Stop 2 of 8 · Daily
Estimates from the driveway
Photos and a voice note from the tech go in, a good, better, best estimate in the price book's language comes out before he pulls away from the curb.
Twenty minutes in the driveway
The estimate is written in the driveway or it is written at nine at night. Sam knows which one closes. Marco finishes a diagnostic in Van Nuys, takes four photos and holds the phone up to talk for two minutes about what he found, and that is everything a good estimate needs. What used to happen next was Sam reading the notes after dinner and half remembering the corroded stub-out.
Now the photos and the voice note go straight into the Claude app on Marco's phone, inside the Estimates Project, and the estimate comes back before the truck moves.
The price book is the only source of prices
This is the rule that makes the rest safe. Claude will happily produce a number for a pressure regulator, and it will sound right, and it will not be yours. So the price book goes in as a file and the instruction is absolute: price only from the book, and anything not in the book comes back as a named line with no price. Sam fills those in. Usually there are one or two, and they take a minute.
The same goes for anything a homeowner could hold you to. Permit requirements, warranty length, code sections and lead times get written as a placeholder in square brackets, not a claim.
Good, better, best
Three options is not a sales trick, it is how a homeowner decides. Repair only. Repair plus the thing that will fail next. The full replacement with the parts that keep the next tech out of the crawlspace. Each one gets a single line on what the homeowner actually gets, in words, not part numbers.
[upload the tech's photos and his voice note] Photo one is the water heater data plate, photo two is the connections above it, photo three is the corroded shutoff, photo four is the closet. Write an estimate from these plus the voice note, using only line items from the price book in this Project. Lay it out as good, better and best, one plain sentence each on what the homeowner gets. Any task not in the price book, list it as a named line with no price at the bottom. Any permit, code or warranty claim goes in square brackets for me to confirm.
[upload the photo of the data plate] Give me the manufacturer, model, capacity, fuel type and the year it was built from the serial number if you can work it out, and say how confident you are on the year. Then two sentences I can put on the estimate explaining why a unit this age is worth replacing rather than repairing.
Turn that estimate into a three sentence text for the homeowner. Name the tech, say what he found in plain words, give the three prices and nothing else. No jargon, no part numbers, no promises about timing.