How many jobs a year does a two-truck shop lose to unanswered calls?

Ask a two-truck owner how many calls they missed last year and the honest answer is usually a shrug. It isn't carelessness. The phone rings out while you're on a roof or already on another call, the number drops into a list nobody scrolls back through, and a year of that never adds up to anything you can see. It can, though, and it takes an afternoon.

Here's the short version. Nobody can hand you an annual figure, because no benchmark tracks how many calls a two-truck shop takes in a year. What is published is the conversion. Invoca's 2026 home services benchmarks put the HVAC lead and close rates at 45% and 43%, which multiplies out to about 19 of every 100 answered calls ending in a job booked while the caller is still on the line. The same math gives 16.5 per 100 for plumbing and a little over 10 for restoration. Multiply your own count of real missed calls by your trade's rate and you have an estimate.

The count is the half you can improve. The multiplier is borrowed either way.

Why nobody can just hand you the number

Search this question and you'll find annual dollar figures quoted with real confidence for "a small contractor." Ask where the call volume underneath them came from and it evaporates.

There's a reason for that. Call volume at two trucks swings on things no benchmark captures: how long you've been in business, how big your maintenance book is, whether you're buying leads or living on word of mouth. A twenty-year shop running on referrals and a two-year shop buying every call have nothing in common on volume.

So a published annual jobs-lost number for "a two-truck shop" isn't conservative and it isn't aggressive. It's invented. What does travel from shop to shop is what happens to a call once somebody picks it up.

What turns a missed call into a missed job?

Two rates, and Invoca publishes both broken out by trade.

The lead rate is the share of answered calls that turn out to be real demand rather than a wrong number or a supplier. The 2026 report puts it at 45% for HVAC companies and 30% for plumbing companies.

The close rate is the share of those leads that convert on the call, meaning they book while the caller is still on the phone. In the same Invoca report it runs the other way: 43% for HVAC, 55% for plumbing.

Multiply the two and you get jobs per hundred calls:

real missed calls × lead rate × close rate = jobs lost on the call

For HVAC, 45% times 43% is about 19 per 100. For plumbing, 30% times 55% is 16.5. Restoration, which the same report breaks out, runs 34% and 30%, or a little over 10 per 100. Two trades built nothing alike on the individual rates land within three jobs of each other, and a third lands at about half the HVAC rate.

Now the honest limit, and it belongs here rather than buried at the bottom. Those rates were measured on calls that got answered. A missed call isn't a random draw from your calls. The ones you miss at two in the afternoon in July may skew toward no-cool emergencies, which tend to be higher intent than your average call. The ones you miss at nine on a Sunday are a mix of real emergencies and junk.

One average applied to both is an approximation, and nothing you do on your end makes it exact. That's precisely why the count is the half worth your effort. It's the only half you can actually make more accurate.

Where a two-truck shop's calls actually go missing

Worth being exact about the mechanism, because the usual version of it is wrong.

People picture a fleet too busy to pick up. That isn't what two trucks looks like. If there's no dispatcher and no rollover, the main line rings one phone, and that phone is in your pocket.

So the miss isn't capacity. It's you. You're already on a call and the second one waits. You're under a sink or on a roof and the phone's in the truck. It's Sunday. One truck being out is enough to cause it, as long as the truck that's out is yours.

Which is also why your instinct undercounts. You're remembering the rings you actually heard.

Count the misses where they're actually marked

Not every record of your calls can tell you which ones you missed, and that decides where you look.

Your carrier's bill usually can't. It lists the calls that came in, but a call that rolled to voicemail is typically a connected call as far as the bill is concerned, so it looks the same as one you picked up.

A business phone system or a call-tracking number usually can. Most of them mark each call as answered, missed or sent to voicemail, and keep the history, so you can pull last year's busy month in an afternoon.

A plain cell phone marks missed calls clearly in its recents list, but it doesn't keep many of them. If that's your only record, count forward instead: check the list every few days for a month and write the misses down before they scroll away. Slower, and honest.

Either way you want at least two months whose shape you already know, a busy one and an ordinary one. A dead one too, if your trade has them.

Three filters, and every one of them makes your number smaller

The raw list isn't your answer yet. Take out three things.

• Collapse repeat rings. One person calling three times in ten minutes is one missed call, not three. It's the same lost job either way.
• Take out the misses that booked anyway. Both kinds: the ones you called back and booked, and the ones who rang back on their own and booked. Neither is a lost job. Matching numbers against the bookings in your job software is the quick way. If you can't make the match, know which way that leaves you: your count includes some jobs you didn't actually lose.
• Take out the personal calls. If the business number is also your own cell, your brother's missed call isn't a lost job.

Notice what isn't on that list: spam. Leave it in. The lead rate you're about to multiply by was measured on ordinary answered calls, junk and wrong numbers included, and discounting them is exactly what it does. Strip the spam out first and you take it out twice. The exception is a line visibly buried in robocalls, far beyond normal. Then the lead rate won't discount enough of them and your count runs high.

