The Hidden Secret to Faster Quotes and Higher Margins

Hosts Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down how to fix the bottleneck that strangles growing security & life-safety companies: design and quoting. They share the people/process/tech playbook to get proposals out in 24–72 hours, tighten scopes, and hand ops clean jobs. From building a repeatable estimation playbook to leveraging international talent and AI for door hardware and camera selection, this episode is your roadmap to faster quotes, higher win rates, and better margins.

If you’re still cranking proposals at 10pm—or relying on sales reps to “figure it out” in spreadsheets—this one’s for you.

✨ What You’ll Learn

• Speed Wins Deals: Why time-to-quote beats price—and how to hit 24–72 hour turnarounds.
• The 3 Pillars: People, process, tech—how to staff solution engineering, document heuristics, and keep quoting inside the CRM.
• Stop Owner-Quoted Chaos: Why owners and sales reps shouldn’t be building estimates—and what to do instead.
• The Estimation Playbook: What photos, notes & drawings sales must capture, plus the heuristics (labor, cable, markup) your team needs.

🔗 Connect

• Stephen Olmon
  
  
  
• Collin Trimble 
  
  
• More Entry & Exit 

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Chapters

• 1:06 Challenges in Quoting and Estimation
• 6:16 Building a Scalable Quoting Process
• 21:39 Building an Effective International Team
• 27:09 Optimizing Sales and Operations
• 33:37 Innovative Solutions and Future Plans

Transcript

E&E EP 6

Stephen Olmon: [00:00:00] Today we're talking about design and quoting. If you are. Any sort of maturing business with serious aspirations to grow, you can't be doing those quotes. 

Collin Trimble: The proposal that gets to the customer first is the one that the customer's gonna take regardless of price. The biggest unlock for us was process of everything that you need to know to do a quote in design.

Everybody listening to this, you just have to do it. This is a 

Stephen Olmon: category of your business that's super important, but will take time.

Welcome to Entry and Exit, episode six. I'm Steven Ulman, and this is my co-host and business partner, Colin Trimble. By day we run Alarm Masters, a fire and security company in Houston, Texas, and by night we are elite. Podcasters. Mm-hmm. That's right. Uh, entry and exit is all about unpacking the fire and security industry piece by piece, [00:01:00] where we try to give you practical, tactical advice, share what we're learning and what we're doing, and how we're growing.

Excellent. 

Collin Trimble: Uh, I can't wait to jump in. Today we're talking about design and quoting or estimation for some of our folks out there that do a lot of ground up construction. Um, one thing that we hear a lot is, and something we've experienced too, which is, Hey man, I am overwhelmed with leads and opportunities.

I can't seem to ca keep up with all of the quotes and proposals that I need to get out the door. Uh, many of them are done. Late at night when you're done, you know, out in the field or done with team meetings and answering emails, you get back, you sit at your desk or your couch or wherever and you're trying to crank out a bunch of proposals, who knows if they're right.

You know, hopefully they are. Uh, it's slowing you down. It's taking you seven to 10 days to get a lot of these proposals back that really you should turn a 24 to 48 hours. Um, and so we're gonna talk about what we did at Alarm [00:02:00] Masters too. Um, unblock that for our team to make us faster, to give us a three to five day turnaround for projects almost of.

Of any size, um, not just the smaller to medium sized projects. So we're gonna kind of jump into quoting and design. We're gonna talk through, you know, where we've been, uh, where we're going, things that have not worked for us. Um, and yeah, we'll just, we'll get into it. 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. I think we should start with. What, what we were doing that was not working and just generally we get to talk to a lot of owners and just starting with the things that inherently aren't going to work, they aren't going to scale.

We talk to owners all the time. I have one person really specifically in mind, great business, um, and they have so many opportunities they [00:03:00] can't keep up and he's. You know, doing quotes at 10 o'clock at night and, you know, he's, he's tried before to hire someone to kind of run estimates or quotes for him.

Didn't really work out. We've talked about that in past episodes where there's something you know you should do. You try it once, it fails, and then you pull back. And this is one of those areas where you really have to kind of double, triple down across a few different areas, whether we'll get into this of people and process and technology.

So the first thing that definitely doesn't work is the owner operator at any sort of real scale. Mm-hmm. I mean, if, if you're really early, you've just started maybe in your first year, I can understand that. But if you are any sort of kind of at scale, maturing business with. Serious aspirations to grow.

