What is inside
14 chapters, in two parts
The phone itself
What a missed call costs, the free fixes, the callback, after hours, and a weekly count you can keep on a whiteboard.
- 1What a Missed Call Costs You7 min
- 2One Person, One Phone and a Full Day of Jobs7 min
- 3Free Fixes Before You Buy Anything7 min
- 4Calling Back Before They Call Someone Else7 min
- 5After Hours, Weekends and the Busy Season8 min
- 6When the Call Is Answered but the Order Never Changes7 min
- 7Your Calls, Counted Every Week8 min
AI and automation
The hours spent doing everything by hand, why automation stalls, which calls stay with a human voice, and how to prove it paid for itself.
- 8The Hours You Spend Doing Everything by Hand7 min
- 9Why Automation Stalls in a Small Business7 min
- 10Write the Steps Down Before You Automate Anything7 min
- 11Where a Human Voice Still Wins the Job7 min
- 12Ground Rules for AI on Your Phone Line9 min
- 13Proof the Automation Paid for Itself8 min
- 14What to Do This Week, in Order7 min
"You're losing business. I don't care who you are. That's just the fact. Every time you miss a call, that's money walking out the door. Say what you want, that's just the God's honest truth about it."
About the author
Connor Gallic
Founder, KaiCalls
Connor Gallic is the founder of KaiCalls, a phone secretary service for small businesses. It picks up for owner-operators who answer their own business phone and spend most of the day out on the job, tent and party rental companies among them.
The work started with a phone call from his father. Connor grew up in a family of entrepreneurs who said for years that they wished they had more time and a little more money, and whose margins rarely let them hire someone to help. His father's tent company had a missed-call problem, and one day his father called him to ask how to use the AI answering companies he kept seeing, because he wanted to test them. Connor looked at them, found them weak at the time, and started building once they began to get better.
Before the phone, Connor Gallic spent his career on marketing and the systems behind it. He is a college dropout. He was brought in to run marketing across all eighteen OpenRoad car dealerships in New Jersey, took over the online telemedicine company his father had started, and built the player-to-player marketplace for the video game Kompete. He now runs his own business mostly through automated systems he set up himself. What he knows about calls comes from the line itself. According to KaiCalls' month-one ledger (September 2026), the service had logged 9,434 calls through September 1, 2026, and 657 of the 690 calls in August 2026 completed.
Connor Gallic has never run a tent or event rental business, and he is not a lawyer or a licensed professional in any trade a reader of this book works in. The rental examples in these pages come from his father's company and a rental business he set up phones for, told as what he saw. Every quote in the book comes from his own recordings.
Owners who want a secretary picking up their own business number can set one up on KaiCalls and keep the number their customers already have.
The working kit
The Working Kit and Sources
The back of the book collects the sheets, scripts and checks the chapters refer to, plus every source used to write them.
- 01The voicemail greeting
- 02The text-back reply
- 03The repeat questions to answer before anyone calls
- 04The callback rule
- 05The index-card test for automation
- 06The three ground rules for AI on your phone line
- 07The Monday tally
- 08The book on one page
- 09Sources cited in this book
2.4 MB PDF
Get the PDF
The whole book in one file, with the figures, to read offline or pass to someone else.
Download the PDFFAQ
Frequently asked questions
Does AI answering sound like a robot to callers?
Some of it still does, and callers notice. A few years ago most of these voices were pretty trash. They've gotten a lot better, and a better voice is still no reason to hide it. Tell callers the line is automated, and pick up yourself whenever your hands are free. The sample intake call on the KaiCalls case studies page opens by telling the caller the conversation is recorded. Then call your own number from another phone and hear what a customer hears.
Is it legal to have AI answer my business line?
The big federal ruling was about calls a business places. The FCC's 2024 ruling on AI-generated voices says those voices count as artificial under the TCPA, and its consent rules apply when you dial out. Answering the calls people make to you is a separate question. Recording, texting and disclosure rules still apply, and they change from state to state. This isn't legal advice, so check your state's rules with an attorney before you go live.
Do I need to tell callers a call is recorded?
In some states, yes, and it's a safe habit everywhere. Federal law needs one person's consent, but a group of states want everyone on the call to agree, and a caller from another state can bring the stricter rule with them. Chapter 12 names those states. So put a recording notice at the start of every call, and confirm your own state's rule with an attorney before you turn recording on.
What does an AI phone secretary cost?
Per KaiCalls' pricing page as of September 2026, Kai Backup is $10 a month for about 20 answered calls, Kai Answering is $79 a month for about 150, and Kai Office is $349 a month for about 600. The KaiCalls pricing page also says plans are a flat monthly price with no per-minute overage. Before you look at any price, do the invoice math from Chapter 1. If one booked job covers the plan, the decision gets easy.
Will an AI secretary work with my calendar?
If you book in Google Calendar or GoHighLevel, Kai can book into it once it's connected. Zapier and Make can carry the call details into other tools you already use. Check the exact list and the setup steps on the KaiCalls integrations page before you sign up for anything. And if your bookings live in a spreadsheet, keep them in the spreadsheet. Send the call details there instead of moving your whole business into a new system.
Do I have to change my business phone number?
No. You can keep your number and forward calls to Kai, use a new KaiCalls number, or port your existing number over. Forwarding is the easy start, because the number your customers already have stays the same and you can undo it later. Set your cell to ring first, so Kai only picks up the calls you miss. The KaiCalls call forwarding help page has the steps by carrier. Test it from another phone before a customer calls.
What if the AI tells a caller the wrong thing?
Set it up to say it doesn't know instead of guessing. Kai shouldn't quote prices unless you put your pricing in, and he should never promise a crew or an arrival time you haven't confirmed. When he doesn't know, he takes a message or offers to get you. Read the call summaries every day for the first few weeks. To change what he says, call Kai and tell him, and the KaiCalls help center covers the rest of the settings.
Who should not use an AI secretary?
If your phone rarely rings, you don't need one. Owners who already pick up every call should keep doing that, because people like reaching a person. Skip it too if nobody will read the call summaries, since then nobody catches the mistakes. And if you handle protected health information, KaiCalls doesn't currently offer a Business Associate Agreement, per the KaiCalls trust center, so talk to your compliance person first. Everyone else should do the free fixes and count a week of calls.
What should I automate first in a small business?
Start with the questions people call about. Write down every reason someone calls you for one week, then put the answers to the top few, usually hours, prices and how to book, on your website, your Google listing and a text reply. Fewer people need to call at all. After that, pick one step that repeats every week, write it on one page and hand off only that step.
Is my customers' data used to train AI?
Not at KaiCalls. Per the KaiCalls trust center, each business's calls, transcripts and lead data are kept separate from every other business and aren't used to train models shared with other customers. You can ask for a record to be deleted, and if you close your account the data leaves with you. The details are in KaiCalls' privacy policy. Ask the same question of any phone tool you're thinking about using.