Told to Sort the Pothole? A Guide for Office Managers
A pattern in our inbox: the quote request comes from office@, admin@ or chair@, the notes are brief, and you can feel the shape of the morning behind it. Somewhere a director walked in from the carpark, said "can you get someone to sort that pothole", and walked into a meeting. Now it's your job, along with the couriers, the phones and whatever the printer is doing today.
This is the five-minute version of doing that job well, written for the person it actually landed on.
What you're really being asked to produce
Not a repair. A decision-ready number. The boss doesn't want to think about asphalt; they want to glance at something, say yes, and have the problem evaporate. Your output is one forwardable email containing a photo of the hole, a fixed price with GST shown, when it can be done, and how it gets paid. Produce that and you're finished apart from forwarding a completion photo next week.
What kills the task is treating it like procurement. Ring three contractors for a small patch and you'll spend a fortnight hosting site visits for two quotes that arrive as ranges and one that never arrives; meanwhile the pothole appears in the health and safety meeting minutes and becomes a standing agenda item, which is a fate no one deserves.
The five minutes, itemised
Walk out with your phone. Take one photo close enough to show the broken edges and one from a few metres back showing where the hole sits: gate, visitor parks, loading bay, wherever. If nothing in frame gives scale, put your foot or a coffee cup in the close shot; nobody judges, and it beats adjectives.
Back at your desk, open the quote form. Name, work email, address of the site, photos on. For depth, your honest guess or "not sure", which works fine. The one field worth an extra thirty seconds is the notes: put access facts in there. Gate code needed, forklift crosses at lunch, visitor parks can't be coned Tuesday, invoice must reference a PO number. Crews plan around what they know; every callback you prevent is a day sooner done.
Send. The fixed price comes back as a one-page PDF, typically same business day.
Forwarding it upward, properly
Don't just bounce the PDF along. Two sentences on top move it from inbox to approved:
"Quote for the carpark pothole by the visitor parks: $X plus GST, fixed price, done in one morning, one-year warranty. OK to book?"
That's the whole email. If your firm leases the premises, the same PDF goes instead to the property manager or landlord with "please advise timeline" appended, and you've converted the boss's hallway comment into a documented maintenance notification, dated and attached. Either way the loop that usually consumes a month closes in a day, and you're the person who closed it.
If your workplace is a unit in a business park and the hole is out in the shared driveway rather than your own parks, the answer changes shape; the accessway post explains who actually owns that problem before you spend your budget on it.
What happens after yes
Deposit secures the works date, balance is settled before the crew arrives, bank transfer or card, GST invoice to whatever entity name you give us. On the day, the crew needs the access you already described in the notes and nothing else from you; the repair is typically hours, the patch takes traffic the same day, and you'll have your completion photo for the forward. File it next to the quote and the thread is its own paper trail if anyone ever asks when the hazard was dealt with.
Frequently asked questions
The boss will ask if this is the cheapest option. What do I say?
It's a fixed price against quotes that arrive as ranges; the number on the PDF is the number on the invoice. Cheaper offers that firm up on site have a way of un-cheapening once they see the job.
Do I need to be there during the repair?
No, and most office managers aren't. If the crew can reach the hole and keep vehicles off it for the day, your involvement ended when you sent the gate code.
What if it's actually several potholes?
Photograph them all in one go; multiple patches in one visit share the setup cost and the quote itemises them, which also reads far better upstairs than three separate approvals over three months.
The pothole was never really your job, so spend five minutes making it ours. Photos in, fixed price back, forward, done.
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