You can't be doing those quotes. It's not gonna work. Yeah, I agree. I think that 

Collin Trimble: [00:04:00] every stage of business, uh, or I should say every size of business has different challenges with their design and quoting the new operator, um, who doesn't have a sales person believes. He or she is supposed to be doing all the quotes themselves.

Um, the operator that has a sales team believes that his or her sales team should be doing all of the quotes. Um, and I think that both approaches are, are not correct and we are definitely take a different view on that in this industry. Um, we talk a lot about enabling our salespeople to do what they do best, which is to sell.

Um, we believe that our salespeople are not the ones that should be doing all of the estimates. Um, that, that should be resourced to somebody else on the team. Another really tough approach is folks that hire very expensive industry estimators. Uh, to scale with their team. I think that's a really expensive way to do it.

I, I think that the only caveat to that would be if you're doing a whole bunch of [00:05:00] ground up construction, you still would probably want some industry experienced estimators on the team, but that shouldn't be the only, uh, group doing the estimates. You should have folks, uh, international talent or junior employees that can also help you with those estimates to scale.

Um, another one I just wanna double tap and kind of circle back on here is. Having your sales team do the estimates is a really tough thing because they're not going to care about them and put the level of detail into it that probably you as the operator or owner would. Uh, and also if you're trying to roll out new initiatives, we hear this a lot, man.

I, I really wanna start selling cloud video and subscriptions, and I train my team, but my sales team just doesn't quote 'em. They just don't quote 'em and, and they tell me they believe in it, but they don't quote 'em. Why aren't they quoting it? I really, I, I get sick every time I see a closed one deal for A DVR.

I wish it was something cloud. Um. That's knowledge. That's also because [00:06:00] salespeople are gonna quote what they know because again, they're doing these last minute at night sitting on their couch at nine o'clock right before bed. So they're just gonna copy and paste an old template that they have to get through it as fast as possible and get it out to the customer.

We like to say we've built, um, over time a quote, center of excellence, uh, for design and quoting, which just sounds. 

Stephen Olmon: Center of excellence. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. It just sounds so stupid, but we believe that it's excellent and it's certainly a center, so it's the center 

Stephen Olmon: of our business, you could say. It's the center of our business.

That's right. Yeah, 

Collin Trimble: exactly. Um, so I would say too that, um, when, when you're looking at building a, a scalable, uh. Quoting and design team or estimation team, you really need three components. Um, one, you need, um, scalable resources. You need to be able to hire [00:07:00] people that you can plug into that department that are not, uh, one in a million estimators that have 35 years of experience.

Um, so you want to find an archetype of a person that's organized or process driven or whatever. Um, that could be a good fit. To build, to do that with or without the experience. Number two, you want, and this is maybe the most important, is you need to have a really good knowledge base. And that starts all the way at the beginning of the sales process.

Your designs, your estimates, your quotes are only as good as the information that your sales team or what, whatever information you're getting on that site, walk, uh, the pictures, the notes, uh, the videos, the drawings, um, that is going to be the thing that. Empowers the quoting and design team to flourish.

And then the last piece is technology, and we spent a lot of time in our last pod talking about CRM. Most CRMs have [00:08:00] some. Form of a quoting tool on board. Uh, that doesn't mean you may not use, uh, a, a technology like Bluebeam or Excel or whatever to do takeoffs, but ultimately the parts, pieces and markup and all that, um, really should exist in your CRM because then you get better insight into your data, around your estimates, in your designs.

Um, so those are the three kind of keys you need to be looking at is. Who is the right fit to hire and is there, can I find this individual person that I wanna hire over time in, in plenty? Uh, number two is, do I have a robust, uh, knowledge base? From the sales team and like the site walk that they're doing all the way to some of the heuristics around what a estimate needs to include.

And then the next piece would be, do you have technology that's connected that makes it easy, that's optimized so you can, uh, build templates and then make, uh, copies of them, um, or even we'll tell you a little bit about some of the stuff we're doing with AI right now to build out, [00:09:00] um, even faster versions of estimates.

'cause we're trying to get our kind of three to five day turn time, down to two to three days. 

Stephen Olmon: When we got started two and a half, three years ago, all three of those categories were, were bad or non-existent essentially. So, you know, we've, we've spent a lot of time and energy, money focus, um, in this area of our business across all three of those categories.

