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First, consider the usual triple-constraints often discussed in project management theory: time, cost, quality (choose 2):

- You can have it fast and cheap, but not high-quality;
- You can have it fast and high-quality, but not cheap;
- You can have it high-quality and cheap, but not fast.

Next, you need to allocate some time for a complete and thorough understanding of the prospective client's requirements. It is very easy to go down the wrong track if something vitally important to the client is either absent from, or misrepresented in, the specification. Requirements engineering (RE) is its own discipline and takes both product knowledge and managerial skill. 

Third, you need to define a complete statement of work. If the prospective client is satisfied with a schematic and some simulation work to prove a concept, it will take significantly less time that it would to go through a traditional waterfall development process with multiple phase gates, physical product construction, debugging and qualification, external lab certification and production release.

Finally, once the statement of work is agreed upon, you must determine time and cost estimates for each of the major tasks in the statement of work. This is often the domain of professional project management teams with technical and operations inputs considered as needed. *How* to estimate these times and costs comes from past experience - how long previous efforts took, what industry "norms" are, how competitors perform, plus the overall workload and capabilities of your organization.

Once all this is complete, you have your initial schedule. Now you just need to deliver!