Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A Grand Rapids custom cabinet shop owner admits losing three kitchens this year to slow quotes. We diagnose the real problem (intake and follow-up, not pricing) and map a one-pipeline fix with staged nudges, pre-written follow-ups, and a single Notion quote template.
An 11-year-old custom cabinet shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan is losing kitchens not on craft or price, but on speed. We rebuild the intake and follow-up layers around the quote so leads stop dying on the desk.
In this episode:
Subscribe: workingsmarter.jgiebz.com
Eric: So three kitchens. You actually think you lost three this year just on speed.
Marissa Kolb: At least three. One of them, the woman literally told me. She said, "I liked your work better, but the other guy had numbers to me by Tuesday."
Eric: Oof.
Marissa Kolb: Yeah. Oof is right.
Eric: And when was Tuesday for you? Like, when would you have gotten back to her?
Marissa Kolb: Honestly? Maybe the following Monday. Maybe. If I remembered.
Eric: Okay. Back up for a sec, for anyone just dropping in. Tell me what the shop is.
Marissa Kolb: Sure. Kolb and Co. Cabinetry. We're in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Six people including me. Custom cabinets, mostly kitchens, some built-ins, the occasional whole-house job if the designer is somebody we love.
Eric: Eleven years?
Marissa Kolb: Eleven years in June. Which is wild to say out loud.
Eric: And the quoting thing. Walk me through what actually happens when a lead comes in. Like, right now. Today.
Marissa Kolb: Okay. So. Someone fills out the contact form on the site. That goes to my email. Which, fine. But then I also get calls, I get Instagram DMs, I get referrals that come in as a text from a designer I've worked with for years.
Eric: So already four inboxes.
Marissa Kolb: Four inboxes. And every one of those turns into a different spreadsheet. Because the way I quote a referral from Jenna is different from the way I quote some guy who found me on Google.
Eric: Different pricing or just different template.
Marissa Kolb: Different template. Different questions. Different everything. And then I go measure, I come back, I'm supposed to write it up, and that's where it dies.
Eric: Dies how.
Marissa Kolb: Dies on my desk. Dies in a tab. Dies because I'm back on the floor finishing a job and the quote is a Google Sheet I named something stupid like "Henderson maybe kitchen final v2."
Eric: Final v2.
Marissa Kolb: Final v2. There's always a v3.
Eric: There's always a v3. Okay. And follow-ups. You said half of them never go out.
Marissa Kolb: Being generous. Probably more than half. I send the quote, I feel great about myself for twenty minutes, and then I just... don't check back in. Unless they email me.
Eric: Right.
Marissa Kolb: And the ones who don't email me, I just assume they went with someone else. Which maybe they did. Or maybe they were waiting on me to nudge.
Eric: Yeah. Okay. Can I tell you what I'm actually hearing?
Marissa Kolb: Please.
Eric: You don't have a quoting problem.
Marissa Kolb: I don't?
Eric: You have an intake problem and a follow-up problem. The quote part, honestly, you're great at. You've been doing this eleven years. You know what cabinets cost.
Marissa Kolb: Okay.
Eric: The part that's leaking money is before the quote and after the quote. Lead comes in, it goes to a different place every time, so you can't see your pipeline. And then after you send, there's no system reminding anybody to nudge.
Marissa Kolb: Yeah. That's exactly it.
Eric: And here's the thing. The person who answered her by Tuesday? I promise you he's not faster than you. He's just got a system that doesn't let leads sit.
Marissa Kolb: That's annoying to hear.
Eric: I know.
Marissa Kolb: But fair.
Eric: So let me tell you what we did at the agency, because it's the same shape of problem. We had leads coming in from the website, from LinkedIn, from referrals, from a podcast guest form. Four, five inboxes. And we were losing people the same way.
Marissa Kolb: Okay.
Eric: We moved everything, and I mean everything, onto one platform. The all-in-one ops platform we run the agency on. I'm not gonna name it because honestly it doesn't matter which one, there's a few of them. But the shape of it is what matters.
Marissa Kolb: What's the shape.
Eric: One place where every lead lands. Form on the website, DM, text to the business line, email to the sales address, all of it funnels into one pipeline you can actually look at.
Marissa Kolb: One screen.
Eric: One screen. And every lead has a stage. New. Measured. Quoted. Follow-up one. Follow-up two. Won. Lost.
Marissa Kolb: Okay.
Eric: And the magic, honestly, is that when a lead sits in a stage too long, the system yells at you.
Marissa Kolb: I need something to yell at me.
Eric: Everybody does. That's not a you problem.
Marissa Kolb: Okay.
Eric: So for you. New lead comes in Monday. By Tuesday morning, if you haven't booked a measure, you get a nudge. Measure done, quote not sent in forty-eight hours? Nudge. Quote sent, no response in four days? That one's even better, because the system can send the follow-up for you.
Marissa Kolb: Wait. Send it for me, like, actually send a message?
Eric: Actually send a message. A real one. In your voice. Something like, "Hey, just circling back on the kitchen quote, happy to walk through any of the line items." You write it once. It goes out every time.
Marissa Kolb: And they think I wrote it.
Eric: You DID write it. You just wrote it in advance.
Marissa Kolb: Okay. That's a reframe.
Eric: It's the whole game, honestly. You wrote it when you had time. It sends when you don't.
Marissa Kolb: Huh.
Eric: And then on the quote itself. This was the other thing we did. We stopped having fifteen versions of the same document. We built one template. Lived in Notion. One source of truth.