One more source is worth naming, because nearly every shop already has it. You can count voicemails in five minutes flat. Just don't mistake that for the answer: Invoca's platform data puts the share of voicemail-bound callers who leave a message at under 3%. Your voicemail count is a floor under the real number, not the number.

Why your year isn't one month times twelve

Volume clusters. The first real heat wave, the first hard freeze, the week the rain doesn't stop. Misses pile into those stretches, because that's when the phone rings while you're already on it. A busy month times twelve overstates your year badly, and an ordinary month times twelve misses both ends.

So price the year in tiers: busy months, ordinary months, and dead ones if you have them. Three tiers is plenty.

The rates may move with the season too, and the honest answer is that nobody knows which way. Nothing published splits lead or close rates by season. A peak-season caller may be more urgent, and a peak-season miss is also more likely to be one you couldn't have run anyway. Don't adjust for it. Just know it's there.

A worked year, with your numbers in place of mine

The shop below doesn't exist. Its counts are there to show the steps, not to predict yours.

Take an HVAC shop running two trucks. After the three filters, its busy-month count comes back at 24 misses, an ordinary month at 9, and a dead month at 4.

Say this owner calls four months of the year busy, five ordinary and three dead:

• 4 × 24 = 96
• 5 × 9 = 45
• 3 × 4 = 12
• 153 missed calls across the year

Then the HVAC rates. 153 × 0.45 × 0.43 works out to about 30 jobs that would have booked while the caller was still on the line. Run the same 153 through the plumbing rates and you land near 25.

What that number is, and what it isn't

It leans both ways, and it's worth knowing how. Books-on-the-call is all the close rate measures, so the estimate leaves out the quote you'd have won on Thursday. It also counts some callers who would have come back and booked with you anyway, which is why the second filter matters more than it looks.

It is not, though, a capacity problem. Thirty jobs a year, in that example, is two or three a month, and two trucks absorb that without anybody noticing. If you were about to argue you couldn't have run them, check that arithmetic first.

The real ceiling is the day, not the year. These misses don't arrive evenly. They cluster on exactly the days you were already buried, which is why you missed them in the first place. At a busier shop, six real jobs landing on the first ninety-five degree Saturday is a different problem, and no, you couldn't have run all six that day.

That's still a loss. It's just a different one. What you lost on that Saturday wasn't six jobs. It was the chance to pick which of the six you took.

What your count points at

The number you just ran is more useful as a direction than as a total. It tells you which lever to pull first.

If it came back small, a handful of real misses a month, the cheapest fix is on the calls you already answer. The same Invoca report found on 55% of the home services calls Invoca scored, nobody asked the caller to buy or book the job. Asking on every call costs nothing but the habit, and it works on every call you pick up.

If it came back large, the leak is the phone itself, and more marketing only pours more calls into it. Answering more of what already rings is a monthly fee and a setup, and whatever answers for you can get things wrong: mishear an address, or tell a caller they're booked when nothing was written. What it covers that coaching can't is the day your misses cluster, because it takes many calls at the same time.

Willison is that option, so weigh the last paragraph knowing who wrote it. It answers every call 24/7, in seconds, qualifies the job and books it straight to the calendar. It reads the address back and never tells a caller they're booked until the booking is actually written, which is how it handles those two errors. If you're weighing the switch, what it actually takes to switch your phones over walks through it. To hear it answer first, press play on a real call on willisonhq.com. And to price your misses in dollars rather than jobs, what one missed call costs runs that version.

Frequently asked questions

One. You lost a single job, not three, and counting each ring separately is the fastest way to end up with a number you can't defend in front of anyone. Group the log by phone number and treat everything from one caller inside a few hours as a single miss. The exception is a genuine repeat customer ringing about something new weeks later, which is a second job and counts twice.

Restoration yes, directly. Invoca breaks it out at a 34% lead rate and a 30% close rate, which comes to a little over 10 booked jobs per 100 answered calls. Roofing isn't one of the nine sub-industries the report measures, so no roofing-specific pair exists to plug in. Fall back to the home services averages instead, 38% of answered calls being leads and 45% of those closing on the call, work it as roughly 17 per 100, and treat it as a rough guide rather than your number.

It shows you missed calls clearly, which is more than your carrier's bill usually can, since a call that rolled to voicemail tends to look connected there. What a phone won't do is keep a long history, separate business calls from personal ones on a shared number, or tell a real customer from a lead reseller without ringing back. That's why a busy month is better counted forward a few days at a time, or pulled from a phone system or tracking number that marks missed calls and keeps them.

Probably not, and no published data splits call value by hour, so treat any firm ratio you're given as made up. The reasoning that holds is about who's ringing: evenings and weekends carry both real emergencies and junk, while an ordinary weekday afternoon sits closer to your average call. If your logs let you tag after-hours calls separately, run the two counts separately rather than guessing at a blend.