And I would say even just. In the last few months, we've started to really feel like we actually, you know, we joked about center of excellence, like that there is some real excellence there. Mm-hmm. Certain parts of it improved faster than others, but, um, this is something I think to set expectations. I don't think this is going to change overnight.

No. You know, there's certain things that you can do that you can change and kind of pull a lever in your business and [00:10:00] see some quick wins. There's not as much of that here. So I think that that's, we want to be practical. We want to be realistic. This is a category of your business that's super important, but will take time.

Um, and so, uh, the, uh, the, the first part of that was who was. Who was doing those quotes? Colin, who was doing the quotes? I can't remember. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, that would've been me. I was doing all the quotes and all the proposals and all the designs. I think Steven, you made a good point. You said, Hey, this is something that we've really refined over the last several years and months.

Uh, this is an interesting one too because there was a lot when we purchased the business that we were like, we are, we know we need to fix this. We need to add a scalable sales team. We need to add better technology. We need to have a customer success team. We had a whole bunch of stuff that we knew before we signed the dotted line to purchase the business that we needed to fix.

This was not one of those things that was on our list of, [00:11:00] oh man, we gotta really solve this problem. So this, this came out of. Uh, feeling the pain and the bottleneck of proposals and quoting and design. And so, uh, like many of you, I'm sure I would do the, uh, site walk. I would go out, I would collect the information.

I may have a technical question or two that I needed to ask somebody on my team, um, Hey, what kind of door locks do I need to use on this particular door? So that I can add access, control or whatever the case may be, I would get those parts and piece recommendation. I would build out a Excel sheet that had a template that was literally the most basic Excel sheet known to man.

I would mess around with the margins, add, you know, miscellaneous to capture zip ties and whatever, and I would. Take that number, and I would go into a Word doc that was a template and I would copy and paste the number and update the scope of [00:12:00] work, and there was no revisions or track change, and half of it was on my desktop and half of it was in our, you know, Google Drive.

And my team would say, what's the latest? Proposal that you sent to the customer. There's been multiple versions. There was no version control. There was no date control. If I lost it, I'd have to start over again and figure out what kind of math was I even doing to figure that out. Uh, we would get it to the customer and that would take days.

To do that days, even for the smallest of jobs, a $5,000 job would take me multiple days to go through that entire process. Um, and we didn't really improve that process at all while I was doing it. Um, we hired our first salesperson and we put all the quoting and estimate and design, uh, on him, and he had to do it all, and that slowed us down.

Um. Tremendously because he came from outside the industry. So everything I had learned in the first, you know, kind of two years, I had to then knowledge transfer that to him. Um, [00:13:00] and so that, that slowed us down even more. It was like we took two steps backward, uh, on that. Um, you know, and then, and then honestly from there, that, that's when we got technology.

But I'll, I'll say this, just getting the technology before we had the, the knowledge base and before we had the resources, uh, staffed up. The technology didn't really speed us up that much. I mean, it did a little bit. We probably felt 10 to 20%, um, improvement from getting off spreadsheets and word docs to putting it into Salesforce.

There's certainly a little bit of an improvement there. Um, but when you have kind of all three of those ingredients, that's where you, the magic really happens. I think. 

Stephen Olmon: You alluded to it, but the, the bottleneck of all this that really prevents you. Again, we want to talk about how to grow and scale, become a business worthy of being acquired over the course of time, whether you wanna do that or not, this is one of those areas that has to mature and.

It is [00:14:00] also, you know, from, from what you said, from our own pain, we got very, you know, kind of bottlenecked held back and so you can get held back in all three of those areas. You could potentially have the right person. And kind of a good knowledge base, but you don't have the supporting technology. You can still kind of have that bottleneck.

Same thing like if you lack the information or if you lack the people, if, if you're doing it yourself. All three of those different areas can kind of create the bottleneck. Would you say? Uh, I think I would say that the people and knowledge though, like you said, those come first and I think those actually create the bottleneck more so, 

Collin Trimble: yeah, I agree.

The knowledge is sitting in a few people's brains and there's only a few people that know how to do it and can do it. And so that, that is the biggest, the biggest bottleneck for us. And so technology, we're big technology homers, but I'm gonna tell you, that wasn't the [00:15:00] big unlock for us. The biggest unlock for us was process.

Um, what we spent time doing was building out a very large 15 page. Our first version was 15 pages of everything that you need to know to do a quote in design. Everything from hey, sales person during your site walk. If it's this type of scope of work, these are the pictures you have to take and the things that you need to determine when you are out on site.

