How many leads am I losing by not answering the phone?

The short answer

There's no honest universal number, it depends entirely on your call volume and how many go unanswered, but the math is simple to run for your own business: count your missed calls in a typical week, multiply by your close rate, multiply by your average job value. That's the real dollar figure, not a guess borrowed from someone else's business.

Why this happens

• Every missed call isn't automatically a lost job.

  Some callers do leave a voicemail and wait. Some call back later. The honest number is missed calls that never converted, not every missed call.

• Most owners have never actually counted it.

  It's easy to feel like you're not missing much when you're the one deciding what counts as 'missed,' especially when you're the one who was on the job at the time.

• The cost compounds with job value.

  A missed call for a $150 drain snake and a missed call for a $9,000 roof both cost you one lead, but they're wildly different dollar amounts, so the math only means something calculated against your own average ticket.

How to check it yourself in 10 minutes

1. 01Pull your phone's call log or your business line's log for the last 30 days.
2. 02Count calls marked missed with no voicemail and no callback logged.
3. 03Estimate your close rate honestly, out of every ten calls that connect, how many turn into a job.
4. 04Multiply missed calls by that close rate by your average job value for a real monthly number.
5. 05Do the same for after-hours calls specifically, since those are the ones most likely to go to a competitor who does answer.

The fix

Running this math yourself costs nothing but ten minutes with your own call log. If the number is bigger than you expected, the fix is the missed call text-back and lead inbox in the Grow plan ($297/mo), which catches those calls automatically instead of relying on you remembering to check voicemail between jobs.