Fourteen people, office fit-outs between 400 and 1,200 m². Two estimators, and a backlog of tender invitations they kept declining.
A fit-out set arrives as eight to twenty PDFs: plans, a finish schedule, a ceiling layout, an electrical sheet. Pricing it meant one estimator with a scale rule and a spreadsheet for the better part of a week — and the drawings were usually revised before the quote went out, which meant doing the measurable parts twice.
The whole set goes into one project. Joffers rasterizes every page, reads it, and drafts the scope: partitions by area, finishes by room, ceilings by grid, electrical by count. Their own unit rates — loaded once into the price book — price it on the spot.
Review is where the estimator's judgement now goes. Low-confidence rows are flagged, so the morning is spent on the six ambiguous items rather than re-counting the hundred and thirty-six obvious ones. When rev E lands, they re-run extraction: the drafted rows rebuild, the rows they added by hand stay put.
“I still check every line. The difference is that checking a hundred lines takes an hour and drawing them takes a week.”
Estimating capacity stopped being the constraint on how much work they could bid. In the first quarter they answered eleven invitations they would previously have passed on, and the quote that reaches the client is a breakdown rather than a lump sum — which has made the conversation about scope instead of about trust.
Exported from Joffers · figures illustrative