Marissa Kolb: Notion like, the Notion.
Eric: Yeah. Notion as the workspace. The quote template lives there, every project gets its own page, pricing blocks you can drop in, line items, scope notes, all of it.
Marissa Kolb: And the client sees that?
Eric: Depends how you set it up. We send a cleaner version out of the platform, but the working doc, the thinking, lives in Notion. The team can see it, I can see it, nothing is on somebody's desktop called final v2.
Marissa Kolb: That alone.
Eric: Right?
Marissa Kolb: That alone would save me, I don't know, an hour a day of just looking for the file.
Eric: And here's the part that I think matters most for your business specifically.
Marissa Kolb: Okay.
Eric: You said referrals come in as texts from designers you've worked with for years.
Marissa Kolb: Yeah.
Eric: Those are your best leads.
Marissa Kolb: By a mile.
Eric: And right now those are the ones most likely to fall through the cracks, because they don't look like leads. They look like a text from Jenna.
Marissa Kolb: Yes.
Eric: So the move there is, the business line, the number designers text, that routes into the same pipeline. Jenna texts you about a client, it shows up as a lead, same stages, same nudges.
Marissa Kolb: Without Jenna knowing she just got put in a CRM.
Eric: Jenna never knows. Jenna just knows you got back to her client by Tuesday.
Marissa Kolb: Okay. I like this.
Eric: And I want to be honest with you about something, because I don't want this to sound like magic.
Marissa Kolb: Please.
Eric: The platform doesn't do the work. It doesn't make you a better quoter. It doesn't measure the kitchen. What it does is it makes it impossible to forget.
Marissa Kolb: Mm.
Eric: And for a shop your size, that's the whole battle. You're not losing to better cabinets. You're losing to people who respond.
Marissa Kolb: Yeah. Yeah, that's it.
Eric: And you don't need to build all of this at once. That's the other thing I'd tell you.
Marissa Kolb: Okay, good, because I was starting to spiral.
Eric: Don't spiral.
Marissa Kolb: Where do I start.
Eric: One pipeline. That's it. Pick the platform, doesn't matter which, get all your leads landing in one place. Don't automate anything yet. Don't build the templates yet. Just get them in one view.
Marissa Kolb: Just see them.
Eric: Just see them. Because I'll bet you right now you don't know how many open quotes you have.
Marissa Kolb: I do not.
Eric: Nobody does. That's the first win. You open the thing on a Monday morning and you go, oh. There are nine kitchens waiting on me.
Marissa Kolb: Nine would be a lot.
Eric: It might be more than nine.
Marissa Kolb: It might be more than nine.
Eric: Then week two, you add the stages. Week three, you write the follow-up messages. One at a time. The one that goes out four days after you send a quote. Write that one first. That's your highest-leverage message.
Marissa Kolb: The four-day one.
Eric: The four-day one. Because that's the one that catches the woman who liked your work better.
Marissa Kolb: Right.
Eric: She wasn't gone. She was waiting.
Marissa Kolb: She was waiting.
Eric: She almost always is.
Marissa Kolb: Okay. So if I'm taking one thing away from this conversation and doing it this week.
Eric: One thing this week.
Marissa Kolb: Yeah.
Eric: Make a list, on paper, of every place a lead can reach you. Website, email, Instagram, business line, designer texts, the whole thing. And then pick ONE pipeline tool, whichever one, and point all of those at it. That's it. You're not writing a message yet. You're not building a template. You're just making sure nothing lands somewhere you can't see.
Marissa Kolb: One inbox.
Eric: One inbox. One view. If you do just that this week, I promise you, you'll find at least one open kitchen you forgot about.
Marissa Kolb: That's horrifying and I believe you.
Eric: It's always true. Every single time somebody does this exercise, they find a live one.
Marissa Kolb: Okay.
Eric: And then next time we talk, we'll do the follow-up messages.
Marissa Kolb: Deal.
Eric: How are you feeling.
Marissa Kolb: Honestly? Lighter. Which is weird because you just gave me homework.
Eric: That's the goal.
Marissa Kolb: I think I was treating this like I needed to be a different kind of business owner. Like I needed to be more organized as a person.
Eric: Yeah.
Marissa Kolb: And what you're telling me is I just need the thing to catch what I drop.
Eric: That's it. You don't need to change. You need a net.
Marissa Kolb: I need a net.
Eric: Everybody needs a net. I need a net. The net is the whole thing.
Marissa Kolb: Okay.
Eric: Marissa, thank you. This was great.
Marissa Kolb: Thank you for not making me feel like an idiot.
Eric: You're not an idiot. You're a cabinet maker who's been doing cabinet maker things. The quoting stuff is a different muscle.
Marissa Kolb: Different muscle. I like that.
Eric: Alright. If you're listening and any of this sounded like your week, do the one thing. Map every place a lead can reach you, point them at one view, and just watch what shows up. That's the whole assignment.
Marissa Kolb: And go call the woman from Tuesday.
Eric: And go call the woman from Tuesday. She might still be waiting.
Marissa Kolb: She might.
Eric: Hit subscribe if this one hit, we do one of these every week with a different operator working through a real thing. Marissa, thanks again.
Marissa Kolb: Thanks, Eric.
A daily 10-minute show for service business owners. AI tools, automated workflows, and the boring-on-purpose tactics that save you 5 hours a week. Each episode picks one niche, one workflow, and one tool — and walks you through it like a friend at a coffee shop.