Do the maths

What missed calls actually cost a Melbourne tradie

Sachin, Melbourne 🇦🇺 · 2026-08-24 · 5 min read

A missed call isn't a missed call. It's a job that went to whoever picked up next. Here's how to put a number on it.

Nobody misses calls on purpose. You're under a house, on a roof, hands in a switchboard, or driving with the radio on. The phone rings out and you think you'll get back to them.

Mostly you don't, and mostly they don't wait.

The four numbers that matter

• 62% of calls to small businesses go unanswered.
• 85% of those callers never ring back.
• 98% of text messages get opened, 80% of them inside five minutes.
• 78% of jobs go to whoever replies first — not cheapest, first.

That last one is the one that stings. You're not losing work because you're dearer or slower on the tools. You're losing it because someone else answered.

Work out your own number

Three figures, and you probably know all three:

1. Calls you miss in a week. Be honest. Check your call log for the red ones.
2. What an average job is worth to you.
3. What share of those callers would actually have booked. A third is a fair guess for trades.

Multiply the three, times 52.

Six missed calls a week, $450 a job, one in three would have booked:

6 × 52 × $450 × 0.33 = about $46,000 a year.

That's four jobs a month walking to the next bloke in the search results. There's a slider version of this on the front page if you want to plug your own numbers in.

Voicemail is not the fix

More than half of callers hang up on voicemail without leaving a word. Think about your own behaviour: you ring a plumber, you get a beep, you hang up and ring the next one. Nobody wants to narrate their burst pipe to a machine and then wait.

Voicemail also gives you the worst possible information — a number, sometimes a name, no idea whether it's a $90 tap washer or a $4,000 bathroom.

What actually works: reply before they move on

The window is short. Someone with water coming through the ceiling is ringing the next three numbers on Google within about five minutes.

A text back inside that window does three things at once:

• It gets read. Nearly every text does, and fast.
• It arrives while they're still deciding. They're holding the phone, thinking about who to try next, and your business name appears.
• It gets you the details in writing. Their words, their spelling, their address. No "I said Tuesday".

You don't have to be the one who sends it. You just have to make sure something does.

The honest limits

A text back won't win you every job. Some people will only ever talk to a human — older customers especially, and anyone with a genuine emergency at 6am. That's a real gap, and it's why answering the phone out loud still matters for some trades.

It also won't help if your problem isn't missed calls. If you're answering everything and still quiet, the leak is somewhere else and no amount of automation fixes it. Check your call log first.

Where to start

Look at last week's missed calls. Count them. Multiply. If the number is bigger than a couple of hundred dollars a month, the leak is worth plugging — and plugging it costs less than one job.

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