Um, just here's some quick examples that everybody in the industry would know. Okay, I'm, it's a commercial application. I am gonna hang new cameras, I'm gonna run new cable. So I need to know where is the head end gonna be located? What closet is there? Network and power there. Um, is it high speed network?

Is it the speed we need? Okay, now I'm running the cable. Is this drop ceiling, open ceiling, hard ceiling? What are those rough distances? Okay, now where is the camera endpoint? Where is the camera gonna be mounted? On, what is it gonna be mounted and what [00:16:00] is it looking at? Um, and so those would be examples of pictures, uh, that needed to be taken and videos and notes that needed to be handed off.

And then, and then from there, how does that information get translated to our, what we would call our solution engineer? And the solution engineer would then put those pieces together. How does our solution engineer know, okay, how much labor am I supposed to use? Um, I buy a box of cable that's, you know, whatever, a thousand feet this is.

1200 feet, what do I do? You know? And so there's a tremendous amount of heuristics I call them, um, that we use every day. You, you guys probably have them too. Here's, here's another one. I would say, hey, if I'm gonna mount, um, a camera that has existing cable cabling, and I'm gonna test the cable, um, you know, make sure it's connected to the box, mount the camera, you know, make sure the camera's.

Set up correctly, I'm gonna say roughly two hours per camera of labor to do that. Well, that's a heuristic that, that we would use. I have hundreds of those and those have evolved over time. And so [00:17:00] we documented all of that and then trained both the sales team on the pictures that they needed to take in the notes and the solution engineer on.

The heuristics to do that, all the way down to how to write an extremely tight and a protective scope of work. What things need to be called out in the scope of work, what things need to be called out in the exclusions list, and what is the, um, steps or process if you know we're doing a takeover and we're using existing material, what if one of those things is broken?

Calling all of that out in the scope of work to make sure that we're tightly protected, um, was really, really important. So we built that knowledge base and that was the biggest unlock and unfortunately. Everybody listening to this, you just have to do it. You have to take the time to spend, um, you know, hours and days over, you know, the course of several years to collect those heuristics in those notes.

Um, if anybody has any questions or wants to see some [00:18:00] examples of ours, they can hit us up and we will, we will talk to you and kind of send you some of the notes that we put together on ours. Uh, but that was a significant unlock, um, not just for the sales team. But for our solution, uh, solution engineer.

And that kinda leads me to our next massive unlock, which we started to use international talent to do all of our estimates. So, uh, what that means is we have full-time, um, team members that are dedicated to alarm masters that are based all over the world. And in this case, uh, we've got an amazing employee that's based out of Nicaragua.

And we give him all of our estimates to do and all of our quotes. And, um, we had to spend a lot of time training him on, uh, here is the estimation playbook, and I would say it's the 80 20 rule. 80% of the quotes that we did with, with our, uh, our international team member were correct, or at least [00:19:00] mostly correct.

And the other 20, all they did was inform changes to our estimation playbook. Um, and so that was the biggest unlock. So now our sales team does no, does, does zero quoting. They do no quoting at all. So our sales team's whole job is to go out on site, take the required pictures and notes, hand those off to our solution engineer, who then puts together the quote and then, you know, puts together a proposal and hands that off to the salesperson to then present to the customer.

And that's only because we started with the know. We brought in a scalable resource. We got so busy that we built, we got another international team member that was in Nicaragua to back up, uh, to help with all of our service quotes. How many times does your team need you? You know, you gotta do a service call and it's not quite project size, it's a couple grand.

You gotta replace the fire panel. Of course, the customer's gonna want a proposal and, and they should have one with a scope of work and [00:20:00] it's, you know, not gonna go to a sales person. So who, who does that? The service manager does that. And is that really the service manager's? Highest and best use? It's three parts.

Some labor and some markup. I mean, it's, it's quick. Um, and there's a lot of 'em, and they're not very big. So we hired another international team member just to do the service quotes. So now when a technician is on the field and they say customer requested a service quote that goes into a queue and they follow the same exact procedures, it's some small variations.

Um, in terms of the heuristics that we use for the service department. Uh, but that has been something that we built over time. We first figured out when we handed off to the salesperson, oh, okay, they're busy. Let's give 'em technology that'll make 'em faster. Well, it did, it made 'em about 10 to 20% faster.

