How to Quote a Fence Job Using Excel with Steve Zamir

Hey,

Hey.

Hey, what's going on? Hey, [screaming] happy Wednesday, everybody. Uh, today we got Susan on here. Uh, if you don't know who she is, what I don't know who she is. Then you've been sleeping under a rock. But you might also remember this guy if you've been to the fence show or have been on any of our uh Facebook group pages or Las Vegas fence. We got Steve Zamiar which is our head estimator over at Las Vegas Fence. Uh Steve, tell us a little bit about you and uh your history. I mean you weren't always in the fence business. No, I was never in the fence business up until I started working for you uh seven and a half years ago when I came in just to watch the office. And now I'm catapulted in a full-time estimating job. But prior to that, I was an estimator for a large painting contractor in Chicago where I spent 42 years. And uh now I'm here doing what I'm supposed to do. ABC. Always be closing. I love that. Bring in the work. That's right. Las Vegas fence what it is. It is true. You are never done selling. Always selling. Always selling. Always be selling. I feel like people like Steve are the perfect salespeople. They always got a great story. They always keep talking and they never walk away until you say yes. Yeah, that's right. You gotta There's two things you got to remember when you're in sales. You only want to hear one of two things. You go back to your client and you're going to hear you again. Get the hell out of here and don't come back. Or they say, "All right, here's the order. Get it done." That's what we want. And you're from Chicago, so luckily most of your stories, the statutes of limitations have, uh, have expired on, right? So, uh, so, so we get to hear a lot of good stories. You own a you but even during your contracting phases, you own a bar down there, I guess, too, right? Uh, I hear a lot of stories about the bar. I owned a successful tavern in Chicago on the south side for many, many years. And uh I didn't partake too much in the uh product, but uh a little bit here and there, but uh yeah, I've had a storied life. Three children, 11 grandchildren, three great grandchildren, and here I am working for my son Brian. So what uh and we're glad to have you. I mean, it's definitely been a pleasure. I know. And and you're right. You did come in uh I think we were just heading down to the hospital or something with Yadira and you came in to help answer the phones for a week or something. We were going to be gone for a week or two and I you were going to come in and help answer the phones. You had some contracting experience going back your whole life and I don't think you ever left. Years ago, I'm like the godfather when he tried to get out and he goes, "Hey, they reeled me back in again." It's f No, that's fencing. That's fencing. Once you're in fencing, you're in it for life. And a lot of people on here will tell you it's uh it's a life it becomes a lifelong career. And even you when you drive through town, you've been doing it here for a while, tell me you don't look over, you're like, "That's my fence." I know. I'm always telling uh Tatiana when we're driving down the street, I put that fence up. And she's like, "Who cares? I care. I put it up." I know. It's a big Las Vegas fence. Yeah. So the and one of the reasons we wanted you on here for this one was because um when you came in, you came from a lot of work with general contractors and things like that. So you were used to the uh traditional GC subcontractor quoting and how it's uh it's done in a basic paragraph per plans inspect. I mean I think quotes if anything bidding commercial jobs actually bidding the jobs is probably easier because you know some of those general contractors because you don't have to put any effort into quotes. You just say hey it's going to be $186,000 as per bids and plans or however you you know what I mean? however they want to word it. And there really isn't a lot of thought and stuff that goes into the quotes other than most of the time goes into figuring out the price. So, I know that's where you and I go

Back and forth sometimes because you spend a lot of time figuring up the price because that's how it is. That's how it is in the general contractor world. It's all the time is spent on the actual pricing and now that you're on this side of it doing uh working, you know, directly for the the people purchasing it, it's a lot of actually more salesmanship, right, is what comes in. Exactly. and the system that you have uh devised with the drawing and the specification of the fence to the left and all what we're going to use really sells the job. There's minimal amount of verbiage where we got to go on and on and on. We show it, we draw it, they look, they know exactly what they're getting, how many feet, how many posts and gates, what type of gate. It's very self-explanatory. Yeah. And uh we're going to get in we're going to get into that and we're actually going to do a quote live here um on my fence life. We're going to do a chain link fence quote um drawing and put a number on it. Uh kind of obviously this isn't a real quote, but we're going to do that live here shortly. So stay tuned. But before we do that um we are going to get into a few things while we got on here to help. It's gonna be [singing] you'll never except you're Sean today because uh Sean couldn't make it. He's got some training. He is on the road. But uh Steve uh you and I are going to answer some questions from fence industry only group on Facebook. So again, all these questions we haven't seen, you haven't you haven't been told any of these questions yet, have you Steve? So nope. And I don't get to see them either. Susan pulls these randomly from the fence industry only page uh or group on Facebook. So, first question, Susan, why don't you read them and figure out who this is for? This is Josh Gifin. Um he said, "So, he's piggybacking off of his last post on what to use for swampy ground. I'm looking for recommendations on a good steel post supplier. He needs 8 foot and 10 foot 2 in plus post. Thanks again. I appreciate you guys. We know tons of great fence suppliers. They're all over. I mean, well, you can start by uh just go to fence showow fence.com and take a look at the list, right? You'll see a a big list depending on where you're at. Send us a message though. Send us a message and we'll reach out to all the um you know, all the distributors and stuff that that are in our network for sure or drop. I wish I would have saw this on fence industry only. Um I probably would have commented on there. Um and he's saying 2 inch. So obviously I'm I'm assuming you know it's you know I don't know if it's back east thing or I mean I know Master Huckle uses used to use the 2 in instead of one and 78 and some companies use one and 78. So um most likely he's looking at um this came from somewhere where they they call it a two inch. So maybe this is from back east but um yeah I mean I obviously you got your your you know your large ones Master Hulco the Merchant Metals. Um and God I feel like I'm gonna now I'm not going to mention a bunch. Eagle Fence Supply. Uh I like the go I like the go to fenceshow.com and you'll be able to see a list of like every distributor there is across the nation. Yeah. Builder Spence. Uh I mean I know Lions Fence has some access to it. Uh we go um even Sheen Cotton do they they sell some through uh MD West, you know, MD West, Midwest Fence Supply, Midwest Fence Supply. Um, it's it's I mean, and I know I probably didn't name one that I'm going to be like, you know, later on wake up going, "Oh man, they're going to think I didn't think of them." But best thing you could do, go to fenceshow.com. Uh, take a look at the exhibitors that have exhibited at our show and you'll see a bunch. Drop us a message and we'll search through our list um of people that get you contacts. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Re send it to What email do you want them to send that that question to if somebody has wanted to find a supplier? Support fenceworkers.com or supportshare.com. Yeah. Whichever one you remember. Yeah. Supporters.org or fenceshow.com. Yeah, that's okay. Um, anyway, next question. Did you Did you see Easy Lvers in the comments?

