What does a missed call actually cost you?

Most owners guess low on this. Not because they are bad at math, but because a missed call is completely invisible.

When a crew breaks a sprinkler line, you hear about it. When a customer is unhappy, you hear about it. When someone calls you at 10:40 on a Tuesday, gets voicemail, hangs up and dials the next company on the list — nothing happens at all. No complaint. No bad review. No gap in the schedule you can point at. The job goes somewhere else and you never learn it existed.

That is the whole problem with this particular leak. It is the only one on your books that never announces itself.

Do the math on your own shop

You already know three of these four numbers. Take two minutes.

1. Calls you miss in a week. The one number most owners have never actually looked up. How to find it is in the next section — do not guess at this one, because guessing is what makes the answer wrong.
2. The share that are real new-job calls. Not every missed call is money. Some are suppliers, wrong numbers, existing customers, and people price-shopping six companies. If you have no idea, start at 0.35 and correct it once you have watched your own calls for a week.
3. Your close rate. Of the new-job callers you do reach and quote, what share book? Most home service owners land between 0.3 and 0.5.
4. Your average job value. Total revenue divided by number of jobs, last month. Use contract value if maintenance is most of your work.

Run it with your own four numbers before you read on. The figure you get is the only one that matters, and it is usually the moment this stops being an article and starts being a decision.

How to find the number you don't have

Missed calls per week is the one people guess at, and the guess is almost always low. Here is where the real number lives.

If you use a cell phone: your carrier's app has a call log with missed calls. Count a full week, not a good week. Include the ones where you saw it ring, meant to call back, and didn't.

If you have a business line or answering service: ask for a call detail report. Ask specifically for unanswered and abandoned calls — abandoned means they hung up while waiting, and those are the hottest ones you are losing.

Either way, count evenings and weekends separately. Storm damage, a broken sprinkler valve, no heat in January — the calls that come in after hours are the emergencies, and emergencies close at a much higher rate than a Tuesday morning price check.

Three things you can fix this week for free

None of these require buying anything. Do them in this order.

Set up a missed-call auto-text

Most phones and business lines can send an automatic text when you miss a call. This one change usually recovers more jobs than anything else on the list, because it reaches the caller while they are still looking.

What you say matters more than people expect. Do not apologise into a void — ask a question, because a question gets a reply and an apology doesn't:

Sorry we missed you — we're on a job. What's going on and where are you located? I can text you back a ballpark in a few minutes.

Make a five-minute callback rule

Whoever is free calls back within five minutes. Not end of day. Not after this job. Five minutes.

Your odds of reaching someone fall off a cliff faster than almost anyone expects. A callback an hour later is a different business outcome than a callback at four minutes, on the same lead, with the same pitch. The person who answers first usually wins the job, and it is very often not the cheapest bid.

Get the quote in writing the same day

Not a better quote. A faster one. A rough number today beats an exact number Thursday, because Thursday is after they hired someone else.

If you cannot price it properly until you see it, send the range and the site-visit time in the same message. You have still given them something to say yes to.

When is it worth paying someone to fix this?

Above that, the question is only whether the fix costs less than the leak — and now you have both numbers, so it is arithmetic rather than a sales conversation.

The honest test: if you have already tried the three fixes above and you are still missing calls, the problem is not discipline. It is that you are running a business from a truck and there is no one to answer the phone at 10:40 on a Tuesday. That is a real constraint, and it is worth solving properly.

— Drew, J316 Digital