In more than a decade around this industry I have sat on nearly every side of a freight quotation: writing them, receiving them from partners on three continents, comparing them against competitors', and, lately, auditing them against the jobs they became. Recently I went through a stack of real quotations from more than a dozen different forwarding companies: Chinese consolidators, European and American partners, Indian and East African agents, and several Nigerian desks. Air and sea, import and export. Not to catch anyone out, to answer one question: where does the money actually leak?
The patterns below belong to no single company; I found most of them in quotes from at least three different firms, on different continents. Names and figures are disguised, but every lesson comes from a real document. If you run a forwarding desk anywhere in West Africa, I suspect at least four of these will feel uncomfortably familiar.
1. The same service, three different prices, in the same week.
One desk quoted a routine customs formality at three different amounts within five working days, to three different clients. Nobody was cheating; there was simply no tariff sheet, so each officer priced from memory. Your client only needs to receive two of those quotes to stop trusting all of them. If your rates live in people's heads, you don't have pricing, you have folklore.
2. Nobody writes down why a quote was lost.
Across hundreds of quotations I reviewed, the number with a recorded loss reason was almost zero. Everything sat as "in progress" forever. That means the business cannot answer the only question that improves conversion: do we lose on price, on speed, or on silence? A one-line "reason lost" field costs nothing and is worth more than any discount.
3. The quote is missing the two lines the client actually cares about.
Most import quotes I reviewed excluded customs duty entirely, "to be advised per PAAR." Legally correct, commercially lazy. The duty is usually the biggest number on the client's total bill. The forwarder who writes "indicative duty at today's rates: ₦X, subject to customs assessment" wins against nine competitors who wrote "excluded." Same with marine insurance: recommended in the fine print, never actually offered as a line the client can say yes to.
4. Free days are a countdown nobody tells the client about.
A terminal gives you a few free days. The shipping line gives you a few more. After that, storage at a modern deep-sea terminal escalates in bands, by the third week, one container can be costing more per day in storage than the trucking to deliver it. On one file I studied, cargo sat for over three weeks post-discharge; the storage and demurrage bill ended up several times the forwarder's entire fee. The client paid it, and remembered it. Put the free days and the daily cost after them on the face of your quote. It changes client behaviour overnight.
5. Your partner's invoice is not your partner's quote.
On one international file, the origin partner's invoice arrived with an accessorial charge that appeared nowhere on their quotation. It was paid without a query and quietly ate a third of the job's margin. Reconciling every partner invoice against the quote it came from, before payment, is a ten-minute discipline that pays for someone's salary.
6. The money you front has a price, and nobody charges for it.
Forwarders in our market routinely pay carriers, terminals and statutory bodies weeks before the client pays them. At Nigerian interest rates, fronting money for 45 days can quietly consume a few percentage points of margin, before you count the bank charges on every foreign transfer. If finance cost isn't a line in your costing sheet, your "profitable" jobs may not be.
7. Declared freight must equal actual freight.
One air file declared the freight from the original quotation instead of the final airline bill, the weight had grown, and the rate with it. Customs compared, revalued, and issued a debit note that wiped out a healthy slice of the margin. The rule is boring and absolute: the figure on the declaration matches the figure on the AWB or B/L, and the Incoterm matches across the quote, the Form M and the entry. Every time.
8. Weight grows between the quote and the aircraft.
The cargo that was "about 650 kg" at enquiry became 850 kg at pickup, and the airline's rate band changed too. The file survived only because the quote carried a reprice clause. If your quotes promise a fixed price on an estimated weight, you are selling insurance for free.
9. Pass-through is not revenue, stop pricing it like it is.
The biggest quotes look impressive because they carry duty, terminal and freight the forwarder merely passes through. Mark up your own services properly and pass third-party costs through transparently at cost plus a disclosed handling percentage. Blending them does two bad things at once: it makes you look expensive on the pass-through and lets your real service fee get discounted into nothing.
10. A quote with no validity date is a standing offer to lose money.
I found live quotations with the validity field blank, and one that literally printed "Validity: Expired." Exchange rates in our market can move meaningfully inside a month. The validity date, the FX assumption, and who bears the movement between quote and payment: three short lines that separate a professional offer from a hopeful one.
The pattern behind all ten: none of these losses come from bad people or even bad markets. They come from missing systems, a tariff sheet, a loss log, a costing template, a reconciliation step, a clause. Every one of them is fixable in thirty days, for free.
That's what I've been building: plain-language toolkits, checklists and calculators for exactly these gaps, drawn from real West African files. I'll be sharing them, free, at olusholaawode.com, starting with a Nigerian customs duty calculator and a complete documentation toolkit covering imports, exports, free zones, personal effects and vessel clearance.
If you run cargo through Nigerian ports and one of these ten stung a little, follow along, or tell me in the comments which one costs you the most. That's the one I'll write about next.