What do the calls you miss actually cost?
Five numbers about your own business, about two minutes, and the answer appears as you move the sliders. No email, no sign-up, nothing sent anywhere.
Your numbers
Nothing here is sent anywhere. It is worked out in your browser.
Your phone bill or call log has this. A normal week, not your busiest.
Rings out, goes to voicemail, or gets picked up and cut off. Most owners underestimate this one, so check it against the log rather than guessing.
Invoice value before costs. If your jobs split into small callouts and big installs, run it twice rather than averaging them into a number that matches neither.
Nobody can know this exactly, including us, so we have not supplied a researched-looking default. Set it to what you believe about your own customers. If you want to test it, ring twenty missed numbers back and count how many had already booked someone else.
Your normal quote-to-job rate on inbound enquiries. Price shoppers and wrong numbers belong outside this figure.
On your own numbers, that is
$93,600
a year in work that rang and went elsewhere
- Calls nobody gets to
- 10 a week
- Callers who never ring back
- 5 a week
- Jobs that walk
- 2 a week, about 104 a year
- Value a week
- $1,800
What this number is not
It is not a promise, and it is not recoverable revenue. Answering every call does not convert every caller, some of that work would have come back anyway, and some of it you would not have wanted. Treat it as the size of the leak, not the size of the cheque. Anyone quoting you a national average for this is quoting a figure they did not measure.
If the number is big enough to bother you
The eight-minute diagnosis does this across the whole week, not just the phone: quotes nobody chased, invoices nobody closed, and the admin that should never have been a person's job. Or read how the after-hours phone is built before you decide who builds it.
How the number is worked out
Calls a week, multiplied by the share nobody gets to, multiplied by the share who never ring back, multiplied by the share who would have become a job, multiplied by what a job is worth, multiplied by 52. That is the whole model. There is no industry benchmark inside it and no coefficient you cannot see.
We have not supplied a national average for any of the five inputs, and that is on purpose. Several calculators in this market open with a figure like “$42,000 a year” already filled in, sourced to nobody. A number you did not choose is a number you cannot defend to your bookkeeper, so the only figures in the model above are yours.
The one input nobody can know precisely is the share of missed callers who never ring back. There is a free test for it: take twenty missed numbers off last month’s log, ring them, and count how many had already booked someone else. That is your figure, measured, and it takes an afternoon.
What to do with the answer
If it is small, the phone is not your problem and you should stop reading about it. If it is large, the next question is what closing the gap costs and who should build it, which is what the cost paper and the build, buy or have it built decision are for. If you would rather see the whole week rather than just the phone, the eight-minute diagnosis covers quotes, invoices and admin as well.