One call in seven rings out

Picture a customer with a leaking water heater at nine at night. They text two or three businesses and wait. The first question is not which of you is cheapest. It is which of you answers.

What the numbers say

CallRail looked at about 1.1 million small-business calls. Home-services businesses missed 14% of theirs. That is one call in seven. CallRail sells call tracking, so read it as their numbers.

Web forms do worse. Leadferno filled in the contact forms of 225 small businesses and waited three weeks: 42.6% never replied, by email, phone or text. Leadferno sells business texting.

What they don't say

You will see a claim that answering in five minutes makes you 21 times more likely to win the job. It comes from a study of six companies' sales calls between 2004 and 2007, run by a company selling lead software, and it measured reaching a lead, not winning the job. Nobody has repeated it for plumbers, or for texts. We will not quote it to you.

What is well evidenced is simpler. A lot of people who reach out never hear back. The business that replies is already ahead of the ones that don't.

Answering is the job

A missed call usually means the owner is on a job, under a sink or asleep. That is not a discipline problem. It is one person and one phone.

That's the gap Tenfour is being built for. A customer texts the number you give them, gets the questions you would ask, and gets a real price back. Nothing goes out until you approve it.