What do you need?
In their words, not your categories. The phrasing tells you what they actually care about.
The client intake system
Stop quoting blind.
Most enquiries arrive with half the story. You call back, ask the same questions you asked the last person, and still guess at the price. This is the intake system that fixes it, in an afternoon.
Eight questions. The same eight, every time.
Ask these before you quote and you will price better, and you will sound like a business with a process behind it.
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questions that decide the quote
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place the answers land
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minutes to reply before it cools
$0
to build the first version
When do you need it?
The real date, not the hopeful one. Ask what happens if it slips.
What range were you expecting?
Asked plainly and early. Nobody enjoys the hour that ends in a number neither of you wanted.
Where is it?
Before you find out on the day that it sits outside anything you would drive to.
How did you find me?
One field, and after twenty enquiries you know which half of your effort is working.
Best number and best time?
Phone tag is the quietest way to lose a job you had already won.
Anything I should know for the day?
Parking, stairs, a nervous dog, a locked gate. The open box that saves the whole afternoon.
Happy to pay a deposit to hold it?
A yes or a no, before the slot leaves your calendar. This is the question that ends no-shows.
What happens next
The first hour is the whole system.
Questions are only half of it. The other half is what happens to the answers once they arrive. Four steps, and none of them need you sitting at a desk.
1 · The answers land in one place. One sheet, one row per enquiry, a status beside it.
2 · They get a reply inside five minutes, whatever hour it arrives. It confirms you have it and says when you will come back with a number.
3 · You quote from the answers, not from a phone call you half remember.
4 · Anyone quoted and not booked gets swept once a week. That sweep is where the found money is.
If you only do one of the four, do the second. Reply speed decides more jobs than price does.
Building the form itself.
Start on paper. Genuinely. Write the eight questions on one page, use it for a week, and cross out whatever you never read back. Then put the survivors into a form so the answers arrive typed, timestamped, and in one place.
One page and a spreadsheet.
Print the eight questions. Keep a sheet with one row per enquiry and a status of new, quoted or booked. This works, and plenty of businesses never need more.
Get the free planner →An online form that fills the sheet for you.
When retyping answers starts costing real time, a form builder is the upgrade. I use Jotform: the free tier covers a small business, the answers land in a spreadsheet on their own, and you can take a deposit from the same page.
See Jotform →Intake that answers back.
The form is the start. The front desk replies in minutes, asks the follow-up question, and books the slot while you are still on a job.
See how SynKasa handles it →Disclosure: the Jotform link above is a partner link. If you sign up I may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend what I use to run this business, and the paper version above costs nothing and works.
When the form is not the bottleneck
A form collects the answer. It does not reply while you are on a job.
If the enquiries are arriving and the delay is you, the intake form is not the fix. The front desk is.