But then we were like, man, we really need to give this to an international team member, um, who we can pay to do this for us, and that can be their full-time job. But then we thought, well, if we're gonna do that, we really need. Some guardrails to put into [00:21:00] place to make sure that, that, that, uh, team member knows what they can and can't do.

What markups are they allowed to go above or below, and what do they need to do when they have, you know, questions? Who do they escalate those to? So that was a little bit of our progression, um, in terms of how did we get there? And, and it did not happen overnight. It was really trial and error. And in fact, and in a little bit we can kind of get into something we just found out as recently as.

60 days ago, another big gap. Um, so we can kind of, we can dive into some more of that. 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. And one thing that. You brought up was our international team, and that's something that we will talk about in future episodes. It's been a, a really big win for us and also to really fun and there is an order of operations to being able to do that.

Right? Yeah. So kind of process begets people in, in that scenario where you can have an effective international team. A lot of people. Already [00:22:00] kind of in, you know, services, home service, blue collar or whatever may use international team members want customer support. Uh, we've taken that further in, in a few different areas of our company.

Uh, but we wouldn't be able to do that. And even if they weren't, even if they lived in our backyard, we wouldn't be able to do that without clear process, clear guidelines so that we can actually get the value out of. Delegating that to someone else. Highest and best use, right? We want our sales guys selling, you know, we want the service manager focused on excellent customer service and, you know, managing cases and planning and managing the team.

We don't want them dealing with some small Yeah. Doesn't make sense the. Reality is that in several different areas we've, we've been talking about this, is you kinda have to know your business, work on your business. It's the classic like work in, work on your business. And so you have to take the [00:23:00] time and kind of invest that forward to.

Build out process. And that even is iterative. It's kinda like we talked about in the, the last, uh, podcast we did, talking about technology, how it's not like you get to invest one time. That's right. And then you never have to again. That would be nice. And so, you know, if I just had to go for a run, like one time ever in my life, now I'm in shape.

That sign me up would love that, you know? But this is, uh, iterative and it's something you have to continue to, to work on and kind of clean up and you'll learn new things and you'll, like we have, and we've continually, um, kind of tried to perfect those processes and guidelines for our team. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, I, I think that you're absolutely right on it being iterative.

'cause we made a lot of mistakes along the way. I also, you know, kind of on the I-Team, international talent team. Um, I think when you're thinking about that, the more information and [00:24:00] playbook you can give them, the more successful they're gonna be. That's an extremely true axiom. The other thing is, is you want to hire.

Um, based on personality and skillset, just like you do for other roles. Um, and so, you know, if you, if you're hiring a salesperson, you know, you may be looking for somebody that's outgoing, that, uh, loves people that, um, is aggressive or potentially competitive. Those would be the traits that you would look for, um, in a particular person for sales.

And similarly, if you're looking for international talent for doing quoting, you would want somebody that's highly organized. Technical process driven and resourceful, and we've got a guy that leads that group right now that exemplifies that on a whole new level. He, he will call me out when I try to cut corners on an estimate.

All the time. I'll try to do a little, you know, smack rooney, throw in a super skew that includes a [00:25:00] bunch of stuff, but it's not clear and it's gonna cause headache down in the line. 'cause again, that's another thing that's really important to call out is it's the quality of the estimate comes from the sales team, and then the estimate, the quality of that estimate impacts the operations team.

So if the, if the estimate and the scope of work are not really tight and there aren't, uh, you know, mark markups or as-builts that are attached to it, you're kind of setting up your operations team to fail. And you may have a great project that turns into a crap project because you did not estimate or provide the right information, uh, on that, on that quote.

And so I think it's really important that that solution engineer. Is the bridge between both the sales, the field sales team is what we call them, and then our operations team, our project managers, uh, to make sure that, and then there's, there's a feedback loop, right? Of, okay, well now we do post-mortems on, well, this was missed, um, you know, uh, the salesperson said that we were gonna take over their [00:26:00] existing, uh, access control system and just replace the panels.

Well, it turned out the existing panel. Cabinet had the power supplies built in and we couldn't use those power supplies. And so we had to, out of our own pocket, charge the customer for a power supply, you know, and that was 600 bucks or whatever to, that we had to eat that we couldn't use as a change order simply because, uh, the salesperson didn't know what to take pictures of.

