Our Quotation Was Six Pages. The Job Was Worth Eighty Thousand Pesos.

The job was a small one. A single chamber, one pump, a bit of pipework on a building that already had a working plant — the smallest kind of wastewater treatment work we take on. Somewhere between seventy and ninety thousand pesos of work, and I had asked for the quote on a Friday because the client wanted to start the following week.

What came back to me was six pages. An itemised schedule with every fitting on its own line, a page of assumptions, a page of risks, three civil works routes, a sensitivity table. It was, clause by clause, a good document. It was also completely wrong for the job in front of it, and I said so in one line: not everything has to be six pages long.

That sounds like a note about formatting. It is not. The length of a quotation is an engineering decision about what the reader actually has to decide, and getting it wrong costs us work in both directions — we have lost small jobs around Cebu by making them look complicated, and we have very nearly lost large ones by making them look simple.

Where the long document came from, and why it is right there

On a real plant contract the length is not padding. It is the work being shown. When we quote a new sewage treatment plant we put every component against a financial benefit — what it does, what happens without it, and what that absence costs — because on a seven-figure contract the owner is entitled to know why each tank and each machine is in the price. That is a page or two on its own.

Then the wastewater strengths have to appear side by side, because the influent number on the drawing is usually the one nobody can source, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest column is the price of not knowing it. Then the three civil routes, because who pours the concrete is the owner's decision and not ours. Then the risks and assumptions, which we disclose before signing rather than after. Then the commissioning period, which has its own clauses because energised and commissioned are not the same date. Then the price, at the end, where it belongs.

And when the client has sent us a finished drawing of his own, the document gets longer still, because we restate his design as issued before we correct anything. Six sections, and every one of them earns its place on a contract of that size.

On a small job the same document does the opposite of what it was built for

Put that structure on eighty thousand pesos of work and three things go wrong at once.

The first is that an itemised schedule invites line-by-line negotiation of items that are not separable. If I show a float switch, a gland, a length of pipe and four hours of labour as four lines, somebody will ask me to take out the labour. On a small job the lines are not a menu — they are one piece of work that happens to have parts. One price is more honest about that than four, because four implies you can buy three of them.

The second is that length reads as cost. An owner looking at six pages for a job he thinks of as half a day's work does not conclude that we are thorough. He concludes that we are expensive and slow, and he is not entirely wrong to, because somebody had to write those six pages and that time is in somebody's overhead.

The third is the one I care about most. A long document buries the two or three sentences that actually matter. If the only real decision on this job is whether the chamber gets a hatch he can open himself or a slab he has to break, that sentence should be the most visible thing on the page. In six pages it is on page four.

So under roughly a hundred thousand pesos we write two pages, and we write one simple price.

What gets cut, and what never does

Shortening a quote is not the same as thinning it, and the test we use is whether the reader has a decision to make on that line. If he does, it stays at any length. If he does not, it goes.

What stays, always. The price still comes at the end, even on two pages — we do not put a number under a title or on a cover. The load-bearing assumptions stay, written as assumptions: the flow we have taken, the strength we have taken, where we think the water goes. The marked estimates stay and stay marked — sludge hauling and third-party laboratory work are always shown as estimates and never as firm prices, and alkalinity correction and coagulant are shown as estimates and marked if required, because on a small job as much as a large one those are the lines that move later. And the genuine client decisions stay, however few of them there are.

What goes is the re-argued reasoning. If I have already stood on site with the owner and explained why the trap he has is catching soap rather than grease, the quotation does not need to teach him that again in prose. He was there. A document that re-argues a settled conversation is not being thorough, it is being deaf.

What also goes is the sensitivity analysis on a job with nothing sensitive in it. Three columns of wastewater strength are indispensable when we are sizing aeration for a building nobody has sampled. They are theatre on a pump replacement.

The threshold is not really a peso figure

A hundred thousand is a rule of thumb and I use it because a rule of thumb gets followed. The real line is somewhere else: a job is small when the owner can hold all of it in his head at once.

