Guides / Winning Work

Why a Shop With the Right Machine Still Loses the Job

September 23, 2026

Shops with a boring mill, a gantry or a large vertical lathe tend to quote a lot of heavy work and win a small share of it. The trade press has been writing about this gap for years, and the shops themselves usually put it down to price.

Price is rarely the whole story. Look at the quotes side by side, as the buyer does, and a different pattern appears.

The buyer is not comparing prices, at first

Put yourself on the other side. A buyer has a three tonne welded housing with two bores that must line up. It is a part their usual machine shop just declined. They send it to four shops and get four answers back.

Their first job is not to pick the cheapest. It is to work out which of these four actually understood the part. Only after that do they compare numbers, and by then one or two quotes have usually already dropped out of the running.

So the question is not how to be cheaper. It is how to be the quote that obviously understood it.

What the losing quote looks like

A number, a lead time, and a line saying terms available on request.

It does not say how many setups. It does not say whether stress relief is in the plan. It does not say which machine the part runs on. It does not say what it assumed about the blank. It does not mention the tolerance that was going to be hard.

The buyer cannot tell whether this shop read the drawing or weighed it. And when they cannot tell, the silence works against you, because the other quote in front of them did explain itself.

What the winning quote says

The machine. Name it. Model, table size, travel, rated load. One line. It converts you from “a machine shop” into “a shop with a Skoda HCW that takes 4 metres and 20 tonnes”, which is what the buyer was searching for in the first place.

The sequence. Rough, stress relieve, finish. Or one setup on the boring mill, index the rotary table, done. Three lines of plan tells the buyer more than three decimal places of price.

The assumptions. What machining allowance you assumed. Who supplies the blank. What condition the material arrives in. If your number depends on an assumption, write it down, because the other shop assumed something different and the buyer needs to know that before comparing.

The hard part, named. “Holding the two bores coaxial across 2.4 metres is the risk on this part. We plan to do both in one setup on the rotary table, which is why we are not proposing a transfer.” That paragraph wins jobs. It proves you read the drawing and it pre-empts the question the buyer was about to ask.

What you would change. “If the flatness on the top face can open to 0.2 mm we can drop a finishing pass and roughly a day.” Buyers remember the shop that offered to make the part cheaper. Even when they cannot accept the change, they now trust your number.

The four things that get a quote binned early

No answer on weight. If the buyer asked about table load and crane and you did not answer, you look like you did not check. See table load and crane capacity for what they are checking.

A lead time with no shape. “Twelve weeks” invites suspicion. “Blank six weeks, rough machine week seven, oven week eight, finish week ten, ship week eleven, and the constraint is the oven” invites trust. Same twelve weeks.

Silence for two weeks, then a perfect quote. The buyer had already moved on. Acknowledge within a day, quote when you can.

A price that is far below the others with no explanation. Buyers on heavy parts do not treat the cheap quote as a bargain. They treat it as a shop that missed something, because on this kind of work that is usually what it is.

The uncomfortable one: quoting work you should decline

Some of the losses are the right outcome. A part at 95 percent of your table rating, with a positional tolerance you have never held over that span, is a job you win and then lose money on.

Declining it well is worth more than winning it badly. A shop that replies “this is past what we would take on that tolerance, but it is inside our range if the position opens to 0.15 mm” has told the buyer two useful things and stays on the list for the next part. A shop that quotes it anyway and then struggles does not get a next part.

A quote template that takes ten minutes

Part: [name], [envelope], [weight]
Machine: [model], table [size], travel [x/y/z], rated load [t]
Blank assumed: [type], [allowance] on machined faces, supplied by [who]
Sequence: [rough / stress relief / finish, setup count, datum plan]
Risk we see: [the one hard thing, and how we plan to handle it]
Inspection included: [what is measured, by what, at what temperature]
Price: [number], [incoterm]
Schedule: [dated steps], constraint is [step]
If you can change one thing: [the callout that would save real money]

Nine lines. It costs you ten minutes and it is the difference between being a number on a comparison sheet and being the shop the buyer calls to talk it through.

What to do next

Pull the last five heavy quotes you lost. Check how many of them named the machine, the sequence and the risk. If the answer is none of them, the win rate problem is not your hourly rate.

Frequently asked questions

Is the winning quote usually the cheapest?

On heavy work, often not. Buyers comparing three quotes on a three tonne part are trying to work out which shop understood the job. A quote that explains the sequence beats a lower number with no explanation more often than shops expect.

Should I quote a job I am not sure I can hold?

Quote it and say plainly where the risk is. A conditional quote that names the risk wins more work than a confident quote that misses, and it costs you nothing when the buyer picks someone else.

How fast do I need to respond?

Faster than you think on the acknowledgement, slower than you think on the quote. Confirm within a day that the part is in range and say when the quote will land. Buyers chase silence, not detail.

Need a quote for a part like this?

Send the drawing with the envelope and finished weight. We match you with up to 3 shops that take parts this size and reply within 24 business hours.

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