KCboost01
Missed calls
inbound per month × miss rate × close rate × average ticket
Of the calls nobody answers, only the share that would actually have become a job is counted, and each is valued at one average ticket. Not every missed call was a customer.
Show your working
Where every number on this site comes from.
A calculator that will not show its arithmetic is a sales toy. Here is all of it: the formulas, the rates, the sources, and the places the evidence is weaker than people pretend. Every rate used on this site sits at or below the published figure it came from.
The evidence
What the research says, and what I use.
How many inbound calls a small trades business misses
Well evidenced
- Published
- 27% industry average. 62% for small and mid-sized firms.
- This site uses
- 22% for HVAC, plumbing and electrical
SourceServiceTitan analysis of 50,000+ contractor phone lines (2024), plus a 2024–2026 rolling average across HVAC, plumbing, roofing and electrical.
Both figures are vendor-published rather than peer-reviewed, but the sample is large and several independent analyses land in the same range. During extreme-weather months, business-hours miss rates in the same data reach 35–45%.
What happens when a lead waits
Directional only
- Published
- Responding in 5 minutes rather than 30 made contact roughly 100x more likely and qualification 21x more likely.
- This site uses
- No multiplier is applied anywhere on this site. It informs the model; it is not used to inflate a total.
SourceDr James Oldroyd, Lead Response Management study (MIT / InsideSales, c. 2007), tracking more than 15,000 leads. Popularised by Harvard Business Review in 2011, whose own finding was a 42-hour average first response and a 7x qualification advantage inside the first hour.
This is vendor-platform data, not a randomised trial, and the famous 100x figure is frequently misattributed to Harvard. Two decades of later work reproduces the direction, not the exact multiple. That is why the calculator does not use it as a multiplier.
How often a quote gets a second contact
Moderately evidenced
- Published
- 48% of sellers never send a second follow-up. Around 80% of sales need five or more contacts, and only about 2% close on the first.
- This site uses
- 55% of quotes get no second touch, and a low single-digit recovery rate on those
SourceAggregated B2B sales follow-up research, 2024–2026.
The 80%-need-five-touches figure circulates widely with weak sourcing, so the calculator does not use it. Only the share of quotes that go unfollowed feeds the model, and the recovery rate applied to them is deliberately small.
Appointment no-show and same-day cancellation rates
Well evidenced
- Published
- 15–20% national average in dentistry, with well-run practices under 8% and some clinics above 30%.
- This site uses
- 11% for dental, 12–14% elsewhere
SourceAggregated 2026 appointment no-show reporting, alongside the American Dental Association Health Policy Institute (2024), which found practices above a 15% no-show rate ran 23% lower profitability than those below 8%.
Rates vary enormously by payer mix and patient age, so the site uses a figure below the national average rather than a headline one.
The cost of an hour of front-desk and admin time
Our estimate
- Published
- Varies by market and role.
- This site uses
- $31 per hour, fully loaded
SourceKansas City metro administrative wages plus employer taxes, benefits and overhead.
This is the one input that is a judgement call rather than a citation. It is roughly a $21/hour wage plus about 45% loading. If your real cost differs, the admin lines scale linearly with it.
The arithmetic
Four formulas. That is the whole model.
02
Quotes with no second touch
quotes per month × share never followed up × recovery rate × average ticket
Only a small slice of un-chased quotes is treated as recoverable. Most people who go quiet were never going to buy.
03
No-shows
appointments per month × no-show rate × saveable share × average ticket
A no-show is not a lost customer, it is a lost slot. Only the portion a reminder or a waitlist would realistically have saved is counted.
04
Manual admin
hours per week × 4.33 × $31 loaded hourly cost
Hours that a person spends on work software can do. Valued at cost, not at what the hour might have earned instead.
Where I have been deliberately conservative
The rules I held myself to.
- Every rate used on this site sits at or below the published industry figure. Where the research disagrees with itself, the lower number was taken.
- The speed-to-lead multipliers are not used. They are the most-quoted numbers in this industry and the least rigorous, so they inform the model without inflating any total.
- Nothing compounds. Each line is calculated independently and summed, so no figure is counted twice.
- The totals are capped by input limits so that an implausible entry cannot produce an implausible headline.
- These are benchmarks applied to two numbers you typed. They are not your figures. On a call audit they get replaced with what actually happened on your phone, and sometimes the real number is smaller.
If you think a number here is wrong, tell me which one and why. That is a better conversation than most sales calls, and if you are right I will change it on the site. dalton@kcboost.com