Pricing requests that go out on time

When we bid a job, we need prices from a lot of people. The masonry supply yard. The sealant distributor. The scaffold company. The roofer we sub the flashing to. Each one needs to know which job, what scope, where the drawings are and when we need the number.

Writing those emails one at a time is slow, and it’s the kind of slow that gets put off. Copy and paste is worse: the wrong name in the greeting, last week’s project in the subject line. And one email to everyone with a long BCC list looks like spam and gets treated like spam.

How it runs day to day

Dom pastes in a list (company, contact, trade) and names the bid. Claude cleans the list first. It drops duplicates and sets aside any entry with a missing or broken address, instead of guessing one.

Then it writes one draft per person. The subject reads like “Sealant pricing request | project name | bid number.” The greeting uses their first name, or “the team” when there’s no contact. The body has the scope for their trade, the wage rules if it’s public work, one link to the plans folder, the date we need the quote and the date the bid is due. It’s short and plain, like a person wrote it. Before making the rest, it checks that the first draft was labeled correctly, so nothing gets stuck.

The drafts sit in Gmail under a “to send” label. A small script we wrote sends the oldest one every few minutes during business hours, so it goes out like normal email, not a blast. Every send lands in a Google Sheet. When someone replies, the sheet shows it. After a few business days with no answer, the row says follow up, and Claude drafts a short nudge with the deadline and the link again.

What still needs a person

Choosing who to ask, reading the quotes, and picking the one we trust. A cheap quote from a supplier who can’t deliver on time isn’t cheap. Dom can hold any batch for review before it sends, and pause the whole queue from a menu in the sheet.

If you ask vendors for prices

Contractors aren’t the only ones who do this. A property manager getting three plumbing quotes, a restaurant pricing a new supplier, an office getting bids on cleaning: same pattern. We set it up on your own email account, with your signature and your rules. See supplier and sub pricing requests.