And so that, that was a quick change, um, that we made, uh, within, within the playbook. And, and again, we, I'm returning back to the original point, which is. Hire the archetype or the type of personality for this role is really important. Another thing for us is they had to have phenomenal English. Um, and being bilingual was important to us.

With Spanish being done in Houston, a lot of our customers speak both English and Spanish. And being able to have that flexibility was really important to us. So we could adequately communicate with the customer because our solution engineer sometimes, [00:27:00] uh, will actually communicate with the customer. And, and that's not super common, but it does happen sometimes when we're working with customers on revisions where they want us to say, oh, okay, well, uh, you, you take over these five, but I actually want to add these three other cameras and can you swap it?

Or whatever. We will, we will let our solution engineer communicate with the customer to get some clarification. Again, all in the name of freeing up our salesperson. So that the solution engineer doesn't have to ask the sales person who has to ask the customer, who has to communicate it back to the solution engineer.

We try to close those loops as fast as possible. 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. And that, that actually, um, kind of leads me to the, the next topic, which is how, how we report on grade, think about metrics in this area of our business. You know, how, how do we, uh, maybe see a yellow flag, um, even though we've improved. Kind of the design, quoting estimation area of our company dramatically over the last couple years.

Um, what are the things that, you know, whether it is kind of closing the loop and catching [00:28:00] something, or just generally speaking, uh, from a metrics grading, even performance review. Like, you know, how we think about that in this area of, of our company? 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. I think a, a way to summarize that is how do you know if it's working?

Like how do we know if it's working? And I think the two highest levels of that would be turn time and profitability. Uh, post project profitability would be the two biggest, uh, turn time is the one that we look at, obviously from a pre-sales perspective. So our sales team, you know, we try to, we try to keep the estimate turn time between three and five days, regardless of the size.

Assuming we have all of the required information from the customer. Like we can't, we can't go do a site walk for a customer that wants a fire, a new fire system, but they haven't given us their drawings. So there's, there's nothing we can do about that. But the minute we get those drawings, that clock starts and now it's, you know, it's three to five days.

Another just. Sales nugget while we're parked here for a second, uh, I can't help myself. Um, typically [00:29:00] the proposal that gets to the customer first is the one that the customer's gonna take. Um, so speed to quote is one of the like largest influencers of a project, regardless of price. Um, so I have a dream.

I have a dream that in the future we would get to 24 hour turn time on all of our let's estimates. Let, let's go, Colin. That's, that's our goal. We're trying to get there as fast as we can. We've got, we've got line of sight to it. We believe that it's, it's, and the numbers are clear for us. It's like, hey, the shorter the, the, the turn time, the faster or the more likelihood that we're gonna get that job.

Um, profitability is really important. Um, we look at profitability as a postmortem metrics. So we've got a project dashboard that shows us, um. The o the the pre-job, uh, margin or what we would call the estimated margin, and then we have the completed margin. So we're gonna make sure that those are really tight.

And if they're not within one or two points of each other, we're gonna figure out why. Sometime that's an operational [00:30:00] issue. We had the wrong guy assigned to the project who didn't know how to program that access control system. And it took him three times as long if we would've had the other guy, you know, who does know it and could have done it like it's the back of his hand.

So, um, those are kind of the big ones that we're looking at. We're also looking at specific things around, um. How do we consolidate manufacturers? So we're really big on not trying to be the, the group that has 15 different manufacturers for every scope of work. So how are we, uh, consolidating that down to one to two manufacturers per scope of work?

Um, a, it, it, it makes us faster, um, from a estimation perspective. B, our sales team knows it better so they can design it better. Um. Then ultimately it makes our technicians more efficient as well. Um, so yeah, those would be a lot of the kind of KPIs that we're looking at. [00:31:00] 

Stephen Olmon: It's so funny. On the manufacturer side, I'll see some of our competitors or other companies in the industry, like on their website, they'll brag about how many different manufacturers they work with.

I want to brag about how few we work with. Yeah. Yeah. Which. You know, there's always outliers or there's always an exception. Yeah. But generally speaking, we're definitely trying to minimize that because again, it kind of goes back to process and pricing controls and what, you know, and just the, the consistency of all that ends up helping drive margin.

Collin Trimble: Yeah, I think the only caveat to that, and I agree 1000%, the only caveat to that would be on the burglar side. Like we have really made a name for ourself of being the dog pound for, for burglar alarm systems. So, um, we've got a lot of customers that are out there using interlogix panels that are really, really old that don't make parts anymore.

