Customers price their own parts

Fifty quotes a day, between jobs

This is a powder coating shop in the US. It coats and blasts wheels, car parts, motorbike frames and industrial parts. The owner is particular about prep. He sent us his process so we would understand what he means by a good job: strip, clean, bake out anything trapped in the metal, blast, mask, then coat.

He told us the shop gets 30 to 50 inquiries a day, and a handful of people answer them in between doing the work. Most arrive as quote requests from the shop’s website. He had already paid for an AI quoting tool: the customer sends a photo, the tool guesses a price, he adds his markup and sends it on. It still needed a person on every single quote.

His website worried him too. He had started a redesign on a website builder and published it half finished. He wanted a page for each service, a gallery, and a site good enough that people asking an AI assistant for a coater would hear his name.

Onboarding while he watched

After a first call and a demo, he joined Iron Rainbow as a founding coating partner over two long screen-share sessions.

He used the software live from the first minute, and we fixed what he found while he was still on the call. The first session turned up eleven bugs. Some were small, like a logo that didn’t link home. Others would have hurt every partner after him: the service-area map didn’t show the territory he had just saved, the connections to his social inboxes failed, and the workspace switcher created a brand-new workspace when he clicked his shop’s name. That last one caught him twice.

On that first call we connected his accounting software and imported his whole customer list while he watched. It was the first time that import had run for a working shop, and it worked. We also drew his territory together, ZIP code by ZIP code, and it was approved before we hung up.

A pricing screen in his own words

The second session was about price, and it started badly. He looked at the pricing screen and found it confusing, and said so plainly.

So we rebuilt it on the call. The breakthrough came from how he already thinks. He knows by heart what he charges for one particular wheel, so that became the reference item, and every other price follows from it through multipliers for size, material and condition. Next to each multiplier, the screen now shows the dollar range it produces. Steel doesn’t behave like alloy, so each slider can carry exceptions. At the bottom sits a table labelled “this is what the customer sees”. He asked for “substrate” instead of “material”, whole dollars with no cents, and minimum prices that step up with wheel diameter. Within the hour he was happy with it. His words now shape the pricing screen every coating partner uses.

The same day he saw the new 3D Customizer, and his team liked how the metallic powders rendered.

Everything he asked for, written down

We work with him in the chat app he already uses every day, and we log every request in his own words without promising dates. The list says a lot about how his shop runs. He wants his busiest social channel connected to the inbox. He wants a minimum order for each color class, because a stock color and a powder he has to order in don’t cost the same. His recurring maintenance charge and water bill are now fixed-cost fields. Staff can change a price, but he wants to approve it. He wants repair work and stripping failed coatings as surcharges, and bikes grouped by engine size because a small frame and a big one are different jobs.

We had thought about rebuilding his AI quoting tool as it was. We chose to put his pricing into the system, so customers see his number straight away and his old tool becomes the model for automatic quote replies. He also suggested showing partners what they want to earn with the platform fee added on top. The arithmetic is the same, so we logged it as a way to present prices.

Live on the network, and a new website

The shop is live on Iron Rainbow with its territory approved, its customers imported and its prices set from the owner’s reference wheel. Customers in his area can design their part in 3D and see his price. He wants to bring in other shops he knows as partners.

Then the website. Before we wrote a word we took his old site apart. People around his city search for what he does about 2,000 times a month, and the old site was on Google’s first page for his own name and one other search. Most of its industry pages were a single picture with the words painted into it, so Google read the menu and the footer and nothing else. Two were empty. His Google profile told a different story: 80 reviews at 4.9 and over 400 photos of real work.

So the new site is built from that profile. There is a page for each kind of job he does, from wheels and calipers to railings, cable tray and patio furniture, with the parts that job brings in, how he preps for it and the reviews customers wrote about it. More than a hundred of his photos and twenty of his videos are on it, every written review is on the page where Google can read it, and the customizer sits at the bottom of every job page. On a phone it scores 99 for speed against 68 for the old site. Every old address forwards to its new page, so nothing Google knew about the shop is lost when the domain moves over.