Easy Lver. Yeah, that's cool. If you haven't seen those, those are pretty cool products, too. Thanks for uh watching. Um, I got Jared Allen Griffin. He's a rising contributor. He says he's looking to branch out and start his own fencing business. He looked at all the fence gurus on the YouTube world, Mr. Fence, Joe Everest, etc. I was wondering what you all would recommend to be my piece of equipment to dig holes with should be. He's a one to twoman operation and can only rely on himself to show up every day. He was thinking a little beaver augur would be his best bet or a general twoman augur not looking to go into debt. So a mini skid is not in the budget yet. Hopefully down the road. Um any advice is appreciated. Um I see two people here who know all about starting a fence company or a business. Well Steve, if you don't mind I'll take this one. I'm going to let you take the next one since I know I know I don't want to hog them all up, but um I can tell you what I started with, you know, and I'm not saying it's it's correct in every area, but um we do own a couple Little Beavers here. Um but the very first one I bought was um and it was used from like a rentals here. I think I bought it for like 600 bucks or something and it was um like I said, it was a used one. They had, you know, they sell, you know, some of the rental companies sell off their and I think it's a good resource to go go to your local rental companies and because rental companies do a pretty good job maintaining it. They have records where they maintain the equipment themselves as well because they go to rent it out. So, um it's a little better in buying I think sometimes for someone else. While it does get used a lot because it's rented, but my very first piece of equipment was a groundhog and it was the mechanical one, not the hydraulic one. So, we didn't have the reverse and stuff, but I the groundhog with a 6-in auger bit was my very first piece of equipment um that I purchased. And then later on um I purchased the hydraulic groundhog which was had the reverse and that was a little nicer and you could tow that one behind the truck so you didn't you know for one person you didn't have to get it up on up on a trailer or something. So um that was kind of nice because I had a an attachment where you can just hook it up to your standard twoinch ball on the back of your truck. Um, and then obviously you start to grow as you grow and I got into a bobcat with this uh skidster with a bobcat attachment and but recently we got the we bought two little beavers and the guys really love the beavers. Uh yeah, I was I was surprised. But you give them a choice, they take the beavers. Um maybe it's because it's lighter and they have to load it or something, but I I guess myself I like to dig with the groundhog. Um I because I don't like to have to lift that thing, you know, be carried as much the the head of it. But the guys love the beaver. So, Little Beaver, Groundhog is probably your go-to. I don't know about you, Steve. What do you think? Yeah, we I like the Little Beavers. The guys uh for our ground out here, they work very well. Can't beat the groundhog. It's a go-to piece of equipment. You can tow it. It's easy to use. So, easy to interchange the augers. So, yeah. Oh, you dear saying, "What about dandy digger?" Well, if you can afford a dandy digger, you probably can afford um that's definitely where to go. So, if you can afford a dandy digger, um then you could probably afford a skidster. So, he's saying he's not ready for a mini skidster. He's definitely not ready for a dandy digger or a fullsize skidster. Um dandy diggers are they make I think they make them up in northern Nevada. They're pretty popular down here. It has a lot of especially down here because the digging is so hard. It's got such great down pressure that it'll actually pop straight through asphalt as well. You don't even have to like you don't even you could put the the right auger bit attachment on it. It'll because the augur is actually more to the center of it and and it'll actually go and pop straight through asphalt without even have to like take a jackhammer and and pop the asphalt out first. So, yeah, she's right though. Um Danny Digger is a is definitely one if you can afford can't go wrong with. Um a lot of guys have them down here in Las Vegas.

