Getting a roofing enquiry costs money. Every click, every advert, every hour on your website. Losing that enquiry costs nothing. No invoice arrives. Nobody tells you. That is the problem: the money leaves quietly, so you never look for it.

Two costs, and only one of them is on paper

You know what you pay to get a phone call. It is on your advertising bill each month.

You do not know what you pay when that call is not answered. There is no bill for it. The customer rings the next roofer, books them, and you never hear about it. Your advertising report still counts that call as a success. It was answered by nobody, but the report does not know that.

So one cost is easy to see and easy to worry about. The other is invisible and usually much bigger.

Work out your own number

Three things. You already know all three.

  • How much you pay per enquiry. Take last month's advertising bill. Divide it by the number of enquiries you got. That is your cost per enquiry.
  • How many enquiries you did not answer. Look at your phone. Count the calls that rang out last week and were never returned.
  • How many of those you would normally win. When you do speak to someone properly, how often do you get the job? Most roofers say around one in three.

Now two sums. The first is the money you spent to get calls you never took:

Missed enquiries per month
  x  Cost per enquiry
= Advertising money you paid for nothing

The second is bigger. It is the work itself:

Missed enquiries per month
  x  Your win rate (0.33 if you win one in three)
  x  Your average job value
= Work you lost

Here is an example. The numbers are made up. Yours will be different.

Say you pay £60 per enquiry.
Say 8 enquiries a month are never answered.

8 x £60 = £480 of advertising paid for nothing.

Say you win 1 in 3, and the average job is £4,000.

8 x 0.33 x £4,000 = £10,560 of work lost.

Look at the two answers. The wasted advertising is £480. The lost work is more than twenty times that. Most roofers spend their time worrying about the £480, because that one arrives as a bill.

Why roofing is worse than other trades for this

Three reasons.

You cannot answer a phone on a roof. A plumber under a sink can sometimes take a call. You are on a ladder, in the wind, with both hands busy. The hours you are working are the hours people ring.

Your jobs are worth a lot. A missed call for a dripping tap costs a plumber a small job. A missed call for a re-roof can cost you thousands. The same missed call is worth far more to you.

Roof problems are urgent. Water coming through a ceiling does not wait. That person is ringing three roofers this morning. They will book whoever picks up. Being the best roofer in town does not help if you are the one who did not answer.

Three ways to fix it, honestly

Here are the real options. Two of them are not us.

1. Turn your advertising down and answer better

This sounds backwards. It often is not. If you cannot answer the enquiries you get now, buying more of them makes the leak bigger, not smaller.

Spend less. Take the hours you save and put them into calling people back the same day. This costs nothing. It works well if you are getting a few enquiries a week and the problem is that you are simply too busy.

Where it falls down: it caps how big you can get. You are still the only person who can answer, and you still cannot answer from a roof.

2. Get a person to answer the phone

Someone in an office, a family member, or a telephone answering service. A real human is good at hearing that someone is upset and calming them down.

Where it falls down: an answering service takes a message, but a message is not a booked survey. They usually do not know roofing. They cannot ask what the roof is made of, how old it is, or where the water is coming in. They cannot ask for a photo. So you still ring everybody back in the evening, and by then some have booked another roofer.

It also gets expensive in a storm week, when the call volume goes up and most services charge per call.

3. A system that answers every call and books the survey

This is what we build, so treat what follows as a biased opinion and check it yourself.

A voice assistant, which is software that answers the phone and talks like a person, picks up every call. It asks your questions: the address, what the roof is doing, how urgent it is. It asks for a photo by text. Then it puts the survey in your diary and sends the customer a confirmation.

Where it falls down: it will not price a difficult job or win a customer who wants a proper chat. It is not a roofer. It gets you to the survey. You still win the work the way you always have.

Which one to pick

If you miss two or three calls a week, do option one. It is free and it will probably be enough. Do not buy anything.

If your phone rings all day and you are turning down real work because you cannot keep up, option two or three is worth costing properly. The question to ask is not "how much does it cost", it is "how much work am I losing", and you now have that number.

Do this today

Three things. All free. All take under an hour.

  1. Count last week's missed calls. Open your phone, go to the call list, and count the ones you never rang back. Write the number down.
  2. Do the two sums above. Use your real cost per enquiry and your real average job. Now you know what the leak is worth, in your own money.
  3. Set an automatic text message. Most phones can send a text when you cannot answer. Use these words: "Sorry, I am on a roof. Text me your postcode and a photo of the problem and I will ring you within the hour." This takes five minutes and it puts you ahead of the two roofers who just rang out.

The photo request matters more than it looks. It means when you do ring back, you already know whether the job is worth driving to.

The honest summary

Advertising money is visible, so it gets all the attention. Lost work is invisible, and it is usually the bigger number. Count the leak before you spend another penny on getting more enquiries. Filling a bucket with a hole in it is expensive.

Want us to count your leak with you? Bring last week's missed calls and your average job value. Twenty minutes, and you will have a real number, whether you work with us or not.