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If You Win Every Quote, You're Too Cheap

By Luke Tadich · The Tradie Owner

Winning every quote is a red flag, not a trophy

Here's a hard truth most tradies never get told. If you're landing every single job you quote, you are the cheapest bloke in town. That's not a compliment. It means you've quietly become the fallback for every price shopper in your postcode. You do the work, you cop the risk, and someone else pockets the margin you should be keeping. A quote is a price test. If nobody ever says no, you're not testing your value at all. You're just confirming you're the cheap option, and cheap is a brutal place to build a business.

What a healthy quote win rate actually looks like

There's no single number that fits every trade. A specialist doing high-end bathroom renos runs a different rate to a maintenance sparky on repeat commercial work. But as a rule of thumb for most residential trades quoting cold jobs, here's where you want to sit.

• Winning 80% or more: your prices are almost certainly too low. You're leaving money on the table on every job you take.
• Winning 40% to 60%: this is the sweet spot. You're priced with confidence and still landing plenty of good work.
• Winning under 30%: either your price is genuinely too high for your market, or your quote and your follow-up need work. Check both before you drop a dollar.
• Winning 90% and flat out: the clearest buy signal in business. The market is telling you to put your prices up tomorrow.

Why losing jobs on price is the point

Losing a job on price isn't a loss. It's the system working the way it should. Every job you lose to a cheaper bloke is a job you didn't do at a rate that would've hurt you. Let the cowboy have it. Let him underquote it, blow the timeline, and eat the callbacks. You want to lose the tyre-kickers so you've got capacity for the customers who pay properly, pay on time, and send their mates your way. The customers you keep when you lift your prices are the ones you actually want. The ones who walk were only ever loyal to the lowest number, and they were usually the slowest payers and the biggest headaches anyway.

How to raise your prices without losing the good customers

1. Know your real numbers first. Most tradies undercharge because they've never worked out their true charge-out rate: super, insurance, tool replacement, ute and fuel, quoting time, and the downtime between jobs. Run the free charge-out rate calculator before you touch another quote. It's an eye-opener.
2. Raise in steps, not leaps. Put your rate up 10% to 15% and watch your win rate for a month. Still winning more than 60%? Do it again. Small increases rarely scare off good customers.
3. Sell the outcome, not the hours. A good quote spells out what the customer gets: clean work, on time, no surprises, warranty behind it. Price shoppers compare numbers. Good customers compare peace of mind.
4. Stop apologising in the quote. Cut the 'I know it's a bit dear.' Present the number like it's the fair price for quality work, because it is. Confidence closes.
5. Then get a second set of eyes on it. If you don't know whether you're too cheap, you're flying blind. Book a free strategy session and we'll work out where you stand. Come on as a client and your first paid session is guaranteed to find at least $100,000 of opportunity, or you get your money back. Nine times out of ten a big chunk of it is sitting in a quote win rate that's way too high.