Ask most tradespeople how many calls they miss and you get a shrug. “Not many.” Or “loads, but they’re mostly rubbish.” Fair enough, but you can’t fix a number you’ve never counted.
How do you find out?
Keep a note on your phone for a week. Every missed call or voicemail gets a line: the time, whether you rang back, and whether it turned into a job. It takes seconds and it costs nothing.
What should you look for?
At the end of the week you’ll have three piles. Calls you rang back and won. Calls you rang back that didn’t come to anything, which is normal because not every caller becomes a customer. And calls you never rang back. That last pile is the one to look at. Some will be wrong numbers or sales calls. Some will be real people with real jobs who got no reply while you were up a ladder.
What is that worth?
Be careful here. Take the real enquiries you never rang back, then use your own average job value and your own usual conversion rate. It’s a rough idea of what slipped, not money you definitely lost. If you’d like to do the sum, the missed-call calculator uses only your numbers and saves nothing.
What if the number is small?
Then you’re fine, and you don’t need us. To be honest, that’s a good result. If it’s bigger than you expected, the answer is a quicker first reply, not longer hours. That could be you, someone at home, or an assistant that picks up when you can’t. Here is how ours works, but count first.