What Unwon Quotes Are Really Costing You

Most electricians can tell you their hourly rate without thinking. Ask the same electrician what their unwon quotes cost them last year, and you will usually get a shrug. Not because the number is small. Because nobody ever sits down and works it out properly. Here is how, using nothing more than the numbers you already know about your own business.

The formula

You need four inputs, all of which you already have a rough feel for.

Quotes per week. How many genuine quote requests do you field in an average week, calls from people you have not worked with before.

Hours per quote. Travel there, travel back, time on-site, time writing it up and sending it. Be honest, most electricians underestimate this.

Your effective hourly rate. What an hour of your time is actually worth when you are on a paying job, not your quoted rate to the client, your real cost of an hour not spent earning.

Win rate. Of the quotes you send, roughly what percentage turn into an actual booked job.

The calculation is straightforward. Multiply quotes per week by hours per quote to get your weekly hours spent quoting. Multiply that by your hourly rate to get your weekly quoting cost. Multiply your weekly quotes by your win rate to find how many convert, and by extension, how many do not. The hours and cost tied up in the ones that do not convert is money spent with nothing to show for it.

A worked example

Take a mid-size operation doing ten quotes a week, ninety minutes each once travel is counted, at an effective hourly rate of $110, with a 50 per cent win rate.

Ten quotes at ninety minutes each is fifteen hours a week spent quoting. Fifteen hours at $110 is $1,650 a week in quoting time. At a 50 per cent win rate, five of those ten quotes convert and five do not. Half of that $1,650, roughly $825 a week, was spent on quotes that went nowhere. Across a 48-week working year, accounting for leave and quiet periods, that is close to $39,600 in a single year, spent on quotes that never became paid work.

Run your own numbers through this and the figure is rarely small. Most electricians are surprised, not because they didn't know it was a cost, but because they had never seen it as one clean number before.

Where the number actually goes

That figure is not a write-off you should accept as the cost of doing business. It is the size of the opportunity sitting in front of you if you can either shorten the hours per quote, lift your win rate, or both. This is worth being precise about, because the two levers behave differently.

Lifting your win rate is hard. It usually means being cheaper, which erodes margin, or building a reputation over years, which is real but slow.

Shortening the hours per quote is the lever most businesses ignore, and it is the one you can actually pull this week. If a quote that used to take ninety minutes to produce, including the write-up, takes closer to five minutes because the structuring and formatting is handled for you, your weekly quoting cost on the same ten quotes drops from $1,650 to something closer to $130. Even if your win rate does not move at all, you have recovered most of that time to spend on billable work instead.

Why speed changes the win rate too, not just the cost

Here is the part most people miss when they only look at the cost side. Faster quotes do not just save you time, they tend to lift your win rate as well, because the client who gets a professional quote back in minutes is comparing you against competitors who are still going to get back to them in a day or two. You are not just cutting cost, you are improving the input on the other side of the formula at the same time.

What this looks like with Just Send It AI in the equation

Just Send It AI is built to compress the hours-per-quote number specifically, from an input of text, voice or a photo to a fully structured, professional, trade-compliant quote in under 30 seconds of generation time. Run that same worked example again, ten quotes a week, but at five minutes each instead of ninety, and your weekly quoting cost falls from $1,650 to roughly $92. Across a 48-week year, that is the difference between $39,600 lost to quoting time and under $4,500, a recovery of over $35,000 a year, without changing a single thing about the jobs themselves.

Do the maths on your own business

Quotes per week, times hours per quote, times your hourly rate, gives you your weekly quoting cost. Multiply by your loss rate, one minus your win rate, and you have the real number sitting behind the shrug most electricians give when they're asked what unwon quotes cost them. It is rarely a small number. It is almost always worth fixing.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate what unwon quotes are costing my trade business? Multiply your weekly quotes by the hours spent on each, then by your effective hourly rate, to get your weekly quoting cost. Multiply that figure by your loss rate, the percentage of quotes that do not convert, to find how much of that cost is spent on jobs you never win.

What is a realistic win rate for electrical quotes? This varies widely by business and region, but many electrical contractors report win rates between 30 and 60 per cent on quotes sent to new, previously unknown clients. Repeat and referral clients typically convert far higher.

Does reducing quote time actually improve win rate, or just reduce cost? Both. Faster quote turnaround reduces the hours spent per quote directly, and it also tends to improve conversion, since clients are more likely to accept the first professional, clear quote they receive rather than waiting to compare several.

The formula and worked examples in this article are provided as a general business calculation tool. Figures used in the worked examples are illustrative; readers should substitute their own quotes-per-week, hours-per-quote, hourly rate and win-rate figures for an accurate result specific to their business.