And uh if you noticed, Anony's letting us know that San Diego Fence is now selling fence materials. Oh, you got lots of options. Oh, pull him back up. I gotta reach out to him. Uh, you know, San Diego Fence was one of my first jobs, man. I must have been 17 to 18 years old driving around in those little San Diego Fence cars, little geometros, uh, making estimates. It was probably one of my first sales sales jobs ever at San Diego Fence. Man, that's that's awesome. Um, I didn't know. Yeah, they didn't sell fence materials back then, so that's good to know. Uh, it's a solid outfit. Uh, uh, the owner, the old guy that we used to used to go eat breakfast with and stuff. Um, that's funny. Yeah. Anyway, Anthony, uh, good to know. Thanks for letting us know. Awesome. Okay, our next question is from Bluebird Construction. Um, they are required to prime and paint this pipe fence. What would uh fence professionals um suggest for paint materials and prime for uh metal pipe? Well, wow, this is right up my alley. I know. I didn't even try many of uh fence. And obviously after you go through and prepare it by, you know, wire brushing the wire brush, spot priming it, uh, all the fence manufacturers now got high-tech paints, water waterborne paint, and you use that DTM, direct to metal. That stuff works very, very well. It's got a good UV uh, value to it. it uh doesn't fade as fast uh the DTM, but I would check with Sheron Williams. They're the go-to as far as I'm concerned. They got a lot of products, lot of good uh waterborne products since the uh oilbased and the alenbased now, they don't want to use them. Especially looks like this rural area where you have a lot of landscape, you don't want to spill it, harm the environment. But that's what I would use. DTM. Nice. Awesome. Thank you. Comes in black, too. Does it? Oh, yeah. Like Henry Ford, you can have any color you want as long as it's black. And now we know why you keep Steve around. Yeah. He's the one I send in there when someone wants a custom color. I'm like, "Yeah, no problem. Go run that by Steve up at the front. He'll tell you. He'll tell you about all your choices." Yeah, that's what the guy a customer asked me the other day, "What colors does it come in?" I said, "It comes in any color, but you got to have black." Yeah. As you can see, guys, uh we sell a lot of black iron fence. Yep. It's going to cost you twice as much to get any other color because we're going to send it to powder coating, right? Pretty much black now. I think that's standard. So, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty standard when you order uh panels already prefabed. Yeah. A lot of it comes in black. What else is going on, Susan? I I feel like you in a few days, right? You're gonna see me in a few days. Steve, are you going on the fence cruise? Uh, no. Someone has to work here. Oh, yeah. I was told earbuffs. Yeah. Yesterday I was told, "Oh, oh, by the way, I won't be in next week." I had that conversation. A lot of us a lot of us won't be there. So, um I I know um all of us are getting to Miami either Saturday or Sunday. I'll be there on Sunday. Um and then on Monday, we we board the ship. Wow. Yeah. We got a kind of a a loose agenda. I know on Tuesday, the first day out to see um we're going to do a meet and greet breakfast um from like 8 to 10 and that's going to be before our training session from 11 to 1. I know um you and Brooks are doing um one session. Yeah, FYI, y'all are doing a session on the intro to uh the quick start class. Okay. And then um session two will start right afterwards and that's going to be Sean King and Sam Nutello on u marketing and branding. So I mean you know we're about to have four really inspirational speakers up there. I'm excited. Can anybody come to this or do they have to be going on the cruise? I would say anybody can come to it if you can get there on the ship. Um, and then of course we're doing a group breakfast on the Thursday and then Thursday night we're going to do Brooks

And Booze where we get together and we throw drinks at Brooks. Alo, it says Brooks at Boo Boos at Brooks. But for everybody who's not able to make it onto the cruise because we do understand that you have businesses to run on Saturday. We're doing a vinyl fence meetup at the Fat Tuesdays in Miami. We have the address there. We're going to have these flyers up everywhere at 6 PM. Come stop by. Um you're buying your own drinks. I'm sorry you guys, but it's a great opportunity to come sit down and and share a drink with us and um all get to know each other. I'm excited. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's going to be bring back some Brater. I think we're all going to be bringing back something. Yeah. Hopefully it's just sea water, not uh not hangovers, right? But it's going to be uh it's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. I know. We're uh we're looking forward to it. We're coming in on Sunday, too. So, um then we're all I think it's just one night and then we get on the cruise ship the next day. So, um I think this is it. Let's do an estimate. What do you say? Let's get estimating. Who's excited? Who's excited? So, uh I'm going to pull this thing up. I'm basically going to show you guys uh one of our blank estim. This is what Steve deals with on a daily basis. And how we go about um doing a quote. So we go out and look at a project. We come back and sometimes we do this in the field, but uh in general, this is a blank. So we go and and and search for a blank bid. Las Vegas fence blank bid. This is what pops up at our end. And you see those those uh a square, a triangle, um a line, a solid line, and then also a dash line. Pretty much the entire quote is done with those. And uh the street down below that. So there's not anything we pretty much add to it besides this. But that's no fun because not everybody has it already configured, right? So I'm going to go ahead and delete all those and show you how you do it when you start from scratch. But that is how we start when we're doing the quotes. So this is your basic Excel and I'm going to this is this is your Excel program. A lot of times people don't realize we do shop drawings. We do everything on Excel. This was be, you know, before a lot of we didn't really have a lot of estimating programs and stuff when there's there is programs out there that help you do the drawing, but um until you can get to the point where you can afford one, maybe that's going to do some of that. I I'm very specific on how I like my quotes to look. Steve will tell you it's, you know, a proven method almost over a period of decades. And I've done I've done this with multiple different sales people where they come in and they're used to doing it in a paragraph and they don't want to follow this. And then we give them, you know, a percentage of leads and we we follow that and track that what's closing. And this is proven to show that your your closing ratios will go up if you do a better job selling it and spending your time selling the job, not just selling price. So, um, this is how we do it. And we start with this. And again, this is just a mockup. So, none of this is going to be real. That's why you see sample and the contractor's license, liability, project limits, and things like that. We start with we have a running a running thing. And this might be LVF, our quote system. LVF, it's 25, and say we're at quote number 151. So, we put that in there and everything's referenced off of that. So, we're going to put um the company's going to be um MGA MGJ Hotel, we'll call it, right? And we're going to go through the basic information of the address. 1 2 3 4 Main Street, Las Vegas. And hopefully you guys are going to type better than me. It's a little slow reaction on the screen, but Nevada 89 1 2 3 4. Well, that's too many digits, right? Okay. Uh, contact person is going to be Steve. I'm just going to go through uh literally how we do it. Steve, we're going to put Smith. And this would be our customer that we put in there. And uh we do a lot with properties where um there's a different property owner than the actual project and stuff that we're working for. So, that's why you see two uh two areas here. The phone number is going to be 7025551212.

