There is a test for this. It takes ten minutes, costs nothing, and you do not need us to run it.
Most owners have a number in their head for this and the number is usually wrong. Not because they are careless — because a missed call leaves no trace. A booked job shows up in the calendar. A voicemail shows up on the phone. A call that rang out at 8:40pm while you were eating dinner shows up nowhere at all.
That's it. Two calls tell you most of what you need to know.
The part that surprises people: under 3% of callers leave a voicemail. So if your line rolled to voicemail on that test, roughly 97 out of every 100 people who called you that evening are invisible to you. They didn't complain. They didn't call back in the morning. They called the next shop on the list.
Good — genuinely. You're in a minority. The follow-up question is who answered and what happens when they're asleep, at their kid's game, or already on another call.
Then every emergency call outside business hours is a coin flip. A homeowner with water spreading across a kitchen floor does not leave a message and wait. They hang up and dial the next number.
This is more common than you'd think, usually after a phone system change nobody noticed. It's also the worst outcome — the caller has no idea whether you exist.
Work it out with your own numbers rather than ours. Take your average job value. Take the number of evenings a week nobody is covering the phone. Assume one call a night — most shops in the trades get more.
At a $400 average ticket, one missed call a week is roughly $20,000 a year walking to a competitor. You will never see it on a report, because the jobs you didn't win don't appear anywhere.
Three honest options, in order of cost:
Run the test first. Whatever you decide afterwards, you'll be deciding with a real number instead of a guess.
Ten days on your rollover line, free. At the end you get the log of every call it caught — times, names, addresses. If the log is empty you owe nothing.
Start the ten days