And we're, we've got technicians that will work on them. In fact, we've got some friends in the industry that will call us and say, Hey, you know, we know Bill knows how to work on [00:32:00] that panel. Could you, could we borrow him? Just please. We need two hours of his time and you know, of course we always say yes and try to help out wherever we can.

Um, so, but I agree, uh, we try to get really specific on, um, manufacturers and I think a little bit of that speaks to the heart of who ALARM Masters is trying to be and not trying to be. So there are a lot of security. Uh, you see this more in security than in fire, but in the security side where there's a lot of owners that want to have the most.

Creative and thoughtful technology driven security systems that are super bespoke and just highly technical, very complex. And that's just not those, those aren't the customers we're pursuing. You know, I'm not pursuing customers that want Fort Knox level of protection with insane level of integration.

We're really targeting that 80%, right? So there's that 80 20 rule, and I think a lot of owners. You know, we'll talk to a lot of [00:33:00] owners when they're selling their business and they're so proud of some of the like, highly technical stuff they did. Uh, we've talked to one who had a zoo and they had this insane setup for man, uh, managing after hours intrusion.

You know, in these animal enclosures and how they were able to filter out, it was just, it was actually quite impressive. But that's not who we're trying to be. Um, and you know, who we're trying to be is the 80 20. We want to get, capture 80% of the customers that need, you know, a video surveillance system at a fair price that's gonna last them a long time.

And so that philosophy for us trickles down into the way that we do our estimates, uh, and into the way we do our vendor selection. So we're not trying to find the most expensive brand of camera that can do insane edge AI analytics. It's just not, it's just not what we're doing. Um, we're really trying to be more thoughtful about that 

Stephen Olmon: and we are starting in our business to kind of go up market and looking at more enterprise things like.

Who [00:34:00] knows. Maybe in the future we'll flex around to that. But again, that will always kind of be the exception. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, and I think too, just to come back to this thought of, we are constantly improving this and we found a gap about 60 days ago that I didn't appreciate and didn't have an answer for. If you would've asked me that, how you handled this 60 days ago, I would've, I would've not had a great answer for that.

And what it is, is this gap between. Design and quoting. Um, quoting, I would say is adding the required parts and pieces and labor to give a final proposal. And the design is the where are we putting the cameras to monitor the things, right? So if you've got a field salesperson that's out on site and the customer says, well, I really need to see this gate at this time of day, it's really up to the salesperson.

To be able to say, well, that gate's pretty far, so we're gonna need a longer [00:35:00] range camera, and you want to be able to see it at night, and there's not great lighting, so we need, and so there's a little bit of design and technical sales that we were throwing on our solution engineer who really, that's not their best fit.

Um. They're really good at following rules and process and having to kind of understand the feature set of the individual manufacturer was really hard, um, for them. And so we were getting bottlenecked on a lot. I mean, I would say 30% of our quotes were getting bottlenecked. Another really big one that we got bottlenecked on was.

Access control. So having to quote the locks on a door. So if you, if you, if you do access control out there, you have obviously your readers and keypads, and then you've got the control panel, uh, but then the lock and then the associated door hardware that goes with that lock. Is complex. It's tough for me to even figure out what is the right combination of [00:36:00] parts for that and then the associated power supplies that go along with that.

And so we were getting bottlenecked on every one of our, our net new access control installations. 'cause we just, we didn't know and solution engineer didn't know. Um, you know, and then the salesperson was brand new from outside the industry and he, he didn't know. So he was trying to go to our service and ops managers and it just so happened that they were out in the field and it was like a really kind of busy time.

And so they weren't getting their answers and the customers were getting frustrated 'cause it was taking us seven to eight days to get these turned around. Um, so we we're solving that again, three ways. We're solving that with, uh, people knowledge and we're solving that with technology. Um, on the people side we're, um.

Creating more resource in our, uh, office, we're doing technical office hours, so we have, um, two senior level operational folks that come in for a full day on Wednesdays, and they meet with the sales team, and all they do is answer technical questions. So that's one way. The other way we're doing it is we're [00:37:00] doing significant training.

So we're bringing in our manufacturers to train our sales team on how to do these designs. Hey, when you go out and you see this and you get this. Problem from the customer. Here is how you would handle that with X camera or X door lock, or you know, whatever. And then the last piece is, is really, I mean I, I'm gonna call it cutting edge.