Um, pre-filled in depending on the salesperson. Um, your information, sales and stuff here. Job name might be a little different. Maybe it's going to be um, parking garage.

Job address. In this case, we're going to put same. And email address. This is where we're going to put Steve. We'd like to have that information because later on it may not seem like a big deal at the time, but later on when you have someone else send it out for you. Steve at MJ Mgj. No, no, we're not going to send it to you. This is the customer.com. So, the customer, right, the date, we put in today's date. I know this is a little monotonous right now, but let's see. Okay, so now the fun part. Once they get that stuff out of the way, and sometimes if it's an existing customer, this stuff's just already uh we have a blank one for that customer. If we give a customer um a lot of the same quotes, we just have one instead of LVF blank bid, it'll say LVF uh M. It'll say M MGJ bid and that way pulls up every time with this contact information in it. But um we'll do the type here. We're going to do a chain link fence and on the next next one we'll do an iron fence for everybody. But on this show, we're just going to do a chain link one. Uh we're going to go six foot high footage. I always include the gates on the footage for one. It's harder for people to reverse engineer your pricing if you figure the gates in it as well and things like that. So, um, we're going to call itund. I might have to change this after we do the drawing because normally I would have done a drawing and stuff first, but I'm just kind of going through this things on the on the actual footage. Um, we're going to call six foot tall fence. So, we're going to go line post 1 and 78, 2 and 38, uh, 2 and 78 inch on the gate posts. rail. I'm going to put in one and 5/8. And again, there's I know there's programs out there that'll do some of this for you, but I actually like this to go through this yourself every single time. I like my sales people to do it because I want them to revisit the job that they looked at and understand that when they're bidding something by putting in the wrong item, the wrong uh loop, the wrong line post or the wrong end post, you could change you could change the whole quote drastically and you could go from making money to losing money real fast. So, aren't these aren't these blank forms also on fenceworkers.org or as well for people to kind of have like a an idea of where to start if they, you know, are starting off and and are willing to do it in their own Excel system. Yeah, for sure. So, if you have anybody has um a Microsoft Office Excel, uh can go into um go into fenceworkers.org, go to resources page, and you can actually download these quote forms, and you can go up and change this logo. This logo is just uh just an image. So, you could change that logo if you wanted, you know, and boom, change a couple information and you got a quote. I mean, we're there's nothing at Las Vegas fence that we don't share out there. If somebody wants to try to do and make better, um, if you had a second type of fence, like an 8ft tall fence, you could do it there. I always list the gates. It's going to be one three-foot walk and one

