I’ll say something I don’t often admit: I dreaded starting every estimate.
And it wasn’t for lack of a system. I am very adept with Excel, and my estimating template was more advanced than anything I ever saw another estimator using. Every estimate — and every variation of an estimate — was its own spreadsheet. I had a rigid naming system. I filed them in folders named for the year. It worked, it was reasonably flexible, and I had my ways of working around its limitations.
I could have gone on that way forever. Most estimators do.
What the system actually cost
But the dread was real, and it was worst exactly when the work mattered most: a job with complications, alternates, a base bid with three what-ifs hanging off it. Each one meant another spreadsheet, another filename, another copy of the numbers to keep honest.
Looking up an old estimate to compare against a new one? Kludgy — and strictly a sitting-at-the-desk exercise. Comparing an estimate to how the job actually performed? A whole separate undertaking, and not a trivial one. So the comparisons that should have been feeding every new number happened less often than they should have. That’s the quiet cost of friction: it doesn’t stop you from working, it just quietly talks you out of the parts that make the work better.
Estimating is how you win work. When you dread it, you do less of it, later, with fewer alternates offered and fewer lessons pulled from the last job. The dread was costing me money and I couldn’t see it, because the system “worked.”
The other side
I built YEStimator to be the opposite of that, and I can tell you what changed, because I live in it every day.
I no longer feel any dread starting an estimate. I spin up variations without a thought — alternates, what-ifs, versions of a base condition, all sitting under one job instead of scattered across a folder of filenames. Searching and comparing happens on the fly, from my iPhone if that’s what’s in my hand. I review numbers in the truck before I walk into a conversation with a client, instead of promising to get back to him after a trip to the desk.
It’s an entirely more flexible, free-wheeling process. It doesn’t hold me back and it doesn’t require me to work any certain way — which, after twenty years of serving a spreadsheet system, turns out to be the thing I wanted all along.
If you’re the best spreadsheet estimator you know, this post is for you. The system works. I know it works. I’m just telling you what’s on the other side of it.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology