Quotes and estimates
RFQs sitting in email, numbers that take all evening to build, bids that go out days late.
Furrow | Northeast Ohio, working across the Midwest
Still doing quotes at 9 p.m.?
Late quotes, callbacks that slip, paperwork every Saturday — that's how jobs you never hear about go to the other guy. Bring me the one task that eats your week. I'll find where the time goes and hand you the first fix worth making. Fixed price. No software pitch.
Direct email only. No form, no call funnel, no newsletter pop-up.
01Your judgment stays yours.Pricing, promises, and anything with your name on it gets decided by a person.
02Your records stay yours.Nothing gets locked inside someone else's platform. If you walk away, everything goes with you.
03Tested on your real work.The fix runs against your actual quotes and files before anyone depends on it.
04If there's nothing worth fixing, I say so.The review stops there instead of talking you into a project.
The problem
The slow quote loses the job.
An electrician with thirty years of bidding behind him put it simply: the jobs he lost went to whoever quoted same day. His number was fine. It was five days late.
The pattern shows up wherever ordinary work piles onto one person. Home-service pros name quoting their single biggest time eater (Jobber, 2026). And a study found the average company takes 42 hours to answer a new lead, with nearly a quarter never answering at all — that study is from 2011 (Harvard Business Review), and nobody who has waited on a contractor's quote thinks it's gotten better.
None of that is laziness. It's one repeated job that outgrew the person doing it. And it costs you work you never even hear about.
The AI question
You're right not to trust the AI pitch.
AI makes things up. Software companies hold your data hostage. And no robot knows what your work should cost. All three objections are fair — MIT found that 95% of company AI projects return nothing (MIT NANDA, 2025), usually because somebody bought a tool before understanding the job.
Furrow works the other way around. Start with the job, not the tool. Where AI earns a place, it drafts — the quote, the reminder, the answer pulled from your own files — and a person you trust checks it before it touches a customer or an employee. Your pricing stays in your head. Walk away any time and you keep everything.
And the records that should never leave the building — employee files, patient paperwork, payroll — don't. That work can run on machines you control, not pasted into a public chatbot, and nothing you share is used to train anyone's model.
Where to start
One Process Review
Pick the one task that eats your week — quotes, callbacks, new-hire paperwork, finding files. In one week I trace where the time actually goes and hand you a short, priced plan for the first fix.
- What actually happens now, written down on one page.
- Where the hours and the jobs slip away.
- The first fix worth making — what it should cost and what it must prove in 30 days.
- What stays with a person: pricing, promises, anything with your name on it.
- If nothing is worth fixing, the review says so and stops.
One week. Fixed fee. The risk is a week of looking, not a year of contract — the opposite of the eighteen-month software project.
Do the math
Run the numbers on your own week.
I won't promise results before seeing the work; that's what the review is for. But you can do the math yourself, right now:
- One more won job. A single $4,500 job at typical margins covers the review. If quoting same-day instead of day five wins you two more a year, the rest is yours.
- Three evening hours back, every week. At what your time is actually worth, that's $6,000 to $18,000 a year — and your Saturdays.
- One missed call a week. Price it at your own average ticket, after you pay for the equipment and the labor.
Where I look
The usual suspects.
Six places the week disappears. The review picks one and goes deep.
Follow-up and callbacks
Quotes nobody chased. Missed calls that quietly become someone else's job.
Proposals and bids
The pricing and boilerplate you need, scattered across old emails and seven folders.
People paperwork
New-hire forms, policy questions, the same answers typed for the tenth time.
Finding things
Prints, travelers, contracts, old jobs — the stuff only one person knows how to find.
Keeping it working
After the fix ships: retests, small tunes, and a monthly note on what changed.
The sample
Read a review before you buy one.
The review is a document, so you should see one before paying for one. Below are two complete samples — a machine shop's quoting and an accounting firm's document chase. Both companies are composites, no client data, but the time math and the fix are exactly what a real review delivers.
A 12-person machine shop, quoting.
RFQs arrive by email. Quotes take the owner's evenings and go out in five days. Nobody chases the six in ten that go quiet. The review traces the hours, prices the fix, and sets the 30-day check.
A 6-person accounting firm, chasing client documents.
One generic checklist for every client. Partners spending six to nine hours a week asking for the same 1099s, three times, piecemeal. The review traces the season, prices the fix, and sets the 30-day check.
Client result goes here.
Published only with the client's written approval. Real numbers only — no testimonials we wrote ourselves.
Second client result goes here.
Same rule: verified numbers and written approval, or it doesn't go up.
Best fit
Built for owners who can point at the job.
This works when you can finish the sentence: “Every week we lose hours to ___.”
- Good fit: a task that repeats every week, someone who owns it, real examples I can look at, and a result you can check — hours, days, jobs won.
- Bad fit: “make us an AI company,” nobody owns the task, or no examples to look at.
- A computer never makes the call on hiring, firing, pay, legal, medical, or money. Those decisions stay with people. Full stop.
Contact path
Tell me about the job that eats your week.
Two sentences is enough: what the work is, and where it stalls.
I read every email and reply within one business day.
Email only. No form, no booking widget, no newsletter, no automated anything between you and me.