What we wish we knew sooner: Estimates in field service
Dan and Wyatt Johnson
If there’s one thing we wish we’d learned sooner, it’s this: slow estimates cost you more than just time — they cost you customers.
Early on, our team was constantly juggling four or five calls in a day. After diagnosing a job, we’d hit the same roadblock:
Do we keep the customer waiting 15–20 minutes while we type up an estimate? Or do we move on to the next job and promise to send it later?
Both choices were painful. Customers hated waiting. Sending estimates at the end of the day meant some never moved forward. And for our techs, the whole process was draining — spending hours in trucks or at home just typing things up. Looking back, we can see how much business (and energy) we lost in those moments.
What we know now is that speed and clarity matter more than perfection. By switching to flat-rate pricing, we eliminated the bottleneck. Our techs can pull up a job, like a water heater replacement, tap once, and instantly show the customer a clear price and description.
The results were immediate. Customers got the transparency they wanted. Our techs got their time back. And we started winning more jobs on the spot, simply because we could give people what they needed right away.
If we could go back, we’d tell our past selves this: stop treating estimates like back-office work. They’re not. They’re customer trust moments, and every delay risks losing the relationship.
The sooner you fix that, the smoother everything else flows.
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone running a service business, it would be this: never let a call go unanswered. Every missed call is missed revenue—and the cost of those lost opportunities adds up fast.
In the early days, most service businesses rely on hustle—answering phones manually, juggling schedules, and patching together tools that were never really designed for the trades.
But the truth is, no matter how hard you hustle, humans can’t answer 10 calls at once. And every call you miss is another job going to a competitor.
The Lesson
Here’s what I wish I had understood sooner:
- Missed calls are lost jobs. If you don’t answer, someone else will.
- Efficiency drives growth. When scheduling, dispatching, and communication run on autopilot, your team can actually scale.
- AI isn’t the future—it’s already here. The businesses using it today are already miles ahead.
- Scalability matters. AI doesn’t get tired, distracted, or overwhelmed. It can consistently handle demand that people simply can’t.
Why This Matters
AI isn’t about replacing people—it’s about freeing them. Answering, scheduling, dispatching, follow-ups—these are tasks that can run automatically so your team can focus on the work that really matters: serving customers and solving problems in their homes.
The companies that embrace this now will thrive. The ones that wait will fall behind.
So here’s the simple truth I wish I’d embraced earlier: AI isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the key to growth, consistency, and long-term success in field service.
