What a missed call costs your business

What it costs 6 min read

How to put a real number on the calls you never get to, count them for two weeks, and fix the cheap causes before you pay anybody to answer your phone.

Your phone rang at twenty to ten this morning. You were under a sink with both hands wet, and by the time you were dry the ringing had stopped. No voicemail, and a number you did not know.

You will never find out who that was. A missed call is the only kind of lost work that leaves no trace at all.

The call you never hear about again

A quote you lose teaches you something. You know the price you gave, you know who else was bidding, and you can decide whether you would do it differently.

A missed call teaches you nothing. There is no name, no job, no reason. The caller moves down their list, someone else picks up, and the whole thing is over inside four minutes. You are not told, ever.

This is why missed calls feel cheap and are not. The ones you notice are the ones that cost you the least, because you noticed them in time to call back.

Work out what one job is worth to you

Do this once, on paper, and you never have to do it again.

Take your last ten invoices and find the middle one. Not the biggest, not the emergency service call that paid for a vacation, the middle one. That is your ordinary job.

Now take off what the job cost you in materials, fuel and the hours of anyone you paid. What is left is what the job put in your pocket. For most owner-operated trades that number is a good deal smaller than the invoice, and it is the only number that matters here.

Write it down. Call it your job value.

Then work out how many calls it takes

Not every caller becomes a job, and pretending otherwise gives you a silly number.

Think about the last ten strangers who called you. How many turned into work? Three is common. Two is common. If it is one in five, that is your number and it is fine.

Now divide your job value by that number. If it takes four callers to get one job, every stranger who calls is worth a quarter of a job to you before they have said a word. That is what the ringing is worth, whether you answer it or not.

The exact figure matters less than the fact that it is never zero, and never small.

Count the misses for two weeks

You do not know how many calls you miss. Nobody does, because misses do not announce themselves.

So count. For two weeks, at the end of each day, open your call log and look at the unanswered ones. Cross off the numbers you recognize, the numbers you called back the same hour, and anything that was clearly a sales call. What is left is your real miss.

Two weeks is enough to see a pattern and short enough that you will actually finish. Multiply the leftovers by twenty six to get a year.

The number usually lands in one or two specific parts of the day. That is useful, because a problem with a shape can be solved and a vague worry cannot.

Where the misses actually come from

When you look at the pattern, it is usually one of a small number of things, and none of them are about you being bad at your job.

Between eleven and two, because you are up a ladder or under something. Between four and six, because you are driving and the phone is in a bag on the back seat. On the days you are on a site with no signal. And in the evening, when the phone is on the counter and you are not.

There is also the quiet category: calls that never happened because your number was hard to find. A number sitting only in the footer of a website, or written into an image so a phone will not dial it, produces a silence that looks exactly like nobody wanting you.

What voicemail does and does not do

Voicemail catches the caller who has already decided they want you specifically. It does not catch the caller working down a list of four names, and that is most of them at the start.

It is still worth having set up properly. A greeting that says your name, your trade, and when you will call back is doing work. A robot message reading out a number is not, and a full mailbox is worse than no mailbox at all, because the caller now knows you exist and cannot be reached.

Check yours from someone else's phone this week. The greeting was probably recorded years ago in a van, and it may not say what you think.

The cheap fixes, in order

Start at the top. Each of these costs you nothing but a few minutes.

• Call your own number from a phone that is not yours and listen to the whole thing, greeting included
• Empty the mailbox and re-record the greeting with your name, your trade and when you call back
• Put your number in the header of every page of your website as a link that dials when tapped
• Take the number out of any image so a phone can read it and dial it
• Turn on call forwarding to a second phone, a partner, or anyone who can take a name and a number
• Check the number on your Google listing matches the one you actually carry
• Pick one time a day to call back every unknown number from that day, and keep it
• Text back the ones who do not answer with your name and trade, because a stranger will ignore a returned call from a number they do not know

When paying anybody is not the answer

If your count comes out at one or two real misses every two weeks, you do not have a problem worth spending money on. Call them back at four o'clock each day and get on with your work. An answering service, a second line, a receptionist, any of it would cost you more than it recovers, and anyone telling you otherwise has not asked you to count.

The counting is the whole exercise. If the number is small, you have bought yourself the right to stop worrying about it. If the number is large and sits in the same two hours every day, you now know exactly what you are buying when you buy something, and roughly what it has to be worth.

Questions people ask

How much is a missed call worth to a small business

Whatever your average job puts in your pocket, divided by the number of callers it takes to get one. Do it with your own last ten invoices rather than any figure you read online, because a figure from a stranger's business is not about you.

Should I get an answering service

Only after you have counted your misses for two weeks. If the count is small, the service costs more than it returns. If it is large and always in the same hours, you know what you are asking it to cover.

Is voicemail enough

For the caller who wants you specifically, usually. For the caller calling four numbers off a search result, usually not. Have it, keep it empty, and record the greeting yourself.

Do people leave a voicemail if the mailbox is full

They cannot, and they hear that it is full, which is the one outcome worse than the phone ringing out. It takes two minutes to clear.

Why do I get calls I cannot answer and no messages

Because someone comparing a few businesses has no reason to leave a message with any of them. They call the next number instead. That is not a comment on you.

Should I put my cell number on the website or get a business line

Your cell phone is fine, and it is the number you will actually carry. A second line only helps if somebody else answers it. Whichever you choose, make sure it is the same number on your website, your listing and your van.