One 12T. We'll call it a doublegate. It's hard for me to see the other screen over there. Sorry. So, um anyway, so then we go into the drawing here. And that's kind of basically where I start with just getting that basic information down there. And then if I had those, uh drawing shapes that I had on there, I wouldn't have to do anything else other than just drag those around. But we're going to uh we're going to do it how I normally do it and how I train people. And Steve, what's the first thing we would normally do? Start at the bottom and put the street. That's it. Okay. And I grab this line right here. Oh, you can't see that. But I'm going to grab a line up on top and and that's under your insert tab. And I'm going to drag that right there. And none of this has to be that perfect. You could go like this. And then I go up into insert again, which I don't think you guys can see that. You can see me click on it, but not the drop down. So, yeah, you can I can see it. Okay. Um, you go over to um text over here, and you're going to do word art. And I just select the black one, and it's going to be real big like this. And I'm going to put uh what is it? Main Street. And again, I would have already had these things resized. So then I'm going to open that up and I'm going to rightclick it, change the size down to whatever I want. In this case, right about there. I'm going to drag it in there. And I've just now created my street. And for me, everything starts with a street because that's where your crew goes to. That's where the customer starts at. When you send a customer or uh or a crew out to a job site, first thing they do is they're where do they start? On the street. They just drove there. So I always start at the street. And I'm going to do basically on a residential one here, just a house. Um, and I start with the house. So I grab a square and I just use the default colors. The blue is fine. That's going to default as a blue. So I start with the house. And again, you can move this around afterwards. Start with that house right in the middle. Right? And uh I just use a square house. Then I'm going to go and grab now I'm going to draw the fence lines themselves. And you notice how this line came the same as this, right? The problem with the lines being the same is it's hard to differentiate between walls and everything else. So I go and I I rightclick this and I can either do it from in here to go and um open up the things. But as second I right click that. Do you see what opened up on the right on the on the left on the right there where it says format shapes. So again, you know, I can close that. But as soon as I right click on it and say format shape right here, this is going to open up. So once you open that up, it's going to stay open for the rest of the thing. So I'm going to go over to line. There's two things here. Fill, you notice how there's two things here. Automatically went to the line, but there's two things here that you deal with. Line is the first one. So I make this a three. Again, I would have this defaulted already, but just so you know. And I make it black if it's the fence. And I'm I'm doing it the long way right now, so I realize just But uh and I would just drag it right here wherever I want. Just right there. And then this time I already have it once. I can hit control C once I'm on it and controlV and it just gave me another one. So it's a lot of control and a lot of control uh C andrlv's. Then I'm going to go like this and then I'm going to go C andrl + V again. And this time I'm going to move it and I'm going to go around the house. And then I'm going to I'm going to make sure I'm I'm you can kind of see the dots on it tell you that we're working with it still. Crl + Crl + V. Except this time I'm going to put that double gate that I that I wanted in there, right? The one that we had uh in the quote. And I want a straight up and down line after that. So I'm going to go ahead and just add it right there. And let's make this double gate. Again, it's just I it's just, you know, this is your basic Excel program, but when you're done, the customers can't tell you're using Excel. and you get really quick at it. So, I'm going to go controll Ctrl +V. I'm going to keep doing that until I get the drawing I want. And then I'm going to show you how to draw the actual fence

Like that. So, now we've got our actual fence line, right? And now we've actually we've actually went and and we already have a text in here. So, we can use this text for everything whether you want to resize it or not. So that's why we had a text in the last one. I didn't just draw the street on there just to have the street on there. I did it because I wanted the lines, you know, to work with. So I'm going to do the same thing. Ctrl + C, Ctrl +V, except this time I'm going to shrink that down a little bit more using the right click. And then and then it shows you the text sizes. Except this time I'm going to go 10 ft. This is where I'm going to add all my dimensions for the actual fence. Now in

And every once in a while you'll go, "Oh man, I got two of the foot signs." You got to go in and delete one. But it's just a part of doing a quote with Excel. Okay, so now I'm going to try to copy that and paste that again.

85 ft. And I can keep hitting control +V and it's going to keep giving me now I don't have to keep copy and pasting. It's going to keep giving me the numbers until I need it, right? Until I'm done. So 30 feet 12 feet and I I doubt all these numbers total up to my 155 over there, but um we would already have those numbers before we started. So um and I would type three-foot walkgate. And you get really quick at these because if you had all these these stuff in there already, it would have um you would have just drugged these around real quick and had like did your whole quote in like five minutes. So um I'm going to highlight it all. I'm going to do a 12oot doublegate.

This should look pretty familiar to you, Steve, right? So, yes, and I can attest that this not only is just a sales tool, but when you get the job using this system, you can come back, make your uh work order, and the guys know exactly where the fence goes. We can calculate how many posts we need, how many line posts, end post, gate post, terminals by looking right at this drawing. Yeah. And a lot of this turns into your work order because sometimes your salesman's not there or maybe a salesman um doesn't work for you anymore and a quote comes six months later and you just I don't like that term. So So you come you end up having to go back and um you know and you just you look at a quote that somebody calls and go ahead with and maybe they just have a paragraph. That's why I hate paragraphs. I hate it when someone goes and says supply and install material and labor to install 156 feet of six foot tall chain link fence with one watt gate, one double gate, and then if somebody calls to go ahead with it, you're stuck with sending somebody out to look at it again. And and it's it's amazing how we'll spend the guy the guy selling you, you know, a cell phone at at, you know, at the mall spends more time trying to sell you a phone than sometimes we spend doing a quote for $15,000. So, um it's it's it's definitely important. So, this right here though to me, you would think would be enough, right? I already explained the fence. I've already done this. But is this enough, Steve? No, it's not. Because what what would happen? What could happen? This next Well, this next procedure, I know what you're going to do. Draw the fence. Eliminates any doubt to the customer as to how high the fence is, where it's going to be. And uh Brian will show you right now. So, and um I'm going to use this square thing. See how I highlighted this? I'm going to build almost the whole fence except for um except for one thing that we're going to need. So, with everything that's on the screen. So, I'm going to go like this. Crl + Ctrl +V. I'm going to drag this. I'm going to drag this and I'm going to make a line post. Now, um I only I on this I only like to use line post. And Steve Steve knows um why. It's because if you draw an end post and you start drawing how it's, you know, you got to start drawing other stuff like uh the rail ends, loop caps, how many tension tension bands, all these. You have to get a lot more detailed and you can make a mistake and you don't want to do more than one post. Um otherwise otherwise the actual drawing might have some details that you might not be able to duplicate in the field. So I'm going to do um this as a line post. I just did this. I'm going to control crl +v. You start with your line post and then I'm gonna do a top rail, right? But that doesn't that's not good enough to make it look like a fence, is it, Steve? And I'm going to move this down just for the heck of it. Um, again, I'm going to keep doing Ctrl +V. Right. But one thing that we are missing is a loop cap. Right. So that would have been on my if you remember seeing that that pyramid on on the triangle on the other one. That's what it was for. That's your loop cap. And you can shape shape that whatever you want. So now I'm going to go and and make this thing on here. I'm going to drag it here. And that looks funky though, doesn't it? That doesn't look like a chain link fence to me. Does it look like a chain link fence to you? Would you buy that fence? Right. So I'm going to right click again. And when I right clicked it, you know, all that stuff. I'm going to hit format shape. This is what the fill is for. Remember what I told you there was two things. Right. So now we're going to go to pattern fill. And if you notice there's a chain link one. I don't call it chain link one. It's not meant for that. But that doesn't look good enough, does it? No. Right. So we're going to go back to formatting that. Right. And we don't want a line around it. So we're going to get rid of the line. But that still doesn't look right, does it? Nope. You know, so um we're going to drag that down a little bit. But now if we go to um back to hit the right click and this stuff pops up again. I don't know if you can see that. Probably not. Um there's a

