Leak · Roofing
The calls nobody
got to.
You said a call that nobody can grab goes to voicemail and you call back when you can, or that a hailstorm request can wait a week for a time on the calendar. Here's what that usually costs, and how to find out whether it costs you that.
What it tends to cost
This leaks in two directions at once, and you're paying on both.
Invoca, a call-tracking company, reports that 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered, and that fewer than 3% of people sent to voicemail leave one. That's home services generally rather than roofing, and it isn't your shop's number. Treat it as the shape of the problem, not the size of yours.
The other direction is what you already spent. LocaliQ put the average roofing search lead at $228 to buy. A lead you paid for and didn't answer costs you the $228 and the job.
After a storm it gets worse, because everyone in the neighborhood is calling everyone at once. The roofer who books the inspection first usually gets the roof, and the homeowner rarely waits to find out who else might call back.
A better plan
None of this needs new software.
Every missed call gets a text back within five minutes, and the text offers a time rather than asking them to call again. "Sorry we missed you. I can have someone out Thursday morning or Friday afternoon, which works?" beats "we'll call you back."
Web forms reach a person fast, not a queue. If your form sends an email to an inbox somebody checks twice a day, it isn't a lead system.
Every missed call gets logged, so the number exists. You can't manage a leak you can't count, and most shops genuinely don't know their answer rate.
Check this yourself this week
Pull 30 days from CallRail, RingCentral, Quo, or whatever your phone system is. Filter to calls not answered during business hours. Count how many ever got a callback.
If that number is small, you've confirmed your own instinct and you can stop reading. If it isn't, you now know something about your shop you didn't know this morning, and you found it in about fifteen minutes.
The napkin version
Ten minutes with your own numbers, no spreadsheet needed:
Missed calls last month with no callback, times the share that are real job leads, times your close rate, times your average job, times your gross margin.
Count a job you didn't sell at gross profit, because you never bought the materials. Count money you already earned at full value.
It'll be rough. That's the point. A rough number you worked out yourself is worth more than a precise one somebody sold you.
What the assessment does differently
Everything above is an industry number and a general plan. The Leak Assessment uses your call log, your close rate and your average job to work out what this costs in your shop, with the math shown on every line. Sometimes it comes out smaller than the estimate. That's a real outcome, and I'd rather you get it than a big number nobody can check.
Haven't taken the scorecard yet? It's twelve questions and about three minutes.