What Does a Missed Call Really Cost You? Grab a Pen — You’ll Have Your Number in 5 Minutes

By Matthew B., Founder, PDX Systems · October 14, 2026 · 6 min read · Conversion Strategy

You’ve seen the articles. “Missed calls cost contractors $X per year!” Big scary numbers, no math shown, and somehow the number is always exactly terrifying enough to sell you something. Here’s my problem with those articles: they don’t know your business. I don’t know your business either. So instead of handing you a number, I’m handing you the worksheet. Five minutes with a pen and your own invoices, and you’ll know YOUR number — which is the only one that matters.

Step 1: Your Average Job Value

Pull your last twenty invoices. Not your biggest month, not your best job — the last twenty, in order. Add them up, divide by twenty. That’s your average job value. For a lot of Portland-area plumbing shops this lands somewhere in the hundreds, but yours is yours. Write it down. If you do mostly service calls it’ll be lower; if you do repipes and sewer lines it’ll be higher. No judgment — it’s just your number.

Step 2: Count Your Missed Calls

Open your phone’s recent calls list. Count the missed calls from the last seven days — real ones, not spam, not your supplier, not your buddy. Just the ones that could have been customers. If you don’t track this (most shops don’t), do it for one week starting today and come back to this article. One honest week beats a year of guessing. Don’t want to wait a week? Your best guess works fine for now — or book a free strategy call and we’ll run your numbers together in ten minutes.

Step 3: Your Close Rate

Of the inbound calls you DO answer, how many turn into booked jobs? Don’t overthink it. If roughly half the people who call end up booking, your close rate is a half. If it’s closer to one in three, it’s a third. Use your gut — you know your business better than any spreadsheet. Write it down as a fraction.

Step 4: The Multiplication

Now the whole worksheet: missed calls per week × your close rate = jobs you probably lost per week. Jobs lost per week × your average job value = dollars walking past your phone every week. Multiply by 52 if you want the annual number, but the weekly one is the one that should sting — it’s concrete enough to picture.

Here’s the shape of it with made-up round numbers so you can see how the math works — these are NOT your numbers, just an illustration: 6 missed calls a week, close half of them, $600 average job. That’s 3 lost jobs a week, $1,800 a week walking by. Whether your real number is a tenth of that or double, the method is identical.

Now Be Honest With Yourself

Three caveats before you frame that number. One: not every missed call was a job. Some were wrong numbers, price shoppers who’d never book, people who called three plumbers and booked the first one who picked up. Your close rate already bakes some of that in, but be conservative anyway — round down, not up.

Two: this worksheet measures what you LOSE, not what any product will magically recover. No system on earth catches every call. If something recovers half your missed calls, that’s a massive win — don’t do math that assumes perfection, or you’ll talk yourself into anything.

Three: the number is only useful if it changes a decision. If your weekly number is small enough that you shrug, great — your phone situation is fine and you just saved yourself from buying something you don’t need. That’s a legitimate outcome. If the number makes your stomach drop, then you know exactly what budget makes sense to fix it. Either way, you decided with your own math, not someone’s scare statistic.

If your number came out ugly and you want to talk through what actually fixes it — text-back, AI receptionist, all of it, priced against YOUR math instead of a sales deck — book a free strategy call with PDX Systems. Bring your number. We’ll be straight with you about whether it’s worth fixing.