You’ll see big round numbers thrown around about how many calls tradies miss. Be careful with them. The honest truth is that nobody can tell you your number, because a missed call is invisible by design. It doesn’t show on a statement and it doesn’t generate an invoice. It just quietly becomes a slow week.

So instead of quoting a figure that may have nothing to do with your business, here’s how to work out your own. It takes a fortnight and a bit of attention.

Why the leak is invisible

When a call rings out, nothing happens. The caller hangs up and rings the next tradie. You never find out they called, so you never count it. That’s why most sole traders underestimate their misses. You’re not measuring missed calls, you’re measuring the calls you noticed, which is a different and much smaller number.

The calls you’re most likely to miss are also the most valuable: the ones that come in while you’re flat out doing paid work, and the after-hours emergencies when you’re asleep or with the family.

How to measure your own number

For two weeks, keep a simple tally:

Check your call log daily. Note every missed call and every call that went to voicemail. Your phone records these even when you don’t see them ring.
Mark which ones you returned, and whether they answered. A lot won’t pick up when you call back, because they’ve already booked someone else.
Mark which returned calls turned into a job. This is your recovery rate, and it’s usually lower than you’d hope.
Add the after-hours ones separately. Weekend and evening misses are easy to forget and often the most urgent.

At the end of the fortnight you’ll have three things: how many calls you missed, how many you couldn’t recover, and roughly what each lost job was worth.

Turning the count into dollars

Take your average job value and multiply it by the jobs you couldn’t recover. Say you missed eight calls over the fortnight, recovered three, and lost five, and your average job is worth $300. That’s $1,500 in a fortnight, or around $3,000 a month, from calls you never knew you’d lost.

Your numbers will be different. The point is to replace a guess with a measured figure. Once you’ve got it, the decision about whether to do anything gets a lot simpler. We’ve laid out the cost side in more detail in how much missed calls are costing you.

What to do with the number

If your fortnight turns up next to nothing, good. You’re catching your calls and you don’t need to change a thing. If it turns up real money, you’ve got two choices: free up enough of your day to answer the phone yourself, which most sole traders can’t, or have something answer for you. That’s the case we make in how to stop missing calls as a sole trader.

Better Half answers the calls you can’t, in your business name, and books the job while you’re on the tools. See how it works for your trade, or register your interest in the beta.