What a missed call actually costs a contractor

You already know missed calls cost money. The question worth answering is how much, on your numbers, this year.

The arithmetic

Four figures, all of which you either know or can estimate closely:

• Calls you miss in a week. Count one week honestly. Most single-van operations land between 5 and 15.
• How many were real work. Strip out suppliers, spam and wrong numbers. Usually about half.
• Your close rate on a first conversation. Most trades sit between 25% and 50%.
• Average job value.

Then:

missed × real × close rate × job value × 50 weeks

Eight missed calls a week, half of them real, a third closing, at $900 a job:

8 × 0.5 × 0.33 × 900 × 50 ≈ $59,400

That is not lost profit — it is lost revenue, and your margin on it is what actually walked. But even at 20% margin it is close to twelve thousand dollars, from calls you never knew you missed.

Why voicemail does not save it

The reflex answer is "they leave a message." Mostly they do not. Someone with an urgent problem and a list of five contractors does not leave a voicemail on the first one — they call the second.

And a voicemail you return four hours later reaches someone who has already booked. You are not competing on quality at that point, you are competing on who answered.

The calls you never see

At least a missed call leaves a number. The version of this that goes unmeasured is the visitor who lands on your website, finds nothing, and leaves — no ring, no voicemail, no record. We wrote about that in why your website loses jobs after 5pm.

If your missed calls are worth what the arithmetic above suggests, the silent version is worth more, because there are more of them and none of them show up anywhere.

What actually moves the number

In rough order of cost-effectiveness:

1. Answer the website. Cheapest and least disruptive — it catches the enquiries you currently cannot see, and it works at 9pm. See how it qualifies by trade.
2. Text back missed calls automatically. Most phone systems can do this. A text within a minute recovers a real share of them.
3. A human answering service. Genuinely good, genuinely more expensive — worth it if most of your enquiries come by phone rather than web. We compared the two approaches in Mazingi vs Smith.ai.

Do the arithmetic before you buy any of them. If your number comes out small, none of this is worth your time — and that is a perfectly good outcome for ten minutes of counting.