The phone rings while you are lying under someone’s kitchen sink. By the time you are back in the van it is half past four, and when you finally call back at six the customer has already had somebody else out. You never hear from them again, and nothing about that job ever shows up in your books.
A missed call is the only cost in a home services business that never appears on a bill. Here is how to work out what yours are worth, using numbers you already have.
The four numbers you already have
You do not need a consultant for this. Everything you need is in your phone records and your invoicing, and it takes about five minutes to pull together. Get these four and the rest is arithmetic.
Do the math on the back of an invoice
Say you take 120 calls a month and 26 of them ring out. That is roughly one in five, which is normal for a two-van outfit with nobody sitting on the phones. You chase them at the end of the day and get hold of eight. That leaves 18 people who called you, needed the work doing, and went somewhere else.
At a 40 percent close rate those 18 would have become seven jobs. At an average ticket of 450 dollars that is 3,150 dollars a month, or about 37,800 dollars a year, walking to whoever picked up on the second ring. And that figure is the conservative one: it counts none of the repeat work those customers would have brought, and none of the neighbors they would have told.
But surely they leave a voicemail?
Mostly they do not. Somebody with water coming through a ceiling is not composing a message — they are back on the search results tapping the next number. And even when they do leave one, you are in a race you usually lose, because your callback lands after two other companies have already offered a slot. A voicemail is a record of the call you lost, not a second chance at it.
What good looks like
Every call answered inside a couple of rings, at two in the afternoon and at two in the morning. Anything that still gets missed gets a text back within seconds, so the caller has a reason to stop dialing. Then run the same four numbers again in ninety days — the missed-call count is the one to watch, and it should be close to zero. If you would rather not put a person on the phones to make that happen, that is the job Hired Hands does.
