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Local trades and home servicesAI assistant

Turn your estimator’s spreadsheet into a client-ready proposal, and let AI catch mismatches

Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, host of The Practical AI Show · Published

Result

self-reported

Turning an internal estimate into a client proposal used to take a full morning of copying, formatting and proofreading. Now a finished estimate spends less time sitting in his drafts folder. It also showed why every number gets checked: one proposal had $30,000 in the price table and a promise not to exceed $28,000 further down.

Lee Mokri owns Geared for Growing, a 40-year-old landscape company in Northern California, and writes about his first year running it with AI. He gives an AI assistant the estimator’s spreadsheet, his proposal template and past proposals he actually sent, then asks it to flag inconsistencies, explain the scope in plain English and format it for the client. His rule: nothing with a price, date, scope or promise goes out without a person checking it against company records.

Who did it

Lee MokriGeared for Growing (landscape company, Northern California)Green Industry Pros (Lee Mokri’s column) · Oct 15, 2026

Try it now

  1. Keep the real thinking human: your estimator still builds the spreadsheet with unit costs, labor and materials.
  2. Give the AI the spreadsheet, your proposal template and 3 proposals you actually sent.
  3. Ask it to translate line items into client language, organize the scope and flag any number that doesn’t match elsewhere.
  4. Check every price, date, quantity and promise against the spreadsheet before it goes out.
  5. Send it while the client is still excited about the project.
Copy-paste prompt
Attached: our estimator’s spreadsheet for [client], our proposal template and 3 proposals we’ve sent before. Turn the estimate into a client-ready proposal in our template. Explain the scope in plain English a homeowner understands. Before the proposal, list every inconsistency you find: totals that don’t match, prices that appear twice with different numbers, quantities that differ between sections, missing items. Don’t fill any gap with a guess. Ask me instead.

Make it run every week

A play works once. Turn it into a routine in three small steps:

  1. Run it once and check the result yourself.
  2. Give your AI a schedule. Tell it when to run this play (every week, or every month) and to message you with what it found before you act.
  3. Keep a log. One line per run: what was checked, anything flagged, what you did.

See how owners turn plays into systems →

What to watch out for

Self-reported in his own column, with no hours count. The AI sounds just as sure when it’s wrong, and it fills gaps instead of asking, so treat it like a first-week hire and check every number. Build it with Page: a portfolio page to link in each proposal.

Did it work?

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