12 missed calls a week, a $600 average ticket and a 45% close rate is $168,000 a year. That’s a service tech’s fully loaded salary, leaving through a phone nobody picked up.
Most owners know they miss calls. Almost none have done that multiplication, because a missed call arrives with no invoice attached and appears in no report. Ad spend gets reviewed monthly. The calls that rang out last Tuesday get reviewed never.
Worse, the ones you miss aren’t a random sample. They cluster after 5pm and during the July afternoon when every phone in the market rings at once, which are exactly the hours when a $180 service call is more likely to be a system replacement.
You need 3 numbers you already have.
The arithmetic
Take your average ticket. Take your close rate on inbound calls you actually answer. Take the number of calls that ring out in a week.
If your average ticket is $600, you close 45% of the calls you pick up, and you miss 12 calls a week, that’s roughly $3,240 a week walking away. Call it $168,000 a year. For most companies in the $2M to $10M range, that lands somewhere between 1 service tech’s fully loaded salary and 2 of them.
And the first pass understates it, because a booked job isn’t worth 1 ticket. If the customer sticks, it’s worth the maintenance agreement, the eventual replacement, and whoever they refer. Losing the call loses all of it.
The hours you’re least covered are the ones worth most
61.1% of the 9,509 HVAC and plumbing companies we’ve scanned had no after-hours capture at all. Not a service, not a callback promise, not even a message saying when someone would ring back. For plumbing it was 67.3%.
A furnace that quits on a January night is a replacement conversation, not a $180 service call. A burst pipe at 11pm is the same. The calls arriving when you’re least covered are systematically the expensive ones.
It compounds with a second gap: 65.4% had no way for a customer to book online, so there’s no fallback when the phone doesn’t get answered. The customer’s only option is the next company in the results.
What is your funnel actually leaking?
4 numbers off your last month. We show you where your funnel sits against poor, average and strong, and what the gap is worth in dollars.
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Where the calls actually go
When we run a scan, missed calls almost never trace back to 1 cause.
After hours. The furnace quits at 9pm. Voicemail picks up. The customer doesn’t leave a message, because the next company answers.
Second-call collision. Someone’s already on the line. The second caller gets a busy signal or a ring-out and never appears in any report you look at.
Mid-job. The one person who answers phones is also dispatching, also handling a warranty complaint, also finding a part.
The callback gap. You do call back, 90 minutes later. They’ve already booked someone else. This one’s the most painful, because it shows up in your logs as a call you handled.
That last one is worth sitting with. Most owners believe their callback process covers them. It covers the customer willing to wait, and in an emergency trade that’s a small share of the people who called.
What the market pays for those calls
Worth knowing what you’re competing against for the same customer. In San Antonio, homeowners run about 11,090 searches a month for HVAC help, and buying that traffic costs roughly $66.94 a click. In Katy it’s $97.49.
You already earned the call. Losing it means paying that price again for the replacement, if you get one.
What actually moves the number
You don’t need to answer every call yourself. You need the call to reach a human or a booking screen inside a couple of minutes, every hour you advertise.
Online booking that shows real availability. Not a contact form. A form is a callback request wearing a disguise, and it puts you back in the 90-minute gap.
Overflow answering for nights, weekends and the second-call collision. The cheap version routes to voicemail and the expensive version books into your calendar. Only one is worth paying for, and whether you need one at all depends on when you’re actually losing calls, which the count below settles.
A number that tracks. If you can’t see how many calls rang out last week, you can’t manage any of this. Most companies we scan have call tracking on their ads and nothing on their main line, which is backwards.
Text-back on the ring-out. An automatic message inside 30 seconds catches a real share of people who’d otherwise be gone. 89.6% of the companies we scanned offered no chat or text intake of any kind, so the bar here is low.
Start by counting
Before you buy anything, spend a week counting. Pull the call log from your carrier, count the ring-outs and the after-hours voicemails, and multiply.
If the number comes back small, you’ve got better places to spend your attention and it cost you an hour to find out. If it comes back the way it usually does, you now have the one thing that makes this easy to fix: a dollar figure bigger than the cost of fixing it.
The Revenue Leak Scan runs the same count on your business, plus your map-pack position and booking path. Figures throughout are from the 2026 demand-capture benchmark.