The arithmetic of an unanswered call

Ask an owner how many calls they miss and you will usually get a shrug and a number that sounds tolerable. Ten percent, maybe. A few a week. It never feels like an emergency, because a missed call leaves no evidence. Nothing lands in the inbox. Nobody complains. The revenue simply goes somewhere else and you never find out it was ever yours.

Start with the number you already have

You do not need new software to work this out. You need three figures you already know or can find in an afternoon.

The first is how many inbound calls you get in a month. Your phone provider has this. So does your Google Business Profile if most of your calls come from search.

The second is how many of those went unanswered, rolled to voicemail, or were picked up by somebody who could not help. Look at the ones outside business hours separately, because that bucket is usually larger than owners guess.

The third is what a job is worth to you on average. Not the quote. What you actually collect, and if you have repeat customers, what they are worth over a few years rather than once.

Then apply a conversion rate you believe

Here is where people talk themselves out of the exercise. Not every missed call was a customer. Some were suppliers, some were wrong numbers, some were people price-shopping who were never going to book.

Fine. Be harsh about it. Assume only one in five missed calls was a real prospect, and that you would only have closed half of those. That is a ten percent conversion rate on missed calls, which is deliberately pessimistic.

Now multiply. A company missing 60 calls a month, at a ten percent conversion rate, on an average job worth $600, is leaving $3,600 a month on the table. That is $43,000 a year, from calls that were already paid for by whatever marketing made the phone ring in the first place.

Why the leak is bigger than it looks

Two things make the real number worse than the arithmetic suggests.

The first is voicemail. Research from Hiya's State of the Call found that the large majority of people sent to voicemail hang up without leaving a message. So the calls you can see in your voicemail box are a fraction of the calls that actually came in. Your logs undercount the problem by design.

The second is that a caller who does not reach you does not sit and wait. They go back to the search results and call the next name. In a competitive trade, the business that answers is often the business that wins, independent of who is better at the work.

The part that stings

You are already paying for these calls. If you are spending on search ads, local service ads, direct mail or a van wrap, the cost of generating a call is already sunk by the time the phone rings. A missed call is not a lost opportunity. It is a purchase you made and then threw away at the last step.

That is why the phone is usually the cheapest place to find growth. You do not have to generate more demand. You have to stop dropping the demand you already generated.

What to do with the number

Once you have the figure, you can make a real decision rather than a nervous one. If your missed-call leak is $400 a month, do not hire anybody. Change your voicemail greeting, set up a proper after-hours forward, and get on with your day.

If it is $3,000 a month, you have a business problem that is worth solving properly, and almost any reasonable answering arrangement pays for itself several times over.

Either way, the number is worth knowing. If you would like a hand working it out, bring your call volume and your average job value and we will do the arithmetic with you on a fifteen-minute call. If it does not justify hiring anyone, we will say so.