Charge an Estimate Fee! Cover the Cost of Your Estimator, and Get Out of The Field!

Okay. All right. Steps things that you must do in my opinion, tease the out of operation estimate fee. Charging estimate fee is very important. This is something that really was the last straw for me to get out of the field was from a financial perspective, be able to cover the cost of an estimator that is indirect labor. Someone that's not making money for the business out in the field. How do I cover their expense?

So it's important to have this. If you want to cover the cost of hiring an estimator and get out of the business. The cost of an estimator as well as the office staff on a call. Then you meet them and you have an estimate preparation. Then you go back. It's like all of that process of selling takes money from you. I want to charge that to the customer. Okay. And we charge $80 per line item for our estimate fees. So if there's one line item, it's gonna be 80 bucks. There's four. There's four, $80, so $360 worth of estimate fees. The reason for that is because when we give a four line item estimate, they might accept one of them. And I want to make sure I get my 80. Alright? Our goal is to make enough money in a month to cover his monthly salary. That's the goal. And if you do that again financially, you can check out, you have an estimator that is literally making you money by charging estimates, charging for estimates. So as long as that, you know, three, four grand, whatever it is, we make a month on, you know, 80 bucks per line item, that can cover his expense. That means financially I'm not taking a hit by getting out of that three to four. That's the biggest hurdle from going from a three to four is the overhead cost of having an estimator charge estimate fees and make it a profit center. Now the biggest question everyone's thinking is, do you charge it before? Do you tell the customer all of that? We do not tell the customer before only because we're still, we want to grow the business. If you're trying to keep your business at a certain level, say for example, you're 1.2 million, you're like, hey, I'm kind of happy here. That's when I would be charged. Like telling the customer, hey, it's 80 bucks to come see your property, then you're gonna keep the amount of estimates down and you don't have to have that person running around doing a bunch of estimates. We don't do that. We just tell the customer it's a free estimate. We go there, it's all backed up into the estimate afterwards. So the $80 on the line item is tacked onto each line item afterwards in the estimate, okay? That's how we do it. Not necessarily the right way to do it. I'm just saying that you need to charge for E fees. We call it E fees, estimate fees. It's basically if you take how long on average. If you ask yourself, how many estimates can I do anything, right? You take that, you divide that by how much it costs to someone to do it. Let's say you're charging, paying someone 25 bucks an hour. You're charged 250 bucks a day. Let's say you can do 10 in a day, that's $25 of their time. That's going per estimate, right? Then you gotta think, okay, now as an office person answering the phone, maybe spend 30 minutes. By the time they answer the phone, set up the appointment, prepare the estimate, send it to the customer, maybe that's 10 bucks, right? And then you got the fact that some estimates, you gotta go back to the customer and they want like clarification and all this stuff. So that's why you're Prob. More around 40. But we only charge people. We get one estimate.