One Process Review — Sample

Ridgeline Machine: quoting

Business	Ridgeline Machine (composite) — 12-person CNC job shop, Northeast Ohio
Job reviewed	Quoting: RFQ arrives → quote goes out → somebody follows up (or doesn't)
Review window	One week. 31 recent RFQs and 47 past quotes pulled from email and indexed — the software does the reading, the week goes into checking what it found — plus three thirty-minute staff conversations.
Verdict	Fix worth making. Priced in section 6.

A real review follows this exact format, filled with your numbers. The figures below are illustrative composites built from demonstration work and published research — sources at the end.

1. What happens today

This is the walk-through, written down. Nobody at Ridgeline had ever seen it on one page.

An RFQ lands in the owner's inbox — drawings attached, sometimes a part photo from a phone. Two customers use portals instead, which demand everything the email already said get re-keyed by hand. Either way it waits an average of 1.5 days before anyone works on it, because the owner is on the floor until 4:30.
Three RFQs in ten arrive missing something — quantity, material spec, or drawing revision. Each one triggers email back-and-forth that adds one to two days.
The owner builds the quote at the kitchen table, 7 to 10 p.m.: digs out material pricing and whether the customer needs certs, hunts for the traveler from the last similar job (found about half the time — the rest get re-figured from scratch), estimates machine time, fills the Excel template. About 90 minutes per quote.
The quote goes out on day 4 to 6. No reminder is set.
If the customer goes quiet — about 6 in 10 do — nobody calls. The quote just dies.

2. Where the hours and the jobs go

Leak	Today	What it costs
Owner's evenings on quoting	12–15 hours/week, 7–10 p.m. plus Saturday mornings	The owner's week, and quote quality at 9 p.m.
Quote turnaround	4–6 days	Unknown lost jobs. Tradesmen on every forum tell the same story: the work goes to whoever quotes same day. The average company answers a new lead in 42 hours; a quarter never answer (HBR, 2011).
Quotes never chased	~60% of sent quotes get no follow-up, ever	A pile of "maybe" nobody converts. Ridgeline doesn't know its own win rate, because nobody tracks what happened.
Lost travelers	~2 jobs/week re-figured from scratch	1–3 hours each, plus repeat setup mistakes the old notes already solved
Incomplete RFQs	3 in 10	1–2 days added turnaround each, at the front of the line

3. What stays with a person

The price. No tool sets a number a customer sees. The owner prices every job.
Lead-time promises and anything contractual.
Which customers get quoted at all. ("Cast-netting" buyers who spray RFQs to twenty shops get a different lane.)

4. The first fix

One bounded build, three pieces, nothing exotic:

An intake checklist that runs itself. Every RFQ is checked the hour it arrives: quantity, material, tolerance, due date, drawing rev. Anything missing triggers a same-day templated ask — so the clock starts now, not on day 3.
A quote workspace built from Ridgeline's own history. The 47 past quotes and every findable traveler get indexed and searchable. A new RFQ pulls up the closest past jobs alongside current material pricing, and a draft quote is assembled — with flags on everything it isn't sure about. The owner reviews, adjusts, and prices. The draft does the typing; the owner does the thinking.
Follow-up that doesn't depend on memory. For every quote that goes out, the follow-up email for day 2, day 7, and day 14 gets written and held. The owner reads it and hits send — or doesn't. To be plain about it: no robot ever emails a Ridgeline customer on its own.

What this should change inside 30 days: quotes out next business day for 7 of 10 RFQs; the owner's quoting time down from 12–15 hours to four or five hours of review; every quote chased at least twice.

5. The 30-day check

Baseline is measured in week one from email timestamps — before anything is built. Pass/fail is agreed in writing:

Measure	Baseline (week 1)	Pass at day 30
Median RFQ → quote sent	4.5 days	≤ 1 business day
Quotes followed up at least twice	0%	100%
Owner evening hours on quoting	12–15/week (logged)	≤ 5/week
Quotes out per week	8	≥ 10, same staff

If the numbers don't move, we say so in writing and work out why before anyone pays for more.

6. What the fix costs

Build: $6,500–$8,500 fixed, three to four weeks, including the 30-day measurement above and training for whoever runs intake.
The review fee — $1,500 standard, $750 at the launch rate — comes off this price if Ridgeline goes ahead within 30 days. (Sample term — subject to final engagement letter.)
After acceptance (optional): a monthly support note — retests, small tunes, what changed — from $1,500/month. No lock-in; the workspace and all data are Ridgeline's either way.

7. If Ridgeline does nothing

Math the owner can check: if same-day quoting wins one extra $4,500 job a month, and $900 of that is left after material and machine time, that's $10,800 a year — the build pays for itself inside a year on won work alone, before counting ten reclaimed evening hours a week. If it wins nothing, the owner is still not quoting at the kitchen table.

The stop rule: had this trace shown no fix worth the money, the review would say so and stop. That's the deal — the review is paid to find the truth, not to sell a project.

Email Furrow about your version of this

Outside sources: Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," Harvard Business Review (2011) — 42-hour average lead response, 23% never respond. Jobber Home Service Trends Report (2026) — quoting as the top time sink for home-service pros. Time-per-quote pattern consistent with Paperless Parts research via Modern Machine Shop (2023). All Ridgeline figures are illustrative composites, not client measurements.