# What a missed call actually costs a contractor

> Everyone knows missed calls cost money. Almost nobody has done the arithmetic on their own numbers — and the answer is usually larger than a year of the tools that would have caught them.

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](/blog/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](/industries).
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](/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.

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Canonical: https://mazingi.com/blog/what-a-missed-call-costs-a-contractor
Published: 2026-08-13 · Section: Missed leads · © Mazingi (mazingi.com)