TL;DR: A 31-person custom metal fabrication shop in Milwaukee receives 340 requests for quote per year. One estimator prices every job manually: reading drawings, recalling similar past jobs from memory, cross-referencing an Excel template he built in 2019, calling suppliers for current steel pricing, and writing the quote in Word. Average turnaround: 9 days. Win rate: 22%. Shops that quote within 48 hours typically win closer to 40%. Twenty-eight RFQs last year were never quoted at all because the queue outran the estimator. We designed a four-stage agent that reads drawings with vision, matches against historical job costs already sitting in the shop's ERP, drafts the quote with a rationale note, and routes it to the estimator for review. Turnaround target: under 48 hours. Running cost: $57-$120 per month.
Tuesday, 9:40am
An RFQ arrives from a food processing OEM in Green Bay. Stainless steel conveyor frame, 14 units, drawings attached. Delivery required in eight weeks.
Doug sees it. He's currently resolving a weld spec question on the shop floor. Then he has a supplier call at 11. Then there are three RFQs ahead of this one in the queue.
He opens it Thursday afternoon. Reads the drawings. This is similar to a job the shop did in March 2024 for a different customer. Doug remembers it. He searches JobBOSS² for the job number, finds it after a few minutes, and pulls the actual costs. Materials were $4,100 per unit at the time. Steel has moved since then. He emails the supplier for current 304 stainless pricing. The supplier responds Friday.
Monday, Doug builds the quote. Materials, labour by operation, finishing, freight, margin. He writes it up in Word. Sends it Tuesday morning.
Seven working days after receipt. Nine, counting the weekend.
The customer had already received quotes from two other shops. One arrived in 36 hours. One in three days. Both were within 4% of Doug's number.
The job went to the shop that quoted in 36 hours. Doug's price was competitive. His shop was capable. His quality record was better than the winner's. He lost the job because he was third to respond, and by the time a customer has two quotes in hand and a project timeline to hit, the third quote is a formality performed out of politeness.
This is, when stated precisely, a business losing work it was qualified to do, at a price it could profitably deliver, because the document describing that price took a week longer to produce than the competition's. The capability was never in question. The typing speed was.
The Shop
Custom metal fabrication shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thirty-one employees: owner, general manager, one estimator, two engineers, eighteen fabricators and welders, three machinists, two quality, two shipping, one admin. $6.2M annual revenue. Serves food processing equipment manufacturers, agricultural OEMs, and industrial contractors.
Doug is the estimator. He handles 340 RFQs per year alongside his other responsibilities: supporting production with drawings, resolving shop-floor questions, and managing material supplier relationships. RFQs are, in theory, his primary job. In practice, they are the thing he does between interruptions from a shop floor that generates questions faster than any one person can answer them.
Each RFQ takes 90 minutes to four hours depending on complexity. At 2.2 hours average across 340 RFQs, that's 748 hours per year. At Doug's loaded cost of $41 per hour: $30,668 in estimating time.
Average turnaround from receipt to quote sent: 9 days. Urgent ones go out in two or three. Complex ones take three weeks.
Current win rate: 22%. Seventy-five jobs won from 340 quotes. Average job value: $18,400. Annual revenue from won quotes: approximately $1.38M.
Shops that consistently quote within 48 hours win a meaningfully higher share of the work they bid on. Ranges vary by sector, but the pattern is well established among fabrication shops: the first credible quote anchors the customer's expectations, and the third arrives after the decision has effectively been shaped. At even a 38% win rate, the shop would win 54 more jobs per year. At $18,400 average: approximately $993,600 in additional annual revenue.
Twenty-eight RFQs last year were never quoted at all. The customer withdrew, the deadline passed, or Doug ran out of time. Estimated value: $515,200 in work the shop declined by silence rather than by decision. Nineteen quotes went out with pricing errors requiring revision. Four were sent under cost and honoured, absorbing $23,000 in margin.
The Monday morning bottleneck: Doug opens his inbox to six to nine new RFQs from the previous week, on top of the eleven already queued. He works through them in the order they feel most winnable, which is not the order they arrived, and never the order in which the customer needed them.
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