The client sent us a layout PDF before Christmas, a spreadsheet of devices, and a question about what it would cost to build their new network on Ubiquiti UniFi. Sixty people, two floors, a warehouse and three meeting rooms. The brief read cleanly. We could have quoted it over email.
Instead we drove out. Four hours walking the place cost us a fuel receipt and half a working day. Without the visit we would have sent a number thirty percent below reality — and lost a weekend over it, while the client lost a month.
Why we walk before we quote
Architectural layouts are excellent at telling you where walls go. They're bad at telling you where cable actually runs, and where the false ceiling is bolted in a way you can't open without calling a certified inspector. If you quote from a PDF, you quote the ideal install. The real install always has something the PDF didn't catch.
The goal of the visit is simple: in four hours, see everything that could surprise us on installation day. We never catch all of it. We catch most of it.
What turned up
- Two server cabinets nobody had logged into in two years. One was running a Windows Server 2012 R2 box that should have been decommissioned long ago. The other was powered on but connected to nothing — just the fan.
- A printer plugged straight into the production network segment. Nobody had clocked that it was broadcasting across the whole company. The colleague who said 'the WiFi is sometimes slow' wasn't hallucinating.
- A 92-metre cable run through a ceiling void from 2014. Cat6 says 90 max. The link was up. Occasional diagnostics, however, dropped it to 100 Mbps and nobody could explain why.
- One meeting room used for client calls — glass walls and, regrettably, a glass ceiling. Wi-Fi falls off a cliff in there. The architect didn't know, because it's not on the PDF.
- Two access points from 2017, mounted upside down. They had worked for years at roughly half power. Nobody dared touch them.
How it changed the quote
We added a day to move the printer onto its own VLAN, an hour to swap the over-90-metre cable, one extra access point for the glass meeting room, and half a day to audit whatever was running in those two forgotten server cabinets. We also told the client that one of those servers wouldn't be wired in until they upgraded or decommissioned it — and we put that refusal in writing before signature, not after.
The final quote came in roughly 28% higher than what we'd have sent over email. But it was real. The client approved it the same week because they had an explanation for every line.
Four hours on site cost us a fuel receipt. Without them, they'd have cost us a weekend and the client a month. This is the cheapest technical decision we know.
Four things we now always check on site
- Actual cable runs against project documentation. Runs longer than 90 metres turn up in roughly every second audit.
- Live kit on the floor. Including the forgotten ones — an old printer, an abandoned access point, an undocumented switch in the kitchenette.
- Where the glass walls, glass ceilings and thick concrete partitions are. Wi-Fi always fights those.
- The server room: who has access, how many hours the UPS actually holds, whether the AC really works in July, and whether at least one spare cable lives outside the cabinet.
The visit isn't only about the quote. It's about whether the client genuinely wants the project, or whether they woke up this morning thinking 'we should do something about that.' On paper the two briefs look the same. On site you can tell them apart in an hour.