Home services and trades
Five places the money leaks out of a contracting business, and how to tell which one is yours.
Answer fifteen questions about how your week actually runs. You get a score on each of the five and the order to fix them in. Nothing to install, no email, about four minutes.
Written for owner-operated home services doing a million a year and up. The numbers below are for one of the five. The other four are not smaller.
27%
of inbound calls to home-services businesses go unanswered. Analysis of 50,000+ contractor phone lines puts the high end near 62%.
85%
of callers who land in voicemail never ring back. They call the next name on the list.
$275–$1,200
what one missed HVAC call is worth. Multiply by the number you missed last week. If you do not know that number, that is the finding.
The fifteen questions
Answer them the way the week actually went, not the way you would like it to go. Nothing here is stored anywhere I can see. The scores update on the right as you go.
The phone is a sieve
Do you know how many calls you missed last week?
Someone calls at eight on a Tuesday night. What happens?
When you do miss one, when does that person hear from you?
Quotes take three days
From “can you give me a price” to the customer holding it, how long?
Who actually writes the quote?
Of the quotes you sent last month, how many did you never follow up on?
Nobody can find you
When did you last ask a customer for a review?
Do you reply to the reviews you get?
Pick the one word you want to be known for. Do your reviews actually say it?
Everything routes through you
You take a Saturday completely off, phone in a drawer. What breaks?
Is any of how you do the work written down where someone else can read it?
Besides you, who can price a job?
Past customers are forgotten
After the job is done and paid, does that customer ever hear from you again?
Could you pull every customer from the last two years with a phone number?
Do you ask for referrals at a set moment?
Your five scores
1 means nothing is in place. 5 means it runs without you.
Not yet answered.
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Start here
Answer the questions and the two to start with will show up here, in order.
What that score is not
It ranks. It does not size. Two owners can both score a 2 on the phone, and one of them is losing four thousand dollars a month while the other is losing four hundred. The difference is call volume, average job value, and close rate, none of which fifteen questions can know.
You will also score yourself about a point high. Everyone does, including me on my own work. So read the band above the one you gave yourself and ask honestly whether you are actually there.
A 1 or a 2 is a finding, not a verdict on you. Most owners running four crews score a 1 somewhere. The point of the ranking is that you cannot fix five things at once and the order matters more than the effort.
The five, one at a time
Each one gets the same treatment: what it costs you, how to check it this week without buying anything, what a fix actually looks like, and what a fix will not do. Your score from above sits next to each heading once you have answered.
1. The phone is a sieve
Stop losing jobs to voicemail.
You are on a roof or under a house. The phone rings. It goes to voicemail, and the voicemail goes nowhere until nine that night. By then the customer has already had someone else out to look at it.
This is the one that gets sized wrong most often, in both directions. Owners either wave it off because they call everyone back, or they assume it is catastrophic. Neither is a number. The check below gets you one.
What a fix will not do
If people are not calling in the first place, nothing that answers the phone helps you. That is number three, and you would be buying a very good solution to your third-biggest problem.
Check it this week
- Pull the call log on the business line. Count the inbound calls nobody answered, for seven days.
- Count how many of those you called back inside an hour.
- Multiply the gap by your average job value. Then cut it by your close rate. That is your floor.
What a 5 looks like
Every call is answered by a person or a system that can book. A text goes back inside a minute when it is not. You see a count every Monday without asking for it.
2. Quotes take three days
Same-day quotes, every time.
Speed of quote beats price more often than owners expect. The homeowner who called three contractors on Tuesday is not running a bid comparison. They are waiting for someone to make the problem go away, and the first credible number usually wins.
The reason quotes are slow is almost never the writing. It is that every one of them routes through you, and you are on a job until six. The fix is upstream of the quote: capture enough at intake that the draft is mostly written before you ever look at it.
What a fix will not do
A fast wrong quote loses twice. You eat the margin or you eat the conversation where you explain why the number moved. Speed only helps once the inputs are right.
Check it this week
- Take your last ten quotes. Write down the hour the customer asked and the hour it went out.
- Count how many of the ten you never followed up on after sending.
- Of the ones you lost, ask two of them who they went with and when that person got back to them.
What a 5 looks like
Intake feeds a draft. You read it on your phone between jobs, change one line, send. Under an hour, every job type. Unanswered quotes chase themselves.
3. Nobody can find you
Show up first when your neighbors search.
