sundance-communications.com Forums Member Forums Telephone Complaint Department & Contractors What is a Quote?

I had a national account customer asked me if I wanted to go out and do a no charge site survey to quote them on cleaning up a data frame

At first I was like I don’t do anything for no charge why am I going to go out there and do a no charge site survey so then I figured I would just add it to the quote I guess 😢

So I looked at the disaster in front of me and didn’t know exactly what to do the job had to be done on a Sunday I guess the first mistake I made was charging them overtime as opposed to double time being ifrom Massachusetts

So I’m staring at this mess in front of me and thinking to myself well this is a one-man job there’s no way this would be two men because there’s only one place to work


It basically came down to installing a wall rack and putting everything in the wall rack

There was two or three patch panels I think there was a 24 port data patch panel there was a 24 port voice patch panel I think there was a third patch panel

They didn’t want me to re-terminate any of the cables on the patch panel they just wanted me to move the the patch panels to the wall rack

And I told them that a lot of the cables weren’t going to reach it all because of the way they were coming up from conduit’s in the floor most of the cables are coming down from the ceiling

Anyways the job had to be done on a Sunday

So I was assuming one man eight hours


So the job got postponed because like I said it had to be done on a Sunday but various things came up

The customer supplied all the materials

When I got the rack it was put together it was very heavy and I thought to myself I cannot mount this rack by myself I must’ve weighed at least 50 pounds

But then I realize I was able to take the rack apart so I thought I should be able to do this on my own

The job was scheduled for last Sunday I felt a little funny about the job so I asked another tech to help me just to be safe keep in mind their entire network was going down and they had to be working on Monday morning

Needless to say the job turned out to be a freak show a lot of the cables didn’t reach some of the cables that didn’t reach we terminated on different patch panels so we had to re-terminate those cables to one patch panel that would stay and then all the other cables would go so it’s very confusing

Some of the cables were for phone and some of my data

So they were various phones and computers that didn’t work until we figure out everything and I think we did a pretty good job considering

There was even a couple of locations that had nothing to do what we were doing they turned out to be bad patch cords

Anyways the company that hired me refuses to pay me for the second guy and a patch panel that I used because they said they didn’t want anything on jacks or crimps

So instead of one man eight hours I build them for two men for seven hours because that’s how long we were there
Plus the cost of the patch panel

They’re telling me because I didn’t let them know that it was going to take longer that they weren’t able to approve any of this extra work that I did

I thought I was giving them an honest quote originally

What do I do lick my wounds and never do work for them again


I thought a quote was a quote “things change

Keep in mind this is a national account working for a company that is nationwide and we’re talking about 600 bucks

Any thoughts

JD

Yes, you quoted it wrong and now have to live with it.
That's why they asked you to look at it and quote it.

Not their fault. Your fault

NEVER under quote for a national.

Nationals are bad news in general, although we work with a select few who never question invoices. Our first question out of the gate when a new one calls is "Do you have a credit card we can pre-auth for this work?" The hourly rate is our local rate - they don't get a discount.

I think hardball is the only way to play with these guys. After all, we're helping them compete in our own backyards!