiliar one is where skipping straight to a number without the other three tends to cost you, either in a quote that has to be revised once you actually see the job, or in a scope that quietly grew past what either side thought they had agreed to.

“Can you just give me a rough price?”

This question shows up on almost every inquiry, and dodging it entirely costs you more than answering it. The honest version is a band, not a number: a range wide enough to be true without a site visit, plus the one thing that would move it up or down, plus an offer to firm it up in person. “Jobs like this usually run [a range], depending on [access, condition, size] — I would need to see it to give you an exact number.” That is a real answer, not a brush-off, and it still protects you from being held to a figure you gave before you had actually seen the job.

If the ask is really just for someone to come take a look with no clear job attached yet — a same-day visit and nothing else agreed — that is worth treating as its own line item. A call-out fee covers the time of the visit itself, so a trip that turns out to be nothing does not cost you a paid slot for free.

Before agreeing to the visit at all, it is worth a quick gut check on whether this one is even worth the trip — the free minimum job price calculator adds up the drive, the setup, and the paperwork against your own rate, so that band you are about to give is grounded in what the job actually costs to take on.

The jobs worth turning down

Not every inquiry is worth quoting, and pretending otherwise wastes time on both sides. Out of your service area, smaller than what is worth the drive, or simply not your trade — all three are reasons to decline, and all three are better said plainly and quickly than left to go quiet. A prompt, specific no costs a client almost nothing and often earns you the next referral anyway, because a business that says a clear no reads as more trustworthy than one that just stopped replying.

Book the visit, then get the quote out

Once the questions are answered and the job is worth a proper number, the inquiry stage is done — confirm a time for the visit, get what you need on site sorted in advance, and move straight into pricing it properly. How to write a quote that wins the work and how to price a job so the number holds up cover everything from here: line items, a deposit, and a number that survives contact with the actual job. The free quote & estimate generator builds that quote directly, and the free terms & conditions builder covers the deposit and cancellation wording worth agreeing to before anyone starts work.

None of that changes what this stage was for. The inquiry is not the quote — it is the handful of minutes that decide whether a quote gets written at all.

Make it a habit, not a scramble

The whole stage runs on the same handful of moves, every time a message comes in, whoever it is from:

Copy the two scripts above, or all six at once, and fill in your details at the top of the new-inquiry templates — personalized the same way as the rest of the site’s scripts.