SAMPLE REPORT · Prairie Peak Exteriors is a fictional business. This report came out of our real process, run on a mock discovery call, so you can see exactly what you receive. The names and numbers are illustrative — the method is not.
01 · Executive summary
Seven hours a week, worth about $2,900 a month — and most of it is your evenings.
Six changes get it back. Three of them cost nothing, four take under ten minutes to set up, and one is a feature you already pay for and haven't switched on. Underneath them sits the real constraint — twenty years of quoting logic that lives only in your head — priced honestly in section 08.
Evening quoting — six to eight hours a week of your own nights
Evening email — an hour to ninety minutes, seven nights a week
Reclaimable
7
hours / week
Focus · Efficiency
One thing shaped every recommendation here. You said it at the end of the call: “Simple, or the guys won’t use it.” Nothing below asks a crew member to learn software, and nothing below asks you to enter data in a truck. That rule is why the CRM lasted three weeks, and it’s the right rule.
02 · How we prioritized
Effort vs. impact
← Low effortHigh effort →
Quick wins · this report
- Quote drafting speed
- Email triage & payment chasing
- Missed calls · photos · reviews
Major projects · section 08
- The quoting engine
- Same-day quote pipeline
Low impact · skipped
- Crew scheduling software — your whiteboard works
Everything in the next section is a quick win: sign up, set up, benefit — this week.
03 · Quick wins at a glance
The pain → the fix
STATED your numbers, straight from the call · INFERRED our estimate — method shown
~6–8 hrs/week drafting quotes at night STATED→Claude voice-to-quote
Calls ringing out all afternoon→Rosie
~7 hrs/week clearing email at night STATED→SaneBox
~2 hrs/week chasing payments Saturdays STATED→QuickBooks reminders — free
20-minute photo hunts, few times a week INFERRED→Shared album — free
19 Google reviews vs. their 300→Review link in invoices — free
04 · Recommended solutions
What to use, what it costs, what it returns
Claude — voice-to-quote
Solves: “quotes probably three, four nights a week, couple hours a night. That’s the killer.”
Cost$0–$28/mo CAD
Setup20 min once
Saves~2 hrs/wkSTATED
Why this one: You already do the hard part standing on the property — deciding the number. Record a two-minute voice memo at the truck; get back a draft you edit in five minutes instead of writing in forty. It cuts the writing, not the judgment.
Next property you walk, record the voice memo before you drive away.
Rosie — AI phone answering
Solves: “she called the business line three times one afternoon... voicemail all three.”
Cost~$69/mo CAD
Setup~15 min
Saves~0.75 hrs/wkINFERRED
Why this one: Trains itself off your website, answers 24/7, screens sales calls, texts you a summary. Built for trades. Watch the 250 min/mo cap in spring — the next tier is US$149.
Start the 7-day trial, then phone your own line and listen to what a customer hears.
SaneBox — email triage
Solves: “an hour, hour and a half every single night, just cleaning it out.”
Cost~$10/mo CAD
Setup5 min
Saves~2 hrs/wkSTATED
Why this one: Works behind Gmail — no new app, no folders to maintain. Your last two attempts failed because they asked you to change how you work. This is a very good filter, not an assistant.
14-day trial, connect the business Gmail, judge it on night three — not night one.
QuickBooks — automatic invoice reminders
Solves: “I do it Saturday mornings with coffee... couple hours most Saturdays.”
Cost$0 — already owned
Setup10 min
Saves~1.5 hrs/wkSTATED
Why this one: Already sitting in the software you pay for every month, switched off. Buying a separate tool for this would be paying twice.
Reminder 1 at three days past due, Reminder 2 at fourteen — written in your voice.
One shared job-photo album
Solves: “texting three different guys... scrolling through my camera roll for twenty minutes.”
Cost$0
Setup5 min
Saves~0.75 hrs/wkINFERRED
Why this one: Two taps, nothing to learn, no account for the crew to create — which is the only reason it will survive where your last two systems didn’t. The purpose-built alternative is in section 05, along with the exact point at which it becomes worth paying for.
Create the album, name it by street, text the join link to the crew.
Google review link in your invoice email
Solves: “nineteen Google reviews and the big franchise guys have three hundred.”
Cost$0
Setup5 min
SavesLead flow — no hours claimed
Why this one: Every invoice already goes out by email; one line at the bottom asks for the review without you remembering to. That’s the whole fix.
Grab the review link from Google Business Profile, paste it into the invoice template.
Total stack cost: ~$110/month CAD. Three of the six are free, one you already pay for, and $0 is required to start — the two paid tools both open with trials. Tool prices verified July 2026.
