Toby Sam Consultancy started in 2022 as one estimator and a laptop. It now runs a team of nine across the UK, the Philippines and India, prices roofing, cladding and façade packages for specialist contractors across the UK, and takes on new clients almost entirely by referral.
None of that should have been possible.
Every one of those clients already knew how to price a job. Most have had an estimator on the payroll at some point. Some still do. They came to an outside consultancy anyway, and the reason has very little to do with TSC and a great deal to do with how this industry treats the one function that decides whether it makes money.
Start with where estimating sits in the business. It is the only department that touches every pound of revenue before it exists, and it is run as overhead. One person, sometimes two, pricing everything that comes through the door, on a spreadsheet built by someone who left in 2016, with no cover when they are on holiday and no plan for when they retire. The same firm will spend more on a new van than it has spent on its estimating function in a decade.
Then look at what that estimator is asked to price. Main contractors issue a package to six, eight, ten subcontractors at once. Each one spends a week on a take off, a supplier enquiry round, a cost build up and a tender letter, and one of them wins. The other nine have given away a week of skilled labour for nothing, and the main contractor has had its budget set for free by the market. Nobody in the chain counts that cost. The estimator is then told the hit rate is poor.
The information arriving with those packages makes it worse. Drawings that contradict the specification. A specification that says refer to the drawings. A query returned marked refer to architect. A package issued on a Friday afternoon for return the following Thursday. The estimator is not pricing the job. The estimator is guessing what the designer meant and carrying the risk if the guess is wrong, because the alternative is to miss the deadline and not be invited next time.
Then the people. Nobody trains estimators. There is no course, no recognised route, no structured development in most firms. A junior sits next to a senior for five years and absorbs whatever that senior happens to know, errors included. The seniors are getting older, the juniors are not arriving, and the industry’s answer has been to pay recruiters more for the same shrinking pool.
And nobody measures any of it. Ask most subcontractors how many hours it took to price their last tender, or whether two estimators in the same office would reach the same figure from the same drawings, and you will get a shrug. In a function where a ten percent swing on one line is the difference between winning at a margin and winning at a loss, the absence of basic quality control is remarkable.
Put those together and you get the pattern every contractor recognises. Win the job because the number was low. Find out on site why the number was low. Lose the margin. Blame the estimator. Repeat.
TSC grew because that pattern creates demand. A subscription that costs less than an employed estimator and covers holidays, sickness and the fortnight when six tenders land at once is not a clever idea. It is the obvious response to a function that has been starved for twenty years.
What we have had to build to make it work is more telling than the growth. Every junior is paired with a senior who leads them through a project rather than sitting beside them. Estimators are calibrated against each other on the same drawings, the way exam markers are, so two people in different countries reach the same number. Every tender is timed, so we know what pricing costs and clients know what they are paying for. None of that is revolutionary. It is what the industry should have been doing in house all along, and mostly has not.
So treat TSC’s growth as a symptom, not a success story. An outsourced estimating consultancy can only expand into a gap that contractors have chosen to leave open.
If your estimator went off sick tomorrow, how long would it be before your tender returns stopped? If the answer is immediately, the problem was never your estimator.