A sample built on fictional content. Holcombe Mechanical is not a real company and this reflects no real engagement.
Ermetis
The free assessment
Quoting is where we would start.
Prepared from your intake form, our call on Tuesday, and our own research on the commercial mechanical trade. The assessment is free. It is not the diagnosis. It is how we both decide whether the diagnosis is worth doing.
An assessment from one call cannot claim to know your company, and this one does not try. It works from what you said and marks what we would verify in person.
The arithmetic is yours to check
Where this document puts a number on something, the inputs are shown and you can change them. Nothing here is a measurement, because nothing has been measured yet.
01What we heard
Three things stood out on the call, and all three are about quoting.
Margin on install and retrofit work varies by estimator, even on similar jobs. Quotes take long enough to produce that some winnable bids go out late. And the company's pricing knowledge is split between the estimating workbook and the judgment your senior estimator applies on top of it.
Where the margin is set
On project work the margin is set when the quote goes out. Everything after that is managing to a number that has already been committed. The trade also runs on thin net margin. CFMA's 2025 Construction Financial Benchmarker, which covers fiscal 2024 for 1,558 construction companies, put net income before taxes at 6.7 percent of revenue. So a spread of a point or two in bid margin, repeated across a year of project work, is a large share of the profit. That is why we would look at quoting before service dispatch or the back office.
02How a quote gets made
The workflow itself is sound, and everyone runs it the same way.
Three of the four problems you described occur between the takeoff and the proposal.
The sequence as you described it on the call. The problems are marked in red.
Sequence, not elapsed time
Drawn from the call. We would walk the sequence in person before treating any step as fact.
03Where quoting stands
Holcombe has three gaps against how quoting runs at contractors that run it well.
Two of the six practices are already working, and one we could not judge from a call.
Open any practice to see what it looks like when it is working. Anything marked to verify is something we would confirm in person.
Six practices
The practiceAt HolcombeStanding
Working version: one copy is marked as the master, one person owns it, and it carries a date it was last reviewed. Personal copies are fine as scratch space, and nothing prices a job from them. The copies themselves are not the problem. The problem is that when a job comes in under, nobody can say which number was right.
Working version: every vendor quote lands in one place with the date it arrived, and anything past an agreed age gets reconfirmed before it prices a bid. Pick a threshold, write it down and hold to it. Whether it is thirty days or sixty is a judgment about how fast your vendors move.
Working version: the adjustments sit beside the assemblies they modify, each with the reason it exists and the name of the person who approved it. A rooftop access adder for grocery sites is a rule, and a rule can be written down. This is the gap the next section is about.
Working version: the review already exists, which is most of what is needed. What closes it is one more step: whoever runs the review changes the assembly in the master workbook, or records why it should stand. You are closer to this than to the other three gaps.
Working version: what you already have. Quantities come off the drawings once and land in the pricing sheet without being retyped. We would not touch this, and anyone who proposes replacing it should be asked why.
Working version: the four numbers are reported on a regular cycle and somebody notices when one moves. Turnaround needs a date logged at the moment an inquiry arrives, which makes it the only one of the four that needs anything new captured.
These are practices we see in the trade. There is no published standard behind them. The yellow mark is the gap the next paragraph is about.
The margin variation mostly comes back to the third gap. The workbook gives every estimator the same starting numbers, but the final price depends on the adjustments made on top of them, and today only the senior estimator's own bids get those adjustments. Two estimators can price similar jobs and come out at different margins, which matches what you have been seeing in the job costing.
04What it could be worth
Nobody knows the size of it yet, including us.
Any assessment that put a number on your margin after one call would be making it up. What we can do is give you the arithmetic and the two figures it turns on, so you can put your own numbers in and see the answer move. Both figures below are assumptions, and the diagnosis is what replaces them with measurements.
What a margin spread across a year of project work is worth.
Project revenue
Margin spread
$160,000
A year of margin, at the spread you selected
15%
Of a pretax income of about $1.07M
$13,000
A month
Pretax income of $1.07M is 6.7 percent of $16M, the median CFMA reported across 1,558 construction companies for fiscal 2024. It stands in until we have your actual figure. The $8M starting point is half the $16M you described, and the spread has not been measured at all, which is exactly what the diagnosis would settle.
The stale workbook costs push in the same direction, mostly on retrofits, where the demo and access assumptions have drifted furthest. The diagnosis captures a baseline for the four measures in the table before anything changes, so whatever gets built later is judged in your own numbers.
05This month
Three things worth doing, none of which need AI or need us.
Each of these is worth doing whatever you decide about the diagnosis, and the diagnosis goes faster if they are already done.
Name the master workbook.Have your senior estimator decide which copy is current, mark it, and make the other three read-only. The private tweaks in those copies are worth reviewing, and the ones he endorses belong in the master.
Give vendor quotes one home.One folder where every emailed quote lands, dated on arrival. A quote more than a month or two old gets reconfirmed before it prices a bid.
Start the clock.Log the date each inquiry arrives and the date the quote goes out, on every bid, starting now. Turnaround is the easiest of the four measures to capture, and a few months of it makes any later improvement visible from the first week.
06The diagnosis
Two to three weeks inside quoting, scoped and agreed up front.
We sit with your estimators through live bids: the inquiry, the site walk, the takeoff, the workbook, the adjustments, the proposal, the follow-up. We inventory what the workflow runs on, including what already works well, and we work out task by task where each task is handled best. Some of what we recommend may have no AI in it at all. And we capture the four baseline measures before anything changes.
What it asks of you: your senior estimator roughly six to eight hours across the window, the junior estimator about the same, two hours of your time, and one of your controller's. Real access, and candor about how quoting happens today. One position is fixed before anything starts: final pricing judgment and sign-off stay with your estimators.
The deliverable is a written map: quoting as it runs today, the same workflow with each task in the right hands, what has to be in place for that to work, the baseline numbers, and a recommendation with a specific scope and outcome for a first build. The map belongs to Holcombe whether or not we go further.
The decision
Agree the scope of the diagnosis, or stop here. If the diagnosis runs, its own end is a gate too: agree a first build and its outcome, or stop with the map. Nothing about this commits you to more than the step you are agreeing to.