Swoopd
When you are up a ladder, under a sink or driving between jobs, your phone rings out. It happens to every tradie. The problem is that a missed call is rarely a customer who waits around. Most of the time it is someone who hangs up and rings the next name on the list.
Let us actually put numbers on it, because once you see the figure it is hard to ignore.
Work out how many calls you really miss
Most tradies underestimate this. You remember the calls you took, not the ones you never saw. Check your phone log for the last fortnight and count the calls you did not answer and did not call back the same day.
For a lot of sole operators and small crews that number lands somewhere around three to eight a week once you add up the jobs, the drive time and the after-hours rings.
Say you miss five calls a week. That is roughly 20 a month and around 240 a year. Not every one of those is a paying job, but a good chunk of them are.
Put a dollar value on a missed call
To turn missed calls into lost money you need three of your own numbers:
- How many calls you miss a week. Use the real count from your phone log, not a guess.
- Your average job value. A plumber doing callouts and small repairs might sit around 250 to 600 dollars a job. A sparky or a builder running bigger work could be well into the thousands.
- How often a caller becomes a paying job. Even being conservative, say one in three new enquiries turns into work.
A realistic example
Say you are a plumber who misses five calls a week. Knock out the wrong numbers and the tyre kickers, and call it three genuine new enquiries. If one in three becomes a job at an average of 400 dollars, that is one job a week you are letting walk.
One job a week at 400 dollars is 1,600 dollars a month. Over a year that is close to 20,000 dollars in work that rang your phone and got nothing back.
Run the same maths on a bigger average job value and the number gets uncomfortable fast. A builder or a sparky quoting fit-outs can lose far more from a single unanswered call, because one missed enquiry might have been a multi-thousand-dollar job.
It is worse than just the one job
The lost job is only the start. A customer who needed you today and got voicemail does not just go elsewhere once. They now have another tradie's number saved, and that is who they ring next time and who they recommend to their mates.
So every missed call is really two costs. The job you lost now, and the repeat work and referrals you will never see.
Why "I will call them back" does not save it
The honest truth is that by the time you are off the tools and free to return calls, the customer has often already booked someone else. People with a leak, a dead hot water cylinder or a tripped board are not patient. They ring two or three tradies and go with whoever answers or replies first.
That is why speed matters so much, and why a callback at 6pm is usually too late. You can read more on that in why the first tradie to reply wins.
What you can do about it
You do not need to answer every call to stop losing the work. You need every caller to get a fast, useful response even when you cannot pick up.
That is exactly what Swoopd does. When you miss a call, it texts the caller back within seconds, asks what they need, and either books the job straight into your calendar or arranges a callback for you to quote the bigger ones. The customer feels looked after, and you find out about the lead instead of it vanishing.
It works alongside your existing mobile number, so there is nothing to change about how you give out your details. Plans start at 99 dollars a month, which is a fraction of a single lost job, and there is a 14 day free trial so you can watch it catch the calls you would have lost.
The bottom line
Pull your phone log, count the real misses, and run the maths with your own job value. Most tradies are shocked at the yearly figure. The good news is that this is one of the easiest leaks to plug. You can see the plans on our pricing page and start the free trial today.