You’re on a roof.
That’s exactly when the big jobs call.
Roofing money is lost in the gaps: the call you physically can’t take, the quote that sits silent for a fortnight, the storm week when the phone melts. Three leaks, mapped, with the sums to size them in your own numbers.
Leak 1: calls you physically can’t take.
Nobody answers a phone at the top of a ladder. A homeowner with water coming in rings three roofers and books the first one who picks up. Being the best roofer doesn’t help if the phone loses the job first.
Leak 2: quotes that die quietly.
A re-roof quote is thousands of pounds, so the customer sits on it for weeks, comparing. The firm that follows up owns that silence. Most roofers send the PDF and wait, which hands the job to whoever rang back.
Leak 3: the surge you can’t staff for.
After a storm, a month of enquiries lands in three days. You can’t hire a receptionist for weather. So the overflow rings out, and the exact week your market is desperate is the week you’re hardest to reach.
What one unchased quote costs. In your numbers.
Placeholder figures, deliberately. Swap in your own; the sum is the point.
Not our numbers and not a promise: pull your own quotes from the last 90 days and re-run the sum. Then add the calls that rang out last storm week.
Three ways to fix it. Two of them aren’t us.
Office cover, or your partner’s phone
Someone you trust answers when you can’t. Free and personal, and plenty of firms run this way for years. Honest verdict: falls down when they’re busy too, when the storm surge hits, and on the follow-up nobody has time to do.
A human answering service
A call centre takes messages in your name. Honest verdict: fine for “he’ll call you back”. Falls down on roofing specifics: they can’t ask where the leak is, what the roof is, or request photos, and a message isn’t a booked survey. Storm week still buries you in ring-backs.
An AI receptionist plus follow-up
Answers every call including the storm-week flood, asks your survey questions, requests photos by text, books the visit into your diary, then chases every open quote on a rhythm you approve. This one is ours.
Our recommendation: If quotes are your leak, start with the takeaway below: a written follow-up rhythm costs nothing and wins jobs on its own. If the phone itself is the leak, option three is the only route that scales to a storm week without hiring. Bring your open-quote list and we’ll size both leaks in your numbers.
Starter
Every call answered and every survey booked, even mid-storm.
- AI receptionist answers 24/7 and qualifies the job, the roof and the urgency
- Missed-call text back in seconds on your existing number
- Survey visits booked straight into your diary
- Call recordings and a plain-English monthly report
Premium
Calls answered, quotes chased, old customers brought back.
- Everything in Starter
- Quote follow-up sequences that run until they answer, in your voice
- Maintenance reminders and win-back texts to past customers
- Escalation to a human when it matters
- Priority support and a monthly performance review
No prices here on purpose. We diagnose your problem first and size it in your numbers. Then you get a one-time setup fee, a monthly fee for optimisation and support, and options to choose between, never a take-it-or-leave-it.
We count before we build: your missed calls, your open quotes and your last surge week, sized with the sums above. Then we plug the biggest leak first. Pricing follows the problem: a one-time setup fee plus a monthly fee for optimisation and support, with options to choose between, never a take-it-or-leave-it.
We build these for trades and publish the honest version: our electrician receptionist went live in 48 hours and we wrote up everything that broke on the way. Same build, roofing questions swapped in. No roofing client yet, so you’d be the case study, on terms that reflect that.
Worth doing whether you call us or not.
- Write your follow-up rhythm down now: day-two phone call, day-seven text, day-fourteen email. Put this fortnight’s open quotes in your calendar against it. Costs nothing and wins jobs on its own.
- Set a missed-call auto-text: “On a roof. Text your postcode and a photo of the problem and we’ll call you within the hour.” The photo request alone puts you ahead of the two firms that just rang out.
- Pull your quotes from the last 90 days and mark the silent ones. Ring the three biggest tomorrow and ask if they had any questions. That’s the whole script.
Asked before booking. Answered straight.
Storm weeks are chaos. A phone system will make it worse.
Storm weeks are already triage; the only question is whether triage happens on your voicemail or in a system. The receptionist answers every call, collects address, photos and urgency, and ranks the list. You climb down to a sorted queue instead of nineteen voicemails.
Big jobs are won face to face, not by phone.
Agreed, and nothing here replaces the survey or the handshake. The system’s job is getting you to the face-to-face: the call answered, the survey booked, the quote followed up. You win the job the same way you always have.
I don’t want to pay for this through the quiet season.
Fair, and this is a conversation about your numbers, not a fixed rate card. Winter is also when storms hit and when a missed emergency call costs most. Bring your seasonal pattern and we’ll size the year honestly, including whether it’s worth doing at all.