A button here that says send to back. Look at that. I just sent it to back. Stop it. Right. So um we could send it to the front, right? Or you can make it you can actually go and make it trans uh transparent if you want. There's different things as you as you start playing with it. you can start you can start really messing with it um a little bit more. So um then what I'm going to do is one last time I got this line here. So I'll probably either steal this line or I probably would have drawn a new one. I would have grabbed one from up above. So I'm going to put it that on there. And had this been a plated job, I probably would have came up and grabbed either a line or I would have grabbed another square and just made it as thin as I could. Again, nothing has to be to scale. You're just trying to make sure a customer knows what you're doing. Right. Right. [snorts] So, I probably would have done something like that or I would have done a um again, there's no wrong or right way to do this as long as you're just showing them something. Or even grab a line like this and go over into your line thicknesses and make that whatever thickness looks right for the drawing that you happen to be doing. But I think I I hate cut copying and cutting and pasting these things because I think it you could accidentally cut and paste the wrong one in and you're doing the wrong kind of fence. Right. Right. So, and the only time I'm I'm actually showing a couple different ways to do it, but in theory you'll be able to do this pretty quickly yourself. Well, apparently Jeremiah Alexander does it as well. He but he likes to make his transparent so you can see through it. Yeah, you could go and make this transparent and then and pop it through. So, it again it's up to preference on that. You could drag this around a little bit, make it, and you could be very specific on where you want that. But, um, the other thing I would do that I always do is because now it's a really big deal to make sure this customer any anything that's that that can be, uh, confused on a contract is when you're standing in front of a judge or something is always going to go to the customer unless it's really clear, right? You'll lose that battle nine out of 10en times if the contract isn't really clear and there's some sort of discrepancy on on what you meant and what the customer thought they were getting. So, I like to make it super clear. So, I'm gonna go something like this, and then I'm going to grab another one of these numbers. So, how many times have you had to go to court and bring your quotes along to show that you were clear? Oh, no. I've had it on um and I'll show I've had it when I when I drove a post, driving post, where I actually did the drawing, and I'll show you where uh where it really came into play. And my screen's not responding as much on this. So, it's a lot quicker if you have your you're not trying to share your screen, but um I would do six feet right here. Susan, I've never had a job I've had to go to court on. So, this system works very well because it shows exactly what we're doing. I've never had to go to court. Um but I I have had to defend driving post once um because I drove the post instead of setting them in concrete um in front of the contractor's board. And I won. I won because the customer was trying to say we didn't uh we were supposed to be concrete and I and I you know I I had that. But if you um if a customer now tried to say come back and say hey I thought I was getting I told you I had dogs. You knew that I didn't want the fence to kick out. Uh this this whole thing should have a bottom rail on it. Would he have a hard time def saying that he thought he was getting a fence? Now if he said Steve told me I was getting a bottom rail. The salesman told me he promised me this would have a mid rail. It would have bracing. It would should have a bottom rail along the whole thing. and the salesperson said this, the salesperson said that, and you're on the phone going, "Well, he shouldn't have said that. I don't think he said that." Um, what can I refer to? I can refer him right back to this drawing. I've got a signature on the bottom of this quote from the customer, right? Saying that he understood what he was getting. So, um, and same thing if I was driving posts in the ground. I I

Think you'd be insane to do a quote driving post in the ground and not actually draw that you were driving the post in the ground because um, the universal standard is not driving a post in the ground. Although we do it and everybody else does it, you would want to have something showing um, that you were driving them in the ground. So, I would probably if it was a a drill, we don't do it as much because of just the type of fences that we build, but um I would have something like this and then I would make a comment saying um post driven. Yeah, post drove into ground. Not frowned, but ground.

