Two ways to lose money on a phone call.
The first is to give a number before you know what the job is. You say "probably around three hundred," you turn up, it is nothing like a three hundred dollar job, and now every option you have is bad. You eat the difference, or you have the conversation where the customer says "but you said."
The second is to refuse to say anything at all. "I'd have to come out and look." If that visit is real work, it is worth charging for the callout. The caller hears a business that will not answer a simple question, and they call the next name, who gives them a range.
Most people are somewhere on this scale, and the ones who are good at it are doing something specific.
Find out what kind of caller you have first
Before you talk about price, work out which of these you are talking to, because they need different answers.
Comparison shopping. They have a list and they are calling down it. They want a number to compare. If you refuse, you are off the list.
Budget checking. They know they need the work. They want to know whether this is a five hundred dollar problem or a five thousand dollar problem, so they know whether to do it now or in the spring.
Emergency. Something is broken right now. Price matters least, availability matters most, and a long pricing conversation is you failing to hear them.
Kicking tires. They are curious, or they are pricing an insurance claim, or they wanted to know for later. Perfectly legitimate, and worth identifying so you do not spend forty minutes on it.
One question sorts most of this: "Is this something you're looking to get done soon, or are you pricing it out for later?" Nobody minds being asked, and the answer changes the whole call.
The questions that actually change the price
You do not need many. In most trades three or four questions get you close enough to give a real range. Yours will be specific to your work, but they usually fall into the same shapes:
- How old is it? Age predicts what you will find behind the panel more reliably than almost anything else.
- Is it accessible? A crawl space, a third floor, a locked utility room, a hedge in the way. The same work, two different jobs.
- Has anyone worked on it before? Previous repairs, especially bad ones, are where surprises live.
- What is it doing, exactly? Not "it's broken." What happens, when, how often, since when.
- When did it start? Sudden failures and slow declines are different problems.
Write your four down and keep them by the phone. Ask them in the same order every time. Consistency is what turns guessing into estimating, and after a hundred calls you will know what the answers usually mean.
Give a range, and say what moves it
The answer that works is not a number and it is not a refusal. It is a range with the reason attached.
"For a job like that I'm usually somewhere between four and seven hundred. It lands at the low end if the shutoff is where it should be and the fitting comes apart clean. It goes to the top end if the pipe behind it is the old stuff, because then I'm replacing a section rather than a part. I'll know which within about ten minutes of being there, and I'll tell you before I start."
That does four things at once. It gives the caller a real number to work with, so they stop calling around. It tells them what decides the price, so a higher number later is not a surprise. It shows you know the work. And it commits you to nothing, because you named the condition.
Two rules that keep it honest:
Make the range narrow enough to be useful. "Somewhere between two hundred and two thousand" is a refusal wearing a costume. If your range is genuinely that wide, you need better questions.
Never quote the bottom of the range as the price. The temptation is to say "about four hundred" because it wins the call. It wins the call and loses the customer on the day.
When not to give a number at all
There are jobs where a phone range is irresponsible, and saying so is a strength rather than a dodge. Anything structural, anything where the failure could be one of several very different things, anything where a wrong guess would mean starting work you have to stop.
Say why, and give the customer something instead:
"I'm not going to guess at that one, because what you're describing could be a two hundred dollar fix or it could be the whole unit, and I'd be making it up. I charge $85 to come out and tell you exactly which it is, and that comes off the work if you want me to do it."
That is not a refusal. It is a different offer, with a price on it.
Write the number down while you are still on the phone
The quote conversation that causes trouble later is almost always one that lived only in two people's memories.
Whatever you said, record it: the range, the conditions you named, the date. A notes app is fine. When someone says "you told me four hundred" six weeks later, you want to be able to say what you actually said, calmly and specifically.
Better still, send it to them. Three lines confirming the range and what moves it takes a minute and prevents almost every price argument.
What all of this is competing with
Here is the awkward part. Everything above assumes you answered.
Most price shopping calls go to whoever picks up. The caller has four numbers and a problem, and the person who answers gets to have this entire conversation. The people who do not answer are not in the running, no matter how good their pricing process is (it is worth working out what those missed calls cost you).
So if you are going to get better at quoting, the order matters. Being reachable comes first. A rough range from someone who picked up beats a perfect range from someone who called back on Thursday.
The short version
Find out what kind of caller you have. Ask the same three or four questions every time. Give a range with the conditions attached, never the bottom of it as a price. Refuse only where refusing is honest, and replace it with a priced visit. Write down what you said. And pick up the phone, because that is the part that decides whether the rest of it matters.