The Math of a Missed Call

Most owners guess at what missed calls cost them. You do not have to guess. The leak is computable from four public numbers: how often calls to shops like yours go unanswered, how few of those callers leave a voicemail, how many calls become booked jobs, and what an average ticket is worth. We ran the arithmetic the way an accountant would run it, twice, at two different shop sizes. Both times, the result rivals the ad budget that made the phone ring in the first place. This writeup shows the numbers, the sources, and the math, so you can rerun the whole thing with your own figures.

What the data says

Start with the miss rate. Invoca, a call-tracking firm that measures live inbound calls for home-services businesses, published the figure in 2022 from its own client call data: 27 percent of those calls go unanswered. Roughly one caller in four gets a ring with no pickup. Your own phone log holds your shop’s version of that number.

Second, voicemail. Of the callers who land there, fewer than 3 in 100 leave a message, per the same Invoca analysis. The other 97 hang up. A caller with water on the floor or a dead furnace does not narrate the problem to a voicemail box. He dials the next name in the search results.

Third, the ticket. HomeAdvisor’s national cost guide puts the average HVAC repair at about $350. Individual jobs run from a $100 service call to a $3,000 repair, so $350 is a fair working average, not a best case. Plumbing tickets land in a similar range.

Fourth, the booking rate. ServiceTitan pulled call data from more than 3,000 trade businesses across the US and Canada. The typical shop books 42 percent of its inbound calls into jobs. Shops running fewer than five technicians book 24 percent. After 6 PM, the small-shop rate falls to 9. Keep that 24 percent in mind. It is the industry’s own measure of how much of the ringing is real, bookable work.

Four numbers: a miss rate, a voicemail rate, a booking rate, and a ticket. That is everything the arithmetic needs.

A worked example in shop math

Take a shop whose phone rings 150 times a month. That is about seven calls per working day. Nothing unusual for a small HVAC or plumbing outfit in season. Now apply the data, and round against ourselves at every step.

Ten missed calls a month at a $350 ticket is $3,500 a month that rang your phone and left. Look at the middle step before you argue with the total. We threw out three of every four gone callers as wrong numbers, tire kickers, and duplicates, which is the industry’s measured 24 percent booking rate rounded to a fraction. Even so, the leak clears three and a half thousand dollars a month for a shop that considers itself busy, not broken.

Scale it yourself. Five missed, bookable calls a month is $1,750. Ten is $3,500. Twenty is $7,000. The line only bends one way, and it bends fastest for the shops whose phones ring the most.

The three-truck version

Scale changes the volume, not the physics. Take a three-truck plumbing outfit whose phone rings 320 times a month, about 15 calls per working day. HomeAdvisor’s national guide puts the average plumbing job at $340, so we will use that ticket. Same public rates, same rounding against ourselves.

Twenty jobs a month. $6,800 a month, call it $80,000 a year. And the bigger shop carries a wrinkle the small one does not. With three trucks running, two calls land at the same time more often, and the overflow rings out while the first line is live. The clock works against it too: in the ServiceTitan data, small shops book only 9 of every 100 calls that come in after 6 PM. The phone rings the same at 9 PM as it does at 9 AM. What changes is whether anything answers it.

What it means for your shop

The first conclusion is the one worth taping to the office wall: the leak sits at the pickup, not in the marketing. Every unanswered call was demand you already generated, and in many cases already paid for. Raising the ad budget while the pickup rate stays put makes the same leak proportionally larger.

• Count your own misses. Your phone system or carrier log shows unanswered calls. One month of data is enough to replace our 150-call assumption with your real number.
• Do not trust voicemail to catch the overflow. The data says it catches almost none of it.
• Look hardest at nights, weekends, and lunch. A full-time desk covers 40 of the 168 hours in a week. Burst pipes and dead compressors do not check your schedule.
• Watch the second line. When one call is live and a second comes in, the second one rings out. A busy signal is a missed call with better manners.

The ribbon above is simple arithmetic, not a study. A 40-hour desk covers 40 of the 168 hours in a week, and the other 128 belong to whoever answers them. None of this is an argument against the person at your desk. A good front-desk person is worth keeping, and this math is not about them. The leak lives in the hours and the overlaps no single person can physically cover. Coverage problems have fixes. Measure yours first, straight off your own call log.

The second conclusion follows from the first. Because the leak is computable, it is also checkable. Any vendor who claims to fix missed calls owes you this arithmetic, run on your own call log with your own numbers. We built our fit call around it.

What the call already cost you

So far we have only priced the job that walked. The call itself had a price tag too. Searchlight Digital’s benchmark of $6.7 million in Google Local Services ad spend puts the average cost of one lead at $51 for HVAC and $57 for plumbing, and finds contractors book only about 44 percent of the leads they pay for at baseline. In rough terms, more than half of paid leads never become jobs even when somebody answers. When nobody answers, the write-off is total, and it happens fast. The MIT lead-response study, built on more than 100,000 call attempts, found the odds of ever reaching a web lead fall roughly 100 times when the first callback slips from five minutes to thirty. By the time anyone dials the number back, the lead is usually gone.

