Licensed plumber of 20 years looking to put down the tools and switch to a remote plumbing estimator position. I would appreciate any advice. Thank you

Hey All! Since @Josh Turner and I are starting to get really busy with our consutling business We are looking to hire somebody I put a job post here that describes roughly what we are looking for https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~022081210334467158603 Long story short, we want some enthusiastic about AI/construction that can help us with some small proejcts to start with and grow from there Feel free to DM me too!

There's this huge misconception that construction estimating is complicated maths. It isn't. If you can do year 8 maths, you have all the maths you need — all we're really doing is multiplying quantities by rates. The actual skill is making sure those quantities and rates are correct. And that comes down to three things: understanding how the job is actually built, managing the data (a real estimate is hundreds or thousands of lines of labour, plant, materials and subbie rates), and understanding the commercial side — the contract, the market, the risk you're carrying. Two estimators can calculate the exact same price for a job. One loses money, one makes a fortune. The difference isn't the maths. It's whether they understood the scope, the terms, and the risk they were signing up to. I put together a full walkthrough of the estimating process below The software I use is ZZTakeoff: https://www.zztakeoff.com?p=23761 Let me know if you have any questions.

fast quote turnaround quietly decides whether you get the job more than a prettier proposal or haggling on price. clients are choosing whoever answers fast and shows they understood the problem, so your first estimate can be short, clear, and honest rather than a 10 page deep dive. save time by building a library of pre priced assemblies for common scopes, use a simple photo intake and checklist to avoid surprise trips, and set a clear expectation for when the final number will land. use quick phone calls to lock assumptions instead of redoing the whole estimate, and keep a one line follow up that pushes edge cases into a human review so you dont delay the routine wins. what part of your quoting process eats the most time rn and what's one thing you tried to speed up?

Google recently launched Workspace Intelligence. It's not one feature. It's Gemini sitting across your entire Google setup — Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Chat. Ask it "what's the status of my project costs?" and it reads the live file and answers. You can build Google Drive projects to curate context per job, an AI-organized inbox, and Zapier-style automations that trigger off your emails. The catch: all of it only works if your data lives in Google. No connectors like Claude or ChatGPT. So if your files are in SharePoint, Notion, or scattered across tools, this isn't for you. But if you already run your projects out of Google Drive, use Gmail for everything, and your team's in Google Chat — this is a genuinely powerful upgrade, and you're getting five standalone tools in one. Let me know if you're in the Google ecosystem and have tried it