Most tradies have a vague feeling they’re losing work to missed calls but have never put a number on it. Here’s a simple way to do that with your own figures. Grab your phone’s call log and work through it. The result is usually bigger than the guess.

The formula

The cost of your missed calls comes down to four numbers:

Missed calls per week. How many calls ring out or hit voicemail in a normal week.
Conversion rate. Of the calls you do answer, how many turn into paid work. For most trades this sits somewhere between a third and two thirds.
Average job value. What a typical job is worth to you.
Recovery rate. Of the calls you miss, how many you successfully win back by ringing later. For emergency-led trades this is low, because the caller has already booked someone else.

Put them together:

Weekly cost = missed calls × conversion rate × average job value × (1 − recovery rate)

Multiply by roughly 4.3 for a monthly figure, or 52 for a year.

A worked example

Say you miss 3 calls a week, you convert about half the calls you answer into jobs, your average job is worth $350, and you win back maybe 1 in 5 of the ones you miss.

Missed calls: 3 per week
Of those, would-be jobs: 3 × 0.5 = 1.5
Lost after recovery: 1.5 × (1 − 0.2) = 1.2 jobs a week
Weekly cost: 1.2 × $350 = $420
Monthly: about $1,800
Yearly: around $21,800

Even halve every assumption and you’re still looking at thousands of dollars a year disappearing without a trace.

Where the numbers come from

The hardest figure to get is the first one, because a missed call leaves nothing behind. The fix is to actually count for a fortnight: check your call log daily, note every miss, and mark which ones turned into a job once you rang back. We walk through that properly in how many calls do tradies miss.

Be honest about your recovery rate. It feels like you win most of them back, but the data usually says otherwise, because the caller who couldn’t reach you rang the next tradie while you were still on the tools.

What the figure tells you

Once you’ve got your number, the decision gets simple. Compare your monthly cost of missed calls against the cost of fixing it. If you’re losing $1,800 a month and a service that answers your phone costs a small fraction of that, the sum makes itself. One recovered job a month usually covers it many times over.

That’s the whole case for an answering service in one line: it costs less than the work it saves. We make the full argument in is an AI receptionist worth it.

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