The leak follows you all the way to the closing table. Broker-reported data from the IBBA puts typical small-business sale prices at 2.0 to 3.3 times seller’s discretionary earnings, depending on size. Inside that range, the paperwork matters. Broker guides report that spreadsheet-run operations get docked a quarter to half a turn on the multiple, while a business that runs without its owner on the phone brings 1.5 to 2 times more total price. Those last figures are broker estimates, not audited studies, but the direction is consistent across every guide we read. A complete record of every call, customer, and job is part of what a buyer pays for. A shop that misses 27 percent of its calls is missing 27 percent of that record too.

And missed calls are only the leak this article prices. Your shop has four more, from paid leads that waited to past customers who went quiet. Run the full five-leak math on the homepage.

Cut the numbers in half. The math holds.

Every number in the math above comes from a measured call dataset, not a marketing claim, and every source is linked so you can check the pages yourself. One famous number failed that test. The claim that 85 percent of missed callers never call back is quoted all over the industry, but the primary study behind it is not publicly available. We treat it as directional at best, and it appears nowhere in the math above.

Some missed callers call back, especially loyal ones. The arithmetic already counts them out. It throws out three of every four gone callers before counting a single lost dollar. If you still think the totals run hot, cut them in half. The 150-call shop leaks $1,750 a month instead of $3,500. That is still a truck payment, every month, riding on calls nobody heard. The conclusion survives any honest haircut. The exact size of the number is what your own call log is for.

How we checked the numbers

Every statistic above was checked against the publisher’s own page in June 2026, and we preferred primary sources over vendor roundups. Where a figure exists only secondhand, we either marked it as an industry estimate or kept it out of the math. The miss rate and voicemail figures are Invoca’s published call analysis. The booking rates are ServiceTitan’s report on more than 3,000 trade businesses. The tickets are HomeAdvisor’s national averages; yours may be higher or lower, so rerun the tables with your own number. The 150-call and 320-call shops are illustrations, not statistics. The 1-in-4 bookable assumption rounds the industry’s measured 24 percent small-shop booking rate, and every derived figure was rounded against the argument, never toward it. This article contains no survey of Pyrsos customers and no Pyrsos performance claims. Public data only.

Sources

• Invoca. “See How Much Missed Sales Calls Cost Home Services Businesses.” 2022. invoca.com/blog/how-much-missed-sales-calls-cost-home-services-businesses. Basis for the 27 percent unanswered rate and the fewer-than-3-in-100 voicemail rate.
• HomeAdvisor. “How Much Does It Cost to Repair an HVAC System?” 2025. homeadvisor.com/cost/heating-and-cooling/repair-an-hvac-system. Basis for the $350 average HVAC ticket and the $100 to $3,000 range.
• ServiceTitan. “Data: Call Booking Rates.” 2024. servicetitan.com/blog/data-call-booking-rates. Basis for the 42 percent typical booking rate, the 24 percent rate at shops with fewer than five technicians, and the 9 percent small-shop rate after 6 PM. Dataset of more than 3,000 US and Canadian trade businesses.
• HomeAdvisor. “How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Plumber?” 2025. homeadvisor.com/cost/plumbing/hire-a-plumber. Basis for the $340 average plumbing ticket.
• Coverage arithmetic. The 40-of-168 staffed-hours figure is our own calculation, a 40-hour week set against the 168 hours in every week. Not a citation.
• Searchlight Digital. “Google Local Services Ads Cost Per Lead.” 2026. searchlightdigital.io/google-local-service-ads-cost-per-lead. Basis for the $51 HVAC and $57 plumbing cost per lead and the roughly 44 percent baseline booking rate, from $6.7 million in tracked spend across 888 contractors.
• Oldroyd, James, for InsideSales.com and MIT. “Lead Response Management Study.” 2007. mit_study.pdf. Basis for the roughly 100-times drop in contact odds between a 5-minute and a 30-minute callback, from more than 100,000 call attempts.
• IBBA and M&A Source. “Market Pulse Report, Q3 2025 Highlights.” 2025. ibba.org/market-pulse-highlights-q3-2025.pdf. Basis for the 2.0x to 3.3x seller’s-discretionary-earnings sale multiples, from broker-reported closed deals.
• Deal Prospectors. “HVAC Business Sale Multiples 2026.” 2026. dealprospectors.com/hvac-business-sale-multiples. Basis for the quarter-to-half-turn discount on spreadsheet-run shops and the 1.5x to 2x owner-independence premium. Broker-reported industry estimates, not audited studies.
• Cira. “Missed Call Statistics.” 2026. hicira.com/missed-call-statistics. Source of the widely quoted 85 percent never-call-back figure, attributed there to Forbes and BIA/Kelsey. Industry estimate; the primary study is not publicly available, so the figure is excluded from all math in this article.