Wrong hours, no photos since 2019, eleven reviews and the last one from a year ago. Meanwhile the shop across town posts monthly and asks every customer. This one bleeds quietly, because you never see the call you did not get.
There is a newer wrinkle worth knowing about. People now ask an assistant for the best plumber in town and take the answer. I walked five Capital Region trades sites through this in September. The business with roughly 1,900 reviews at 4.9 stars lost the recommendation to a shop with 165. Not because of the rating. Because the assistant was reading what customers actually wrote, and the word the business claims on its own homepage did not appear in any of them. Review volume did not save it.
What a fix will not do
Search visibility moves on a sixty to ninety day lag and depends on what your competitors are doing. Anyone who prices this one for you off a form invented the number.
Check it this week
- Pick the one word you want to be known for. Fast, affordable, licensed, honest, whatever it is.
- Read your last twenty reviews. Count how many contain it. Usually the answer is zero.
- Ask an assistant for the best in your trade in your town. See whether you come up, and read who did.
What a 5 looks like
The ask fires within a day of every finished job and it asks for the specific thing. Replies go up within two days. Hours, photos and posts are current.
4. Everything routes through you
Get your Saturdays back.
Scheduling, intake, invoicing, the one supplier who only talks to you, the hire you keep meaning to make. It all lands on your phone. You cannot take a Saturday because the business stops when you do.
This is the expensive one and it is the one to fix last. It is hard to scope, it takes months, and it is the only one of the five where doing it badly makes things worse. Fix the phone and the profile first. They are cheap, they show up inside thirty days, and they change nothing about how you work.
What a fix will not do
Nothing here replaces the field-service app or the accounting software you already pay for. Anything worth doing works around what you have.
Check it this week
- Take one Saturday. Keep the phone on but write down every interruption and who it came from.
- Mark the ones only you could have handled. Usually it is two or three out of fifteen.
- The rest is the list. Start with whichever one happened most.
What a 5 looks like
How the work gets done is written down where the team can read it. Intake and scheduling happen without you. You can see status without being in every thread.
5. Past customers are forgotten
Your best customers are the ones you already have.
Every person you have ever done good work for is a warm lead you are ignoring. No service reminders, no seasonal check-in, no referral ask at the one moment they are most willing to give you one, which is the day you finished and they are happy.
On a maintenance-heavy trade this is usually the largest number of the five and the last one anyone looks at, because it does not feel like a problem. Nothing is going wrong. That is exactly why it sits there.
What a fix will not do
If the list lives in a shoebox of invoices and three phones, there is nothing to send. Getting the names and numbers into one place is the first job, and it is not glamorous.
Check it this week
- Try to pull a list of everyone you worked for in the last two years, with a phone number. Time yourself.
- If it takes more than ten minutes, that is the finding and the rest of this waits.
- If you got it, count how many you contacted even once since the job closed.
What a 5 looks like
Thank you, referral ask and seasonal reminder go out on their own, timed off the completion date. Every past customer hears from you at least twice a year.
Two rules before you buy anything
Kill the step, then automate what is left
The first question about any task is not how to speed it up. It is whether it should happen at all. Owners hand me a workflow with eleven steps and four of them exist because of a customer who left in 2021. Automating those four costs money and makes them permanent. Cut first. What survives the cut is worth building around.
Work around what you own, never replace it
You already pay for accounting software and probably a field-service app you use maybe a third of. You have no IT person, and a migration would eat a quarter you do not have. Anything worth doing sits alongside those and feeds them. If someone opens with what you need to rip out, that is a software sale, not a diagnosis.
If you want the version with your numbers in it
Fifteen questions rank your likely top gaps. Sizing them takes your own numbers.
Start with a free thirty-minute intro call. If the audit fits, it is $500: one sixty-minute call, then a written plan back in 48 hours that puts a dollar figure on each gap using your call volume, job value and close rate. If we go on to work together, whether we build it for you or coach you through it, the $500 credits against that.
Book a 30-minute intro callCall and plan available in English or Spanish.
Where the numbers come from. The 27% unanswered-call figure is Invoca’s; the higher contractor range comes from ServiceTitan’s analysis of more than 50,000 contractor phone lines, and the lower figure is used here on purpose. The 85% voicemail figure and the $275 to $1,200 per-missed-call range are published home-services benchmarks. The review-wording finding is my own desk test across five Capital Region trades businesses in September 2026, which is one afternoon of work and not a study.
No product is named in this guide and none is recommended. Which tool, if any, is a separate conversation that should come after you know which of the five is costing you the most.