How much do missed calls really cost a Canadian small business?

Ask any Canadian small-business owner whether they miss calls and they'll shrug and say sometimes. Ask them what those calls are worth and most won't have a number. That gap between casually knowing the problem and putting a dollar figure on it is where most service businesses quietly leak revenue every month.

Here's the back-of-envelope math, with worked example numbers, for a handful of common service industries.

The formula every owner should know

Cost of a missed call = P(call results in a job) × average job value.

The first factor is the part owners underestimate the most. When someone calls a plumber, they aren't cold-shopping. They have a problem that needs solving today. Most callers who reach voicemail hang up rather than leave a message. The caller has 4-5 other Google results open in adjacent tabs; the next one that answers wins the job.

Most callers who reach voicemail hang up rather than leave a message. They call the next business on the list.

What a missed call costs by industry

Job value varies wildly by trade, but the unit math is the same. Multiply the conversion rate by the average ticket and you get the expected value of one missed call. The figures below illustrate the calculation. They are example inputs, not survey data. Swap in your own and the arithmetic still holds.

Those are expected values per inbound call, blended with the conversion rate. So if a plumbing business gets 30 calls in a month and misses 10, here is the bill:

10 missed calls × $380 expected value = $3,800/month in forgone revenue. $45,600/year. From a phone problem.

The same arithmetic runs differently by trade. A dental practice weighs a new patient over years, not one visit. A salon books smaller tickets and has fewer people free to pick up, because the person at the front desk is often also the person holding the scissors.

The after-hours hole

Even the best human receptionist works business hours. Calls don't. Early mornings, evenings and weekends are exactly the hours a service business is hardest to reach, and voicemail is the usual outcome. A handful go to forwarded cell phones where the owner answers in a kitchen at 9pm and offers to call back tomorrow. Most never reach a human at all.

Those after-hours calls also carry the most urgency, whether that is a leak, a toothache, or a Saturday-morning appointment request. Someone with water on the floor is not comparison shopping; they are booking whoever picks up. Skipping them isn't a small loss. It's the most valuable slice of your funnel.

What it costs to fix

For decades the only way to plug this hole was a human answering service. Canadian providers typically quote $200-$500/month, and they take a message. They don't book the appointment, can't access your calendar, and don't know your prices. The caller still has to be called back. Half of them have already booked with someone else by then.

AI receptionists like Cedri handle the call end-to-end for $18.99/month, 30 calls included and no per-minute charges: pick up immediately, ask the questions a human would, check your live calendar, book the slot, text both sides a confirmation. The caller hangs up with a real appointment, not a callback promise.

How to measure your own number

If you want the real number for your business, not an industry average, three things will get you close:

• Pull last month's call log from your phone provider. Count inbound calls that were never answered or went to voicemail. Most VoIP providers (RingCentral, GoTo, etc.) export this as CSV.
• Multiply by your real conversion rate. If you don't know it, that is the number worth measuring rather than guessing. Count how many of last month's answered calls became paying work.
• Multiply by your average job value. Pull from your bookkeeper, your QuickBooks revenue, or just the average of your last 50 invoices.

The product of those three numbers is your monthly miss tax. Most owners are surprised. Most owners then go quiet for a minute. Then they fix it.