By that test some cheap jobs are not small. A softener on a commercial kitchen is modest money and it changes the chemistry of everything downstream, so it needs its paragraph about what it does to the interceptor and why that remedy sits inside the base price. And some jobs that look big are simpler than they read: a second identical train beside a plant we built ourselves is mostly a repeat of a document the owner has already approved once.

The other half of the test is who reads it. A document written for one owner who has walked the site with us can be short, because the conversation is part of the document. A document going to a procurement department, a bid committee or a group office in another city has to survive being read by people who were never in the room, and that is a different job. Itemisation there is not padding — it is the only way the price can be checked by someone who did not hear the reasoning. On those we write the long one whatever the value, and we say why.

We have made the opposite mistake too

I would rather admit the other failure than pretend we only ever over-wrote. We have sent a short, clean, two-page document on a job that deserved the full treatment, and lost it to a longer quote from somebody else — not because the other plant was better but because the other document let the owner show his boss how the number was arrived at. Brevity is only a kindness when the reader can act on it alone.

It is also worth remembering that our document is usually read beside somebody else's, and a short one is harder to compare line by line. When an owner put two quotations side by side and asked us to explain why ours was dearer, the gap turned out to be almost entirely a difference in what each document included — which only became visible because both of us had written our assumptions down.

And there are things we have learned never to drop at any length. The provenance of the influent figures — one line saying where the numbers came from, even if that line reads that they came from an assumption. The discharge standard we are designing to, because Class C and Class B are not the same duty: ammonia as nitrogen at 4 against 3, and phosphate as phosphorus at 4 against 1.5, which is the difference between a phosphate stage you can run by hand and one that needs dosing control. Establishing the receiving water and its classification is our work and our cost, never a line on the client's to-do list, and it appears on a two-page quote exactly as it does on a twenty-page one.

What two pages actually look like

Page one: what the building is, what we measured, what we are going to build, and what it will do when it is running. In plain sentences, not a table. If there is a genuine choice — and often there is exactly one, such as whether we pour the chamber or his own contractor does under our supervision at a stated fee — it goes here, with both options described on equal footing and no recommendation attached. We do not pick for him.

Page two: the assumptions, the marked estimates, what we need from him, and the price. One number. If the operating cost matters to the decision we put that in too, because cost per cubic metre is the ownership argument and it belongs in the technical half of the document rather than beside the purchase price — the gap between a plant running at twenty-nine pesos a cubic metre and one running at ninety is worth more over five years than most of the differences people argue about at signing.

That is it. Nothing is hidden. Everything that was in the six pages and mattered is in the two, and the owner can read it standing up.

Where this does not transfer

This is a drafting position and not an engineering one, and it rests on things that are true for us and may not be true for you.

It assumes we have surveyed the site ourselves. We can write two pages because we have been there, measured, looked at the existing tank and talked to whoever runs it. A supplier quoting off an emailed description cannot responsibly be that brief — the assumptions are doing much more work in his document than in ours, and they need to be visible.

It assumes an owner who reads, and one person deciding. Put a committee, a lender or a consultant between us and the decision and the short document fails, not because it is wrong but because it was written for a reader who is not the one holding it.

It assumes our own position in Cebu. We can give one simple price on small work because we have our own fabrication and civil network here and we know within a narrow band what the concrete and the labour will cost; the benchmark we work from is around fourteen thousand pesos per cubic metre of tank capacity at a 3,000 psi mix, and about 1.2 million for a 70,000 litre three-chamber tank. A supplier importing his equipment and subcontracting his civil works has more variance to cover and may honestly need to itemise where we do not.

And it does not apply to tenders at all. A government or institutional tender has a mandated format, and the format wins. We fill it in.

None of this changes the engineering. The end goal is established the same way on a small job as on a large one, the technology is chosen on the same grounds, the ammonia and nitrate duties are worked out with the same arithmetic, and the same field guide sits behind both. What changes is how much of that working we put in front of the owner, and the answer is: as much as he has to decide on, and not one page more.

If you want to see how we size and price your own case before anyone writes anything, the instant price estimator and the design generator will both give you a starting band in a few minutes, and the parameters by industry page will tell you which tests your sector is actually held to. If you would rather just talk it through — including whether your job is a two-page job or a twenty-page one — book a free 15-minute consultation.