So, I would probably spell it better than I just did, but um and then I would do an arrow. I would steal an arrow from here.

And what's that going to do? If somebody tries to say anything, you know, it just it's going to do it. Or clear. Yeah. or if you had a specific type of concrete footing. I wouldn't draw the concrete footing unless you absolutely had to. But um I would draw a footing similar to that. I would send that to the back. Um I would go into pattern fill and change that to some sort of concrete. You see all these different pattern fills, you know. And if this happens to be I'm going to get rid of the street for now um and show you if I was doing it I would have done the drawing. So, um, if this was going to be on a wall, what would you do? I would probably, again, there's so much you can do with this. I'm going to get rid of that that stuff. I'm going to do this as a wall here. And say this was going on top of a wall. I would go into pattern fill. I would grab the wall. So, I have Brooks down here saying he uses Excel as well, but he has a separate page in his contract for drawing um that has the building, the driveway, etc. are pre-drawn, a legend, and low voltage icons. Um, he's saying his way is way better. Yeah. So, um, I think having a separate drawing page, I think that it's the mistake because, um, it should all you should design your quotes and you should be able to do good enough job. Like say this was uh, again, this is a fake one, 5525 the quote price, right? So, um, when you look at this quote, right, your eyes are drawn to what? The most aesthetic thing anywhere. I mean, if you had decorative, and I tell people that when you're when you're selling a gate, uh, you know, on the side of somebody's house and they they want to do this big fancy draw this big fancy gate in the side of their house and the first thing I say is, well, when they people walk up to your house, are you trying to what are you trying to draw their eyes to? The side of your house or your your house or and sometimes that is what they're trying to do, maybe that side of the house. So, if you do a big decorative gate on the left side of your house, your eyes are going to be drawn to this big decorative gate. So, if you have something on the side of your house you don't want everybody to see, you probably don't want to put a big, you know, behind the gate, you probably don't want to put a big decorative gate five foot tall with this big 12- foot tall monstrosity thing behind it, right? You want to put something basic and have their eyes drawn to your house instead of that. Same thing with this. If you're looking at this um and again, just my opinion, and it's just going off of uh you know, me doing quotes the last 30 years and developing my quote forms to kind of fit that. But are is your eyes drawn to the price or is it drawn to the drawing? The drawing 100%. You know, if you go to a car lot, uh, and you want and and they're trying to sell cars, are they going to make you fall in love with the car and make you makes sure this is the one you want? They're going to show you the car. And then you tell them, "Hey, how much the whistles and you you ask them how much this car is?" He's going to say, "Well, hey, let's grab some keys. Let's go see if you like it. Let's test drive it. Let's they want to show you the car or show you something." And then they'll say, then then they say, "Let's go sit down and and now they got you to love it." So, what this does is gives you this one split-second chance to show this customer that you understood what they wanted and you you know you understood what they you know what they need and you and they might even have a question. They might even come back and say, "Hey, um that's not what I wanted." Now, you've got a dialogue going. Now, they're committed to you with having a conversation to start uh you know to start building the fence that they do want. So, um, I think that if you just have a paragraph and you have a a description and all your disclaimers, and I have all those on there, which is down here, but if you had all these disclaimers and you have them read your terms of agreement and all the negative stuff first and the price, now you've got a customer just shopping price and you're no longer selling, you're just an order taker. And if that if I mean, I would never hire an order taker to go out. I would never spend all that money on a lead to send an order taker out,

Then I might as have them sitting in the office. Again, that's my opinion as a sales guy. But as you advance into, you know, there's software out there that that will do it. But I think I think what we're going to see is if you if you get down to stop selling, you're going to end up having to have more leads because if your theory is just to throw as much pricing as you can out at everybody, um, and hopefully one of them will grab it and commit to you before you even go look at it or something sometimes. I don't know. I think that's going to require more leads and now your cost per lead is going to go up because you got to have more leads to throw away a bunch. So, um, I'm a firm believer in shaking hands, getting out there, and when you call up, we schedule your appointment right away. Um, and we go out there and try to make the sale. I mean, typically I've asked for the sale before someone else has even looked at it. You know, you know, on the sales side, there's always, uh, this drawing, there's no questions. Customer calls up and says, "Wow, I didn't realize." Or you called the customer and said, "Hey, can we start your uh, project?" They go, "Wow, I didn't know it was going to be that much." And you go, "Wait, hold it." You see, you got 155 feet of fence. They go, "Wow, I didn't realize that. You're right." So, there's a lot of advantages to this. And it looked like it was pretty complicated, but it's not. Today I did six uh estimates I sent out and uh so it goes pretty fast and I haven't had a complaint from one customer yet as to our uh estimates or quotes when I send it to them. It's pretty What I like about this is this can actually be done on site in person right in front of the customer very quickly, especially if you have the pre-loaded template with your with your designs like you were saying. You know what I mean? So, I mean that you don't have a reason to walk away and not ask for the sale because you've already given them a quote. It's right there. It's clear. Yeah. And um I can tell you there's times when if you do if you do do a good enough job selling it, um the price is is secondary. And there's going to be people that are price always people that are price conscious. But I think that and Steve will probably um attest to this. Uh and everybody has stories how they got, you know, they were the highest bid and they still got it. But Steve will tell you that there's people that say, "I just flat out want to use you and they loved his drawings." And uh they even if they get a better a better price, they'll call and say, "Hey, we really want to use you guys. You understood what I wanted." Um Steve, what about your feedback from customers when you do a drawing? Yeah, they love it. I I just had just what you just said yesterday. I had a client uh they wanted a uh little cage built to lock up all their tools. And in talking to the guy, he said, "I'm using uh two foot shelving inside there." And when I looked at it was only 12 feet wide. He's using two foot uh shelving all the way around. I says, "Wow, you're not going to have enough room to walk in there." He goes, "Wow." when after I showed him the drawing 12 by 24, he goes, "You know what? You're right. Push it out to 14 by 26." So, it does work. And uh I says, "How you going to lock this up?" He goes, "Well, we don't want no one to get in." So, wow. We sold a keypad with the guy. So, nice. There's a lot of uh advantages to seeing this right in front of you and looking at it and saying, "Wow, I didn't realize I had that." And wow, you're going to use these good posts. So, there's a lot of advantages to it. Yeah. So, again, takes my selling skills away a little bit after No, you're still selling. He's It takes followup and everything like everything else. Yeah. You got to follow up. You gotta do it ABC. Always be closing. Yeah. But um this doesn't mean to take away from software that's out there and as you advance the the big advantages to software programs out there um that are in our industry and other industries are it does take a lot of this and streamline this the learning curve you know um obviously you don't have to learn how to use Excel you don't have to do all this you don't have to um you know you don't have to go through and save it and save it as a PDF and then email it as a document and you know

