The situation before we started
Field techs were doing site visits and texting/calling notes back to the estimator. The estimator would spend the first three hours of every morning turning those notes into actual proposal documents — laying out scope, pulling pricing, formatting the PDF, attaching photos.
This is the kind of back-office work that quietly eats senior people. The estimator's time is worth a lot more drafting the bid strategy and handling judgment calls than it is laying out a Word document.
What we built
A workflow that sits between the tech and the estimator and does the layout work:
- Tech submits site visit via a structured form (the same one they used before, just slightly cleaned up)
- Photos get parsed: equipment labels, panel readings, breaker counts extracted with vision-language model assistance
- Pricing pulled from the standing QuickBooks item list using the tech's notes
- Draft proposal generated as a Google Doc using the firm's existing template, with sections flagged for the estimator's review
- Slack message to the estimator: "Draft proposal ready for Cardinal job #4429 — 3 items need your eyes"
The estimator opens the doc, makes their judgment calls (markup strategy, schedule risk, custom language for the client), and sends. No more layout work.
What happened
- 38 minutes saved per quote, on average, in estimator time
- Quote turnaround time down 61% — faster turnaround translated directly into higher close rates
- Quote-to-job conversion up 14% in the first 60 days
The agent never touches the customer. It never speaks. It just removes the parts of the estimator's day that didn't require an estimator.
What we learned
This is the kind of work that doesn't make a marketing story for a customer — it makes a marketing story for an operations team. The result the GM cared about wasn't "we wowed our customers"; it was "I got my senior person back to doing senior person work."
That's a lot of what back-office workflow automation looks like in practice. It's invisible. It's boring from the outside. And it returns the most hours of any single thing we build.