A storm comes through on a Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning your phone will not stop. By Friday you have forty missed calls, nine voicemails you have not listened to, and no idea which of them was the big one. This happens to every roofer, every year, and almost nobody plans for it.

Why storm week is different

Normal weeks are steady. You get a few enquiries, you ring people back in the evening, it works well enough.

Storm week breaks that. Three things happen at once:

  • Demand jumps. A month of enquiries can arrive in two or three days.
  • You get busier too. The same storm made work for you. You are out fixing emergencies, so you are answering fewer calls than normal, not more.
  • Customers are in a hurry. Water is coming into their house. They will not wait for a call back tomorrow. They ring down the list until somebody picks up.

So the week when your market wants you most is the week you are hardest to reach. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

What one storm week is worth

Try this with your own numbers.

Enquiries in your last storm week
  minus  the ones you actually spoke to
= Enquiries lost

Enquiries lost
  x  Your normal win rate
  x  Your average job value
= What that week cost you

An example with made-up figures:

Say 45 enquiries came in over four days.
Say you managed to speak to 20 of them.
That is 25 lost.

Say you win 1 in 3, average job £3,500.

25 x 0.33 x £3,500 = £28,875

Now the important part. Storms are not rare. Most parts of the UK get several bad weather events a year. If that happens three times, you are looking at a number that is bigger than most roofers' entire marketing budget.

Put your own numbers in. Even if you halve the result to be careful, it is still a lot of money.

The part most roofers get wrong

The instinct in storm week is to answer whatever is ringing right now. That feels productive. It is actually the worst way to sort the list.

Answering in the order calls arrive means a £200 gutter repair gets your attention and a £12,000 re-roof goes to voicemail, purely because of when they rang. You are letting the timing choose your work instead of choosing it yourself.

What you want is a sorted list. Every caller's address, what the roof is doing, how bad it is. Then you decide the order. That is triage, which just means dealing with the most urgent and most valuable first.

Three ways to handle the surge

1. Plan it yourself, in advance

Write a storm plan now, while it is calm. One page. It says: who answers the phone, what they ask, and how jobs get ranked.

Then when the forecast is bad, you switch the plan on. Partner, family member, or a mate answers and fills in the same short form for every caller.

This is free. It works better than most roofers expect, because the problem is usually not having a plan, not the phone itself.

Where it falls down: the person helping you has their own life. And if forty calls come at once, one person cannot take them all anyway.

2. Put an answering service on standby

Some telephone answering services let you turn them on and off. You switch them on when the forecast is bad.

Where it falls down: they charge per call, and storm week is exactly when call numbers are highest. So it costs most when you use it most. They also do not know roofing, so what you get is a pile of messages, not a sorted list of jobs. You still have to ring everyone back.

3. Something that answers all of it at once

This is our line of work, so weigh it accordingly.

Software that answers the phone does not care whether one person rings or forty at the same time. It asks every caller the same questions, gets a photo by text, and ranks the jobs by how urgent they are. You come down off the roof to a sorted queue instead of nineteen voicemails.

Where it falls down: it costs money in quiet months too, when you do not need it. If you only get one bad week a year, that is a hard cost to justify and you should say so.

Which one to pick

Write the storm plan regardless. It is free and everyone should have one.

If storm weeks are the only time you struggle, put an answering service on standby and keep your money the rest of the year.

If you are missing calls in normal weeks as well, then storm week is not really your problem. It is just the week your usual problem gets loud enough to notice. Fix the normal weeks and storm week fixes itself.

Do this today

The next storm is not the time to work this out. Do these now, while it is quiet.

  1. Write the six questions. What you need from every storm caller: name, address, what is happening to the roof, how long it has been going on, whether water is coming inside, and a photo. Save it in your notes app so anyone can read it out.
  2. Decide who answers. Ask them now, not on the day. Send them the six questions.
  3. Write your automatic text. "Storm damage? Text your postcode and a photo. We are ranking jobs by urgency and will come back to you today." This buys you hours, because the customer knows they are in a queue rather than ignored.
  4. Count your last storm week. Go back through your phone to the last bad weather. Count the calls. Do the sum above. That number is your budget for solving this.

The honest summary

You cannot hire someone for the weather. But you can decide in advance how the calls get answered and sorted, and that decision is worth more than anything you would buy. Write the plan while it is calm.

If you want help sizing what your last storm week actually cost, bring the call list and your average job value. Twenty minutes and you will know.