What a Missed Call Costs You

You're on a job. Your hands are full. The phone buzzes in your pocket and you let it ring, because you can't drop what you're doing every time somebody calls. An hour later you pull it out. One missed call. No voicemail. A number you don't recognize.

So what did that cost you? Nobody sends you a bill for it. It doesn't show up in your bank account or on your taxes. And that's the whole problem with it. The cost of a missed call is a job that went to somebody else, and you never find out which job or which somebody.

This chapter puts a number on it. Your number, built from your calls and your prices, worked out on the back of an invoice. No industry average, and no scary statistic from a company trying to sell you something.

The caller on the other end of that ring

Flip it around and stand where the caller is standing. They need something done, maybe this weekend. They search, they find you, they tap your number. It rings and rings.

The caller has no idea you're up to your elbows in a job. All they know is that nobody answered. Most of them don't sit there and wait for you to get free. They go back to the search results and tap the next business on the list. And if that one doesn't answer either, they try the one after that. The job goes to whoever answers first, and a lot of the time that's just the company that had a free hand at that exact moment.

Voicemail doesn't catch all of it either. Plenty of callers hang up without leaving a message, so your missed-call list is often a number with no name and no reason attached.

Calling back later is harder than it sounds. According to Pew Research Center's 2020 survey on unknown callers, eight-in-ten Americans say they don't generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls. To somebody who called you once, your number is still a stranger's number.

So the clock starts the second it stops ringing. Every hour between the missed call and your callback is an hour that caller spends looking for somebody else, and some of them find somebody.

Speed matters even when people do want to hear back. Researchers writing in the 2011 Harvard Business Review study on online sales leads found firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as firms that tried even an hour later. Those were web-form leads, mostly at bigger companies, and not phone calls to a small shop. Still, it points the same direction owners feel every week. Interest cools fast.

Pricing your missed calls on the back of an invoice

Let me do some math for you. Grab an invoice, a receipt, whatever paper is closest to you right now. Every number you write on it comes from your own business, not from mine and not from some report.

Start with last week's missed calls. Open the recent calls list on your phone and count the ones you didn't pick up. Don't guess. Count.

Now cross some of them off, because not every missed call is a lost job. Some are robocalls, wrong numbers and people selling you something. Some are price shoppers who were never going to book with you no matter who answered. Be honest here, and be a little tough on yourself. What's left is the calls that could have turned into work.

Last, write down what a normal job is worth to you. The normal one you do most weeks, and not your biggest job of the year.

Now multiply. Say you missed 8 calls last week and crossed off 6 as junk and shoppers. The 2 that are left would have booked. Say a normal job is worth $600 to you, so that's $1,200 of work gone to somebody else in one week. Say that pace holds for 50 working weeks, and it comes to $60,000 a year.

Your numbers will come out different. Maybe you only miss 3 calls a week. Say your normal job is $150, and it takes a lot of missed calls before it hurts. Good. Now you know that too.

Rough is fine, as long as it's yours. Then when somebody tells you what missed calls cost, you can hold their number up against the one you built yourself.

Why a hire just to catch the calls rarely adds up

So the obvious fix is to hire somebody to answer the phone. Every owner hears that one.

Most small business owners can't pay a person to sit next to a phone all day. People look at a local shop and figure the owner is raking it in. Usually they're making a reasonable living and not much more, and a full-time salary for somebody whose whole job is picking up is a big bite out of that.

And a hire doesn't fix the whole thing. A person still takes one call at a time. A person still goes home at the end of the shift and takes a day off when they're sick. Chapter 2 gets into why that limit is built into the job itself.

Plenty of owners land somewhere in the middle. A family member answers when they can, or a part-timer covers the busy months. That helps, and it still leaves the hours nobody is covering.

Try this instead of taking anybody's word for it. Put your yearly missed-call number from the invoice next to what a full-time person would cost you in your area, with payroll taxes and everything else that comes with an employee. For a lot of small shops, the hire costs more than the calls they'd catch. For some busy shops, it doesn't. Do the math before you believe anyone on this, including me.

The number stays hidden until you write it down

Most owners aren't tracking their calls at all. They remember the good calls and the angry ones. The calls that rang out while they were busy on a job just disappear.

And the missed calls you can see are only part of it. A caller who couldn't reach you this spring might not bother trying you next spring either. That one never shows up on any list.

So for one week, keep a simple tally. Every missed call gets a line with the time it came in and what happened after. Did you call back? Did it turn into a job? Paper is fine. The notes app on your phone is fine. Chapter 7 turns this into a weekly habit, but one week is enough to get your first honest number.

Written down, a missed call has a date and a price next to it, and that's a lot harder to shrug off than a buzz in your pocket.