Things like that and it'll help with the estimating on um coming up with the pricing and things like that. So, this is a manual way to do it. We just been doing it for this way for 20ome years. So, um we haven't found um the ability to switch over quite yet to um you know, anything else yet, but there's a lot of great ones out there that we're going to be probably um researching. But if you can't afford um to do anything and you've got Excel, there's no reason you can't send out a professional looking quote today, you know, with one of the one of the advantages of doing this is it double checks you. You look at the drawing and you go, "Wow, 155 feet of fence, six foot at only 5,500. Did I make a mistake? It's got two gates. Let me let me look at this again." So, it double checks you to make sure that you have included everything. You're uh right on your price and you can go back if a customer calls you up and says, "Hey, you know what? Your price is 555." You know, Joe Blow down the street says he he can do it for 51. You can look at your drawings, see, and it's easy to make a decision whether you should discount it or not. But it also double checks you. And that's it, you guys. If you work for somebody that's not my money, I gotta I gotta double check. Well, I appreciate that. I do love to double check something before a price goes out because we are on the hook for it. And I look at it like this. Every quote that somebody sends out um from Las Vegas Fence, I'm on the hook for it. Doesn't, you know, and this whole employees love to say my bad. My bad. No, it ain't your bad. It's it's it's it's my bad. It's gonna, you know, it's it's we're liable for it. And just by saying my bad, I made a mistake. Doesn't mean the mistake didn't happen. It doesn't mean I'm not going to pay um personally. you know, it's your bath, but you're not gonna pay the the $5,000 to change this fence that you didn't have the time to make a drawing on, right? You know what I mean? You didn't. So, I'm paying somebody to drive out there, and I think a lot of us do as business owners. We're paying you to to drive out there to measure it, to look at it, to come back to make the quote, but you don't think that we we wanted you to spend an extra five minutes and do a drawing, you're highly mistaken and make sure make sure and cover us liabilitywise. So, but again, there's a lot of programs out there um that will do this that will do this for you. I don't know if they'll get all in one. I like it. I don't I you know, I don't personally don't like the customers to see the price before they see the drawing. So, I'd like to see um the drawing be the first thing they see. But, um and there might be programs out there like that. Um again, go to the fence show because uh almost every anybody who's everybody in the um you know, quoting, estimating software, pretty much anybody that's that's doing this in our industry is at the fence show. So, um go to fenceshow.com, take a look. um you know at last year's exhibitors and next year's um and see who's going to be there. Come out and try out the software there. I think that's a good way to do it, too. But again, it's a quick way to do it. I think Susan um if people are interested, we'll do the iron one um in one of the episodes coming up. Show you how we do the iron fence quotes, which is a little bit different, but the drawing um the drawing is obviously a lot different ways to do it. Um any any any last minute questions uh Susan you might have for us? I don't think so. Um I like this. I like where it's going. I definitely think we should uh offer more hands-on training with Excel. Um just for people in general, I think it's good information to have. But um I I guess my only question is is now that my fence life is about to end, does that mean I'm off until um we go on the cruise? Like is it boo is it is it booze cruise time? Well, you got about a half hour until we meet up on some leadership team stuff. But Got it. I'm excited. I'm excited. It's gonna be it's gonna be a great uh networking and education opportunity. Yep. All right. Well, Steve, thank you for coming on. Um you got to get back. It was my pleasure. My pleasure. And all you guys ask for the order, remember, unless you're in Vegas, then just give them up.

Blow it off. And I'll get the order. All right. You got to get back to work. You're falling behind already, probably. I know. We'll talk for letting me work a half a day today. take the rest of the day off after you get your quotes off. All right, we'll we'll talk to you guys later. All right, thank you. See you.