Stephanie Wiechers: You're listening to the Data Edge, the podcast for facilities, construction and infrastructure teams who are ready to get time and money back with their data. I am Stephanie Wiechers. Most hard FM teams have no price baseline for variable works quotes. No list, no reference, nothing written down. Just two experienced people who can look at a quote and know in their gut whether it's fair. Here's what that actually costs you, and it's not just the money. When you don't have a baseline, most teams fall back on the same safety net. You ask for three quotes, you get three contracts, contractors out, get three prices, pick the middle one, maybe pick the cheapest one. middle one feels safe, it feels thorough, the cheapest one is obviously the cheapest one. Except think about what actually that means on the ground. Three different contractors have to visit the site or at least review the job and they have to write up a full quote. That takes days each, sometimes longer if they're busy. Your team has to chase all three, compare them, and usually wait on the slowest one before making a decision. And here is the part that nobody talks about. Two of those three contractors were never going to get the job anyway. So they spend real time pricing something. They had maybe a one in three chance, or maybe a one in six chance, or maybe a zero chance of winning for a customer who might not even come back next time. So everybody loses a bit of time. The client waits longer for the repair, your team spends longer chasing paperwork instead of managing the actual job, and the suppliers spend time on quotes that mostly go nowhere. Multiply that. By however many jobs like this you run in a year. And that's a genuinely enormous amount of time spent entirely because nobody had a number to check a single quote against. I have experienced this on the supplier side and I know how painful it was. And as you especially for a smaller contractor, you have to do it because you you can't afford to not quote, even though you know but you don't know which ones, many of these companies will never work with you. I want to walk you through exactly what this multi-quote system looked like in a specific case two weeks ago. So a quick word on who's talking to you in case that you're new here. I'm the founder of Pearstop. We take facilities and construction invoices, we sort them properly down to the individual line, a lot of UNSPSC, so people can see what they are actually spending and on what. Without doing it by hand. The story today came from that kind of work directly. So this week I'm gonna talk to you about a property manager and we're gonna call her Elena. So Elena's team looks after a portfolio of office buildings. It's nothing glamorous. This is you know the unglamorous side of property. We have the boilers, the roofs, the fire doors. The stuff that only gets noticed when it breaks. Her team handles somewhere around four hundred and fifty variable works quotes a year, and Elena's budget is just under 300,000 euros. Here is the part that should make you sit up a little. Almost none of those four hundred and fifty quotes get checked against anything real. They get checked against two people's memory. Two people Who have seen enough quotes over enough years that they can glance at one and just feel, nah, this is fair. No price list, no baseline, nothing written down. So, two weeks ago, let me tell you exactly what happened. Because the details matter here. There is a hot water cylinder in the plant room on the third floor of one of Elena's buildings. It's an old unit. Probably been there since the building was refurbished, and nobody's entirely sure. It started leaking. Slowly at first, a few drops a day, and then more. By the time that anyone noticed, water had already tracked down through the floor and left a brown stain spreading across the ceiling tiles of the office directly below. Now, an office with a spreading brown stain on the ceiling is not a sole problem. Tenants noticed immediately. A few emails came in, one fairly annoyed one from a company director whose desk happened to be directly underneath it. So this wasn't we'll get to it next month job. This needed sorting and it needed sorting properly. Because a leaking cylinder that's ignored doesn't stay a small problem. It turns into a bigger one, mold, damaged ceiling tiles, potentially electrical risk if it gets into the wrong place, and Obviously harm to a client relationship. A contractor came out, he had a look, and he quoted for replacing the cylinder along with a circulating pump attached to it, since the pump was old enough that replacing one without the other didn't really make much sense. So here is where it gets interesting. That quote landed on the desk of the two people who normally sign off jobs like this. Both of them away. It's August. On leave. the other one was out sick, it was pure coincidence, but there it was. Nobody else on the team felt confident enough to approve it. So this is not because they weren't capable, right? they see these quotes coming in all the time too. But nobody had ever told them what a fair price for a cylinder and pump replacement actually looks like. So the quote just sat there. Someone chased it after a few days, then chased it again. The tenant underneath the stain understandably wasn't thrilled either, since, you know, from where they were sitting, quite literally nothing seemed to be happening. Eventually, one of the two approvers was back. Reviewed it in about ten minutes, said it looked reasonable, sign it off. Job done, cylinder replaced, stain eventually dried out and got repainted. Two weeks. That is how long approval was delayed for, for one fairly ordinary repair. Because the one thing that the whole approval process depended on judgment had literally left the building. Not the paperwork, not the budgets, just the judgment. One property lead put it to me this way We take great care in the work we do. There are delays because everything runs through these two people and nobody is able to reference their knowledge in any other way than asking them. So just to recap where we are, pretty routine repair, a two-week delay, entirely