The Follow-Up Machine — AI With Tom

You're not losing jobs on price. You're losing them on Tuesday.

An enquiry lands on Tuesday morning. You're with a customer, so you'll deal with it tonight. Tonight you're knackered, so it's tomorrow. Thursday you send a good, careful reply.

By Thursday they've had two other quotes and picked one.

You didn't lose that job on price, or on quality, or on anything you could have argued about. You lost it because someone with a worse offer was faster.

A quick decent reply beats a slow brilliant one, nearly every time. That's uncomfortable, and it's the most useful thing on this page.

The good news: this is the easiest thing in your whole business to fix, because it isn't a skill problem. You already know what to say. The problem is purely that saying it takes twenty minutes you don't have at the moment the enquiry lands.

How it works

Hold the door

A real reply
within the hour.

Draft the real one

In two minutes,
not twenty.

Chase on a rule

Not on how you
feel about it.

Step one — hold the door open

You don't need to answer the enquiry within the hour. You need them to stop looking within the hour. Those are very different jobs, and the second one takes thirty seconds.

Write this once. Keep it somewhere you can send from your phone.

Hi [name] — thanks for getting in touch about [the thing they asked about].

I'm out on jobs today so I'll come back to you properly by [specific time] with [exactly what they'll get — a price, some options, a date].

In the meantime, [one genuinely useful sentence — a rough price range, a typical timescale, one question you'll need answered anyway].

Speak shortly,
[you]

The three bits that matter

A specific time. "By 6pm today" is a promise. "Soon" is nothing, and they'll keep looking.

Something useful now. A rough range makes it a conversation instead of a holding message. It also filters out anyone whose budget was never in the room.

A question back. A reply from them means the thread is alive, and you can't be forgotten as easily.

Step two — draft the real reply in two minutes

This is where AI earns its place. Paste this prompt, fill the brackets.

Here's an enquiry I've received: [paste it]

Here's what I know about this job: [two lines — what they need, anything unusual, roughly what it'll cost]

Write my reply. Rules:

• Under 150 words. They're reading it on a phone

• Answer the actual question first, before anything about us

• Give a real number or a real range. Never "it depends"

• End with one clear next step and a specific date

• Plain English. No "delighted to", no "reaching out", no "solutions"

If there's something you'd need to know to price this properly and I haven't told you, ask me before writing.

Why the last line matters most — without it, AI will confidently invent a price and you'll send it. With it, you get told what you've forgotten before the mistake goes out. That single sentence is the difference between a useful tool and a liability.

Make it sound like you — paste your Business Brain above this prompt and the reply comes back in your voice, with your prices, aimed at your kind of customer. Without it you'll get something competent and slightly generic, and you'll end up rewriting half of it.

Step three — chase on a rule

You send the quote. They go quiet. You think about chasing, decide it looks desperate, and never do.

They didn't say no. They got busy. Follow-ups don't fail because they annoy people — they fail because they never get sent.

Day 3 — Add something

Not "just checking in". Send a photo of similar work, or a detail you forgot. "Meant to say — we did one of these in Penarth last month, here's how it came out."

Day 7 — Make it easy to say no

"Are you still thinking about this one, or has it gone on the back burner? Either's fine — just don't want to keep bothering you." This gets replies, because you've given them permission.

Day 21 — Close the loop

"I'll leave this one there — give me a shout if it comes back round." Sounds like giving up. It's the message that most often gets a reply, because it's the one that's finally not asking for anything.

Three messages. Write them once, and never decide again whether today is the day.

Put the dates in your calendar when you send the quote. The decision is the hard part — take it away and the chasing happens by itself.

What it's actually worth

Fictional plumbing firm, but do this sum with your own numbers.

Twelve enquiries a month. Four turn into work — a third, which is normal.

Of the eight lost, three never got a reply inside two days, and four got quoted and never chased.

Fixing the speed wins back one of those three. Chasing properly wins back one of those four.

Two extra jobs a month. At an average job of £2,400, that's £57,600 a year — from writing four messages once.

A third of what you lose, you lose to silence rather than to a competitor.

Where this goes next

All three steps are manual, and that's deliberate — manual and happening beats automated and half-built. Write the four messages this afternoon and you'll feel it inside a fortnight.

Once it's running by hand, the obvious next move is the holding reply sending itself the moment an enquiry lands, and the chase dates appearing without you adding them. But only automate it after it's worked manually for a month — otherwise you're automating a guess.