There is no phone number anywhere on this website. It is deliberate, it is unusual enough that people mention it in first emails, and it occasionally costs us an order.
Here is the reasoning, since it comes up.
Verbal quotes are not quotes
In a trade where 'Grade A' has no legal definition and means different things at different yards, a number given over the phone is not information. It is a number, detached from the definition that makes it meaningful.
Written quotes carry the grade criteria attached. That protects you considerably more than it protects us, because you can hold the definition up against the load that arrives — and against the other three quotes on your desk.
Every dispute we have ever had was resolvable in ten minutes because both parties were looking at the same document. That is not a coincidence.
It removes the sales call
Nobody from this company will ever ring you about a quote you did not follow up. That is not a policy we wrote down; it is a consequence of not having the infrastructure to do it.
Several customers have told us this is the thing they like most, which says something uncomfortable about the rest of the industry.
What it costs us
Genuinely, some business. There are buyers who want to talk something through and will use whoever picks up, and we lose those.
It is also harder in a genuine emergency. A site that has failed a fire inspection at 4pm on a Friday wants to talk to somebody, and an email — even one answered within the hour — is not the same thing.
And it reads as unfriendly to some people. We understand why, and it is not the intent.
The general principle
It belongs with the rest of what is on this website: a published grading standard, coefficients you can argue with, a landfill percentage that is not zero, and a year-end account that includes what went wrong.
All of it is the same idea. Write down what you will do, then do that, and make the written version the thing that governs.
A phone number would not be inconsistent with that. It would just make it easier to be inconsistent, and we would rather remove the option.