One missed call costs your average ticket multiplied by your booking rate. At the trades' measured 24 percent small-shop booking rate, that is about $48 per miss at a $200 ticket, $84 at $350, and $192 at $800. Multiply by your monthly miss count and the leak prices itself.
01The four numbers you need (you already have them)
No consultant required. The whole calculation runs on four numbers, and you own all of them.
Calls per month: your phone log has it. Miss rate: count last month's rings with no pickup; if you have not counted yet, the industry baseline is 27 percent unanswered, from Invoca's tracking of live home-services calls. Booking rate: ServiceTitan's study of more than 3,000 trade businesses puts small shops at 24 percent of calls becoming jobs, so unless your own number says otherwise, use theirs. Average ticket: your price book or last quarter's invoices, divided out.
The formula assembles itself: misses times booking rate times ticket. The booking rate is doing the honest work in that line. It concedes, before you can object, that most missed calls were never bookable. Wrong numbers, spam, duplicates, tire kickers: the 24 percent rate throws out three of every four callers and prices only the remainder.
02Worked at $200, $350, and $800 tickets
The small-ticket objection says misses cannot matter much when jobs are modest. Run it and see.
At a $200 ticket, a drain-cleaning or handyman sort of book, each miss carries $48 of expected work. Ten misses a month is $480. Call it $5,800 a year, at the low ticket in the trades.
At $350, HomeAdvisor's national average for an HVAC repair, each miss is $84. Ten a month is $840, roughly $10,000 a year. This is the standard case we work end to end in The Math of a Missed Call, and it lands within sight of many shops' entire ad budget.
At $800, septic work, restoration, replacements and installs, each miss is $192. Ten a month is $1,920, about $23,000 a year. High-ticket shops also tend to run fewer, bigger calls, so each individual ring carries more of the year on its back. If your average job clears four figures, a single missed afternoon can quietly outcost a month of the fixes discussed on this site.
Notice the small-ticket case did not escape. It shrank the per-miss number, but $480 a month is still real money against small-shop margins, and low-ticket books usually ring more often, so the miss count runs higher even as the per-miss cost runs lower. The leak scales with your business either way.
03Why the loss compounds monthly, not per call
The per-call figure understates the damage, for two reasons worth stating plainly.
First, the leak is a rate, not an event. Nothing about next month fixes itself, so the $840 case is not an $840 problem. It is $840 a month, every month the phone rings like it rings now, and a year of it outweighs most one-time expenses an owner frets over far more.
Second, a first call is rarely just its own ticket. The $350 repair customer, kept, is the future tune-up, the eventual replacement, the referral, the review. We will not pretend to put a precise lifetime figure on that, because we would be inventing it. Directionally, though, every first-call miss forfeits the whole chain, and the chain lands in a competitor's customer file instead of yours.
One honest caveat cuts the other way: these are expected values built on averages. No single missed call reliably costs $84. Some cost zero. One was an $8,000 replacement. The math only becomes trustworthy at monthly volume, which is exactly how you should read it: as a monthly line item, not a per-call panic.
04Run it on your own numbers in two minutes
Averages persuade. Your own numbers convict. Pull last month's phone log, count the misses, and set your real ticket next to them. Misses, times 0.24, times ticket. Write the result where you write your other monthly costs, because that is what it is: a recurring expense that has been running untracked, possibly for years.
The calculator on our homepage runs this live if you would rather drag sliders than do arithmetic: your call volume, your answer rate, your ticket, with the industry baselines pre-loaded and every assumption printed in the fine print. No email required. And once a fix is in place, the same math should run in reverse and in public, which is what the Money Ledger is for: it tracks every dollar actually booked, so you can see what your phone was dropping, in dollars, on your own report.
Two minutes with your phone log, then twenty with us if the number startles you. We will look at your call volume and tell you straight whether fixing this pays for itself at your ticket.
QUESTIONSCommon questions
How much does a missed call cost a small business?
It depends on your ticket and your booking rate, which is why generic answers range so wildly. Multiply your average ticket by your booking rate and that is roughly what each miss puts at risk: about $84 at a $350 ticket and the industry's 24 percent small-shop rate.
How do I calculate my own missed call losses?
Take misses per month, times your booking rate, times your average ticket. Three numbers, all off your own phone log and price book. Ten misses at 24 percent and $350 is about $840 a month. Swap in your figures and the answer is yours, not an industry average.
Twenty minutes. We look at your call volume and tell you straight whether this pays for itself. If the math does not work for your shop, we say so on the call.
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