Join us as we dive into custom woodworking challenges—quoting bottlenecks, outsourcing trade-offs, and how tech, automation, and clear strategy can free business owners from overwhelm and unlock growth.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Problem Machine Podcast.

• Outdated quoting eats up 40 hours per project—business growth stalls
• Outsourcing quoting: fast, but costly or risky in quality
• Automation offers hope—can AI really match a human's detail?
• Offloading tasks comes with trust and training headaches
• Small process choices can shackle—or free—your business

Resources:

• DevNoodle
• PodcastChef

Connect with our hosts:

• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn
• Brian Mattocks - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 33:37 - Quotes and estimates are a solved problem. The people that do this well don't list every single screw, they list a range of the number of screws most cabinets are ever gonna need to install, go to somewhere between the minimum and the maximum there and say, screws are 100 bucks a job, right? Whatever that conversation is, whatever that math is, you should be able to get there from here and move to the next problem. AI can do all this all day, every day. So it's not a human consideration to bring a human in the loop to do something that humans are not able to do well like it's in every way you're using the wrong tool for the job just because it's the tool we've always had doesn't mean it's the right one
• 14:31 - Do I need to go through all this effort, essentially unpaid to give them the answer they're looking for? So imagine almost like a pre-quoting process that just gives them the ballpark that, essentially they can stand behind with 100% confidence that they can get there from here. I would want to build a solution that does that. You may not be able to remove the design sort of pole in the tent, right? But you should get paid for it as opposed to do that first and then again, roll the dice on the answer. So, what intelligence do you think we would need to sort of cook up to give them that high certainty, rough order of magnitude tool?
• 18:30 - Is that one job that is underbid going to cost you 100 times over? And if that's the case, then we need to figure out, is this a Six Sigma event that we need to solve for? And if the answer is no, we don't ever have to worry about that, then great. Yeah, makes sense. This part of it, creating the initial quote. And I think you nailed it earlier. It's kind of like, this is a part of sales process that carries risk. Let's eliminate that and essentially get him his time back risk-free.
• 25:43 - And it gets worse too, because in the human-to-human exchange, particularly when you're training somebody that's working for you, you have an inherent trust problem. And it's not something that a lot of folks want to talk about, right? But the employee may have questions that they're afraid to ask because it shows that they may not know it in the same way that they were hired to do, or they may not be quite comfortable, or any of that kind of head trash that gets in the way on the employee side instantly makes them less trustworthy. This isn't that they're duplicitous. This is just that by default, because they have their human beings with human doubts and concerns, they may not be asking the questions that need to get asked to create better outcomes, because again, whatever, whatever those reasons might be.
• 27:47 - We have an estimating problem. Do you, though? Or do you have
• sales problem? Or do you have a we're working at risk problem? Because they're all different problems and they're all solved in slightly different ways. Design problem, right? Yeah, exactly. It could very well be that the entire problem here is a design problem. And it gets worse, right? So like, you know, at some point you get into this, it's like, it's turtles all the way down, where you're just, you know, chasing, chasing all of the things. But, but first things first, take the labor-intensive stuff. And if you're not getting paid for it, make sure you do. So if we can find a way to solve that problem, I think that's mission one.