05 · What we ruled out
The recommendations we didn’t make
Six tools got prescribed. Roughly forty didn’t. These four are the ones you’d most likely have been sold by someone else — here’s why they aren’t in section 04, and what would change our mind.
Jobber~$230/mo CAD
The standard answer for a landscaping company your size, and on paper it replaces four of your six pains at once. We left it out because of your own history: a CRM you abandoned after three weeks, email folders that didn’t stick, and one rule stated plainly at the end of our call. A platform migration in your busiest season is the highest-risk thing you could do this year. What would change our mind: you raising it yourself, off-season, with your office lead driving the rollout — then it’s a real conversation and we’d help you scope it.
CompanyCam~$110/mo CAD, 3 seats
The right tool for the photo problem — it files by GPS automatically, so nobody has to remember anything. We put the free album first because a $110/month subscription for a 45-minute-a-week problem is a poor trade while a free option is untested. What would change our mind: if the album is half-empty a month from now, the discipline isn’t there, and CompanyCam removes the need for it. That’s the trigger — not a hunch.
NiceJob / Podium$105–$350/mo CAD
Review automation, and your review gap is real — nineteen against three hundred. But you have never once asked a customer for a review in a systematic way. Paying $105 a month to automate a request you’ve never made is buying the second step first. What would change our mind: a full season of the free ask in your invoices, and a conversion rate worth automating.
Crew scheduling software$70–$210/mo CAD
You mentioned the whiteboard twice and never once complained about it. It works, the crews read it, and it costs nothing. Replacing a working system to make an assessment look thorough is how software gets bought and abandoned. What would change our mind: a third crew, or the day the whiteboard actually fails you.
We take no commission, referral fee, or affiliate revenue from any tool named in this report. That is why three of the six recommendations cost nothing and one was already sitting switched off inside software you own. Our incentive is that you implement, get the hours back, and come to us for the build in section 08 — not that you buy subscriptions.
06 · Your 4-day quick-start plan
Ten minutes a day, four days
| Day | Action (≤10 min) | Tool | What you'll notice |
|---|
| Day 1 | Turn on automatic invoice reminders | QuickBooks | Saturday’s chase list is shorter this week |
| Day 2 | Start the trial, connect your Gmail | SaneBox | By night three the inbox pass is a third the size |
| Day 3 | Start the trial, call your own business line | Rosie | The phone gets answered while you’re on the mower |
| Day 4 | Voice-memo one quote instead of typing it | Claude | A quote goes out same-day |
Four days, ~10 minutes each. This captures the majority of the value in this report. The album and the review link are two more five-minute jobs — they’ll keep until next week.
07 · The financial picture
Shown work, conservative numbers
Net monthly ROI = ( hours/week × your rate × 4.33 ) − tool costs
Reclaimable time identified7 hrs/wk
Your loaded rate (conservative default — adjust to yours)$100/hr
Gross monthly value$3,031
Total tool cost−$110/mo
Net monthly ROI~$2,900 / mo
Your hourly rate wasn’t on the intake form, so we used $100/hr — deliberately low for an owner running $1.6M with eight staff. The real number moves this figure up, not down. These are identified hours, captured when the recommendations are implemented, by you or with us. Our guarantee covers the identification: 5+ hours/week found, or your $1,500 refunded.
08 · What comes after quick wins
Major projects
These came up on our call. No off-the-shelf tool solves them well — they’re build projects. No obligation; you now know what they’d involve.
The quoting engine
“It’s all in my head, that’s the problem... It’s twenty years of gut feel.”
What it would be: a custom Claude skills suite built on your actual pricing logic — slope, soil, access, the clay neighbourhoods, crew-hours — turned into something your office lead can work through and produce a quote you’d sign without rewriting. The first half isn’t software; it’s getting twenty years out of your head and onto paper, and it needs you in the room.
Before final payment: we run your last fifty real quotes through it and you see the scorecard — what matched, what didn’t, what we fixed.
Honest range $3,000–$5,000 · Typical timeline 3–4 weeks
Same-day quote pipeline
“In spring I’m honestly a week, ten days behind on quotes sometimes.”
What it would be: one automated workflow — a request arrives by form, phone, or email; the customer gets an immediate acknowledgment with a real date; the request lands in a single queue with property details already collected.
Before final payment: tested against a full week of your real incoming requests — you watch it handle them before it goes live.
Honest range from $1,950 · Typical timeline 1–2 weeks
Your $1,500 assessment is credited in full toward any of these within 90 days.
09 · Next steps
From report to reclaimed hours
- Run the 4-day quick-start plan.
- Your review call is booked for August 4, 2026 — bring questions and anything that didn’t land.
- If a major project is worth exploring, say so on the call and we’ll scope it properly — fixed price, underwritten before you commit.