caused by the fact that judgment on price lived in exactly two people's heads and nowhere else. And underneath that, the quieter cost, the fact that without a baseline, teams like Elena's often end up asking for multiple quotes just to feel safe. Which means more contractor time spent, more waiting. More back and forth for a decision that a written baseline could have made in minutes. So let me show you exactly why this keeps happening. Because once you see the mechanism, it's actually pretty simple. An approval process where two experienced people sign off on everything isn't actually optimized for value. It's a bottleneck for the whole team because it means every small ticket needs the same manager approval as a genuinely complicated one. There is less room for the two of them to focus on the cases that actually need their judgment because they are spending the time on small decisions instead. Now, to be fair, plenty of managers running exactly this setup will tell you it works. And they're not wrong either. It does work. Here's the thing. Given the team a rough baseline doesn't take anything away from those two people. It gives them their day back. Instead of reviewing routine jobs one by one, they only get pulled in on the stuff that genuinely moves the needle. And this is really the whole point of today's episode. What Elena's team actually needed wasn't more approvers and it wasn't asking three contractors for a quote every time either. What they needed was a cost baseline, built from their own internal data, so that faster and better decisions could happen without waiting on either of those two people or on three separate contractors turning up to price the same job. This creates improval on every end. It creates improval in how fast can we execute our product projects, but it also helps to save money, right? it improves supplier relationships, which means that when there's something genuinely complicated or fast that needs to happen, this person trusts you. You know that they know that you're gonna give them the work highly lightly when they quote reasonably. and that they don't always quote for nothing. Let me give you a second example, because this pattern shows up almost everywhere once you look for it. Say you've also got quotes coming in for something simpler, gutter cleaning, let's say. So 20 jobs a year, roughly the same task every time. If you lined up the last 20 invoices for that job, you'd almost certainly see most of them cluster around a similar number, with maybe one or two that are way higher or way lower than the rest. That cluster in the middle, the bit where most of all the prices sit close together, that roughly is your fair price range for that job. No one's ever written that down. It's just sitting there in invoices that nobody's opened side by side. That is a cost baseline. Built entirely from data that you already have. And once it exists, You don't need three quotes to feel confident about a price. You just need one. Checked against a number that you already trust. So here's what I want you to actually go and do this week. It's for free, no software required, and it won't take you more than an hour. So step one, pick one recurring job type. Something that comes up often enough that you'd recognize it immediately. Like Boiler repairs, roof patches, whatever it is for you. Step two. Pull every invoice for that job type from the last 12 months. And you might need to use your judgment here a bit, right? To be like, okay, what suppliers have we been using? can we use some AI to pull them together smartly? Step three: line up all of these invoices, just a price, side by side. You'll see a range pretty quickly. Most jobs will cluster somewhere in the middle. A few will look completely out of place. Way higher, way lower than the rest. Ignore those for now and focus on where most of the prices sit close together. That range, roughly, is your baseline. So again, just to make sure that that lands, pick the job type, pull the invoices, line up the prices, and look for where most of them cluster. Then A final good sense check is to compare all of the actual description lines that are sitting in your cluster and like double check if that's one type of job based on your own judgment. so now we've clustered, we know our our baseline. It's rough, it's not perfect, but it's the first version of something that used to live only in two people's heads. Anyone on your team can now glance at a new quote and ask, is this inside the range that we've seen before? Without needing ten years of experience to fuel it, and without needing to send the job out to three different contractors just to be sure. So here is what I want you to take away from Elena's story. If two of your most experienced people flew off to Greece tomorrow to sip cocktails on the beach, and you know who would blame them? would anyone else on your team actually know whether a quote was fair? Not a guess, but just really no. No, you're probably not alone if the answer is no. Almost every team runs this way. And a lot of them hit exactly this kind of delay right now when it's summer. And most of them are quietly asking for three quotes on jobs where one checked against a proper baseline would have done the job faster for everyone involved, including the suppliers who didn't need to be dragged into a job they were never going to win. Thank you for sticking with this one, genuinely. if you are the kind of person who is still listening at this point in an episode about quote approvals, you clearly care about getting this right. And that is exactly the kind of person this show is for. Next week we have story number three. A construction procurement lead who gets asked a question as simple as, Where are we buying window sales? and can't actually answer it. And then I'm also gonna give you a sneak peek. We have a really exciting guest episode coming, which is also gonna be airing in the next couple of weeks. So keep an eye out for that one. It's a hard services one as well. The link and resources are as always in the description. Super exciting that you you is super excited to have had you here. And I will see you next week at the Data Edge.