Most HVAC owners can tell you their average ticket size without thinking. Far fewer can tell you how many calls their business misses in a week — because a missed call doesn't show up on an invoice. It just quietly doesn't happen.
Start with your miss rate
How many calls a shop misses varies a lot with staffing and season, but it's rarely zero, and it tends to climb when techs are the ones answering the phone between jobs. As an illustration, if you're doing 60 inbound calls a week and missing 15% of them, that's 9 calls a week nobody answered. Check your own call log for a week to find your real number.
Not every missed call was going to book — but many were
Some of those callers will try again later. Many won't. Plenty of callers who don't get a quick response will simply call the next number they find. For an emergency call — no cooling in July, no heat in January — the caller often can't afford to wait; they need someone today, and "someone" is whoever answers first.
A simple estimate
Take your weekly missed calls, multiply by your own close rate, then multiply by your average repair ticket. As an example only: nine missed calls a week at a 25% close rate and a $350 average repair ticket is roughly $790 a week — swap in your own numbers. That's before counting any replacement jobs, which run far higher.
The fix isn't more staff, it's a faster first response
Hiring a full-time dispatcher to catch every call is expensive and often impractical for a smaller shop. The gap that actually needs closing is the few minutes between a missed call and any response at all — that's the window where a caller decides whether to wait or move on. Closing it doesn't require a bigger team, just a faster first reply.
If you want a real number instead of an estimate, we'll look at your actual call logs and tell you what a faster response would likely have been worth.