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Most service businesses do not lose work to competitors. They lose it to silence — the enquiry nobody replied to, and the one answered three days later when the customer had already booked someone else. Put in your own figures and the arithmetic is done in front of you, with every assumption visible and editable.
Enter a number greater than zero for enquiries and average value.
One assumption, and it is yours to set. Nobody can tell you how much faster replies would lift your close rate — it varies far too much by trade, price point and market. The figure below is a starting suggestion based on your current reply speed. Change it, or set it to zero to ignore that half of the calculation entirely.
—Left on the table each month
The arithmetic
Plenty of calculators like this one quietly apply an industry statistic to make the number frightening. This one shows its working, because a figure you cannot check is a figure you cannot take to a decision.
Part one — enquiries nobody answered. The count of unanswered enquiries, multiplied by the close rate you already achieve on the ones you do answer, multiplied by your average customer value. This part involves no assumption at all: it says that if those people had been treated like everyone else, they would have converted like everyone else.
Part two — enquiries answered too slowly. Your answered enquiries, multiplied by your close rate, multiplied by the uplift you entered. This part is entirely your judgement. Set it to zero and the tool simply stops counting it — the first number stands on its own.
What it deliberately does not do is estimate lifetime value, referrals or repeat work. Those are real, and they would make the number considerably larger, but they would also make it much easier to argue with.
In practice the fix is rarely working harder. It is making sure nothing depends on somebody remembering.
What closes the gap
You do not need all four at once, and the first one alone usually accounts for most of the recovery.
Every enquiry gets a reply within seconds — by email, text or both — confirming it arrived and saying when a human will follow. It does not close the sale. It stops the customer from carrying on down their list of three other providers while they wait.
An unanswered call triggers a text immediately: "Sorry we missed you — what do you need and when?" For trades and clinics this is usually the single biggest recovery on the list, because phone enquiries evaporate faster than any other kind.
A tracker or CRM row per enquiry, with an owner and a status. Not because spreadsheets are exciting, but because you cannot notice something falling through a crack you cannot see.
Anyone who has not replied in two days gets one more message, automatically. Most businesses never send it, and it is the cheapest revenue in the whole process.
All four are ordinary workflow automation — usually built on tools you already pay for, connected with n8n. See how automation projects are scoped.
Questions
No. It sizes an opportunity from your own figures so you can decide whether follow-up deserves attention before anything else. What you actually recover depends on lead quality, your capacity to take the work, and how well the follow-up is written.
Because the honest answer is that nobody knows it for your business. Response-time effects differ wildly between a £90 callout and a £9,000 installation. A calculator that hides its own guess inside the maths is selling you something.
For a one-person business with a quiet phone, quite possibly. For anyone taking calls while on a job, it is worth checking before you believe it — count a fortnight of missed calls against callbacks actually made, rather than estimating.
Not really. It assumes a human replies to an enquiry before money changes hands, which is a service-business shape. Abandoned-cart maths is a different model.
Nothing. There is no server behind this page, no form submission, and your figures are not stored even in your own browser — reload the page and it resets. Use the copy button if you want to keep them.
Then follow-up is not your bottleneck, which is genuinely useful to know. It usually means the problem is further upstream — not enough enquiries arriving in the first place. That is a visibility problem, not an automation one.
Send me what you got, along with how enquiries reach you today. I will tell you which of the four fixes applies, what it would take to build, and whether it is worth doing at all — that last answer is sometimes no.
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