Work out what your phone costs you.

The reason missed calls stay invisible is that they never enter your books. A lost job doesn't appear as a loss; it appears as an ordinary week that was slightly quieter than the one before. So the only way to see it is to calculate it deliberately, once, with your own figures.

The four numbers

You need four things, and you can estimate all of them in about a minute.

One: calls you miss in a week. Not calls you receive — calls that ring out. Most owners guess low here by half. Your phone's call log will tell you the truth, and it's worth ten minutes to look.

Two: how many of those were real work. Some are suppliers, some are wrong numbers, some are people selling you SEO. In most trades, somewhere between half and three-quarters of unrecognised missed calls are genuine prospects.

Three: your average job value. Use what you actually invoice, not the small jobs you remember. Include the ones that turned into something bigger once you were on site.

Four: the share you'd close if you reached them. This is the one people inflate. Be pessimistic. If you'd normally close half the leads you speak to, assume you'd win back a fraction of the missed ones — a third is a defensible figure, and the argument works even at a quarter.

The arithmetic

Missed calls per week × 4.3 × share that are real work × share you'd win × average job value.

Six missed calls a week, two-thirds of them real, winning back 30%, at a $650 average job: 6 × 4.3 × 0.67 × 0.30 × 650, which lands near $3,370 a month. That's the conservative version, before a single estimate follow-up closes anything.

The revenue calculator does this live if you'd rather drag sliders than do arithmetic in your head.

Why the real figure is higher

Three things this calculation leaves out, all of which push the number up.

The first is that missed calls cluster in your busiest weeks, which are also the weeks with the most valuable jobs — the cold snap, the storm, the spring rush. You're not missing an average call. You're missing an above-average one.

The second is customer lifetime value. A recovered service call isn't one invoice; it's a customer who calls you again and tells a neighbour. Costing it as a single job undercounts it substantially.

The third is the quote pile, which for most trades is larger than the phone problem. Every estimate you sent that never got a follow-up is a job you'd already done the unpaid work on.

What to do with the number

Compare it to the cost of fixing it — an employee, an answering service, a text-back system, or nothing. Most owners find the monthly loss is several times the cost of any of those options, which turns a spending decision into an obvious one.

Compare the options honestly, or run your numbers.