Maybe it's not that cutting edge, which is we're using AI to do a lot of that design work. So we've uploaded. Quite literally thousands of pages of data sheets from manufacturers, user manuals from the manufacturers. We actually downloaded the entire NFPA fire code. We also downloaded, um, what I would say tribal knowledge that comes from me and our operations managers on, um, general rules of thumb heuristics that we use.

And then also what we did is we downloaded a whole bunch of, um. Locksmith type best practices and [00:38:00] knowledge so that now we can take a picture or multiple pictures of a door and we can upload that into an AI agent that will then spit out the exact set of locks and power requirements for that application.

And we have tested it and it's right, 95% of the time we even created guardrails around it to only make recommendations for the suppliers. That we want them to work with. So we don't want them to quote some very obscure door lock or some obscure camera. We want 'em to only quote these specific ones. So that, that has been a recent development over the last 60 days that we've spent a lot of time building and have seen a lot of success on, you know, getting our, our team trained from the manufacturer, making sure we have office hours with our technical team, and then building this, uh, AI agent to help us do a lot of that design work.

Stephen Olmon: That's really exciting and I think we're really just at the, the beginning of benefiting from all that effort. And back to a [00:39:00] past episode, you could try to do some of this in a one-off way. It really doesn't make sense to pour yourself into what you know, you call kind of cutting edge, bleeding edge type technology without having the foundation.

So again, we took the time to build the foundation of people, process technology so that we can then take some shots. Like this, that's unique. I don't think a lot of people are doing things like this and, and many companies, operators don't feel like they have the time or bandwidth to even try, try. That's right.

Yeah. And so, you know, the, the effort and the focus and the past has led us to a place where we can even try to explore some of this. Um, and then, um, you know, I think from a, from a homework perspective, we always love homework. Um. I think the homework here really is to assess where you are. You know, is this a significant may?

Maybe there is a [00:40:00] more significant problem in your business today that deserves to be kind of primary. Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people living into that kind one to three, one to 4 million that range. This is a massive issue because we've talked to a lot of owners in that range. You know, that, that have this exact challenge and they feel behind.

So I think take an honest assessment of where you are across all three of those core areas in that kind of quoting and design estimation, um, part of your business. And then, um, take action. Just like, you know, we always ask like. Go, go choose a technology solution. You know, this goes back to our past episode technology roadmap, that it's connected and it, and yeah, those systems talk where they're integrated, um, and spend the time to build out the process.

Um, and don't maybe. Overspend on a hire here. [00:41:00] Like you don't necessarily have to do that just to like silver bullet. No silver bullet here. Like document all of your processes. It is iterative. You don't get to do it once. Um, anything else? 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, I would, I would say start on your playbook right now. Um, start chunking it in.

Like this doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be formatted nicely. It can be in your own words. Um, so what I would do is open up a Google Doc today. Type in the title estimation playbook, and I would start adding all of your general heuristics. Hey, every time we mount a camera, we do X number of labor hours for every distance we do X number of cable, we round up to this X number of boxes.

For access control panels, this is what we like to use. In that playbook, start to dictate what manufacturers are your. You know, top one or two per scope of work. Do it in an unstructured way and overload it with data. Don't stress about the way it looks or feels or whatever, and build that. Take 30 days of just estimates that you're doing.

Then every [00:42:00] time, just add something in there. If you could even add one or two things a day, you're gonna pick your head up in 30 days. Cleaning that up and structuring it super easy to do. Getting the information out of your head is the biggest, uh. Pain point is the, is the hardest, the hardest step to take.

So I would just give yourself a little bit of, uh, of a break and just may, maybe it's just a go, an apple note on your phone, but I would just start and, and create that note with all these heuristics. Man, your future self is going to be psyched that you did that because it's gonna be good for you. It's also gonna be good even if you don't buy into the whole salespeople.

Shouldn't be doing the quotings. Great. That's a great resource for the salesperson. You know's, true. Whoever's doing quoting in the future is gonna benefit from that. So just to add I to the homework list is I would add and, and start building your, your knowledge base 

Stephen Olmon: Well, as always, if you've enjoyed it, please like and subscribe to entry and Exit and leave us a review.

Say something nice. Yeah. You know, talk to us about five, five [00:43:00] stars if you would. Five stars, very strong Jawlines. Yeah. Anything that you might think to, to leave. And just a little note of encouragement that's, uh, anywhere you listen to podcasts. Thanks again. Thanks.