How much does a missed call cost your trade business?

How we work this out

No black box, no fudged industry numbers. The maths is one honest line:

• Calls missed per week × your win rate × your average job value = lost revenue per week. We then multiply weekly by roughly 4.33 for the month and by 52 for the year.

That's it. Every figure in the result is driven entirely by the inputs you chose. If a number looks too big or too small, change your inputs - the result moves with them. We deliberately don't bolt on studies we can't stand behind or "typical tradie" averages we've made up. The point is to help you sanity-check the size of your own leak, with your own numbers.

What the number is really telling you

Here's the part most tradies miss. The leak isn't the phone ringing out. The leak is the enquiry behind it - a real person with a real job, money in hand, who needed someone today.

When you don't pick up, that person doesn't leave a voicemail and wait. They scroll to the next name and ring them instead. By the time you've climbed down off the ladder and seen the missed call, the job's already being booked by someone else. You never quoted it, so it never showed up as a loss. That's exactly why it's so easy to ignore, and so expensive over a year.

The calculator just puts a dollar figure on something that's been invisible. If the yearly number made you wince, that's the signal worth acting on.

How to plug the leak

You're never going to answer every call while you're on the tools - and you shouldn't have to. The fix isn't staring at your phone or hiring a receptionist. It's making sure the enquiry gets caught the second you can't pick up. Here's how TradeStream handles it:

1. It catches the miss. When a call goes unanswered or comes in after hours, TradeStream texts the customer straight away so they know they've reached the right business - before they dial the next name on the list.
2. It captures the job. The text includes a smart intake form. The customer taps in what they need - job type, suburb, a photo, how urgent it is - in a couple of minutes, while they're still keen.
3. Ash qualifies it. The AI reads the answers, flags urgency, and sorts the real jobs from the time-wasters, so you're not chasing rubbish enquiries.
4. You get a callback-ready lead. Instead of ringing back blind, you call back already knowing the job - which is exactly when you win it.

It won't conjure jobs that were never there. What it does is stop the silent ones - the misses you'd otherwise never even know about - from walking straight to a competitor.

Want to go deeper? Read why the first tradie to call back usually wins the job - speed is half the battle.