After-hours plumbing calls: the hours you are actually unreachable

Most advice about after-hours calls starts with a statistic you can't check. This starts with a clock, because the hours are the one part of this you can work out for yourself in about two minutes, and they turn out to be the surprising part.

Count your own week

A week is 168 hours. Say you answer the phone from 7am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. That's eleven hours a day across five days, so 55 hours when a customer who rings gets you.

Which leaves 113 hours when they don't.

That number is misleading on its own, because a good chunk of it is the middle of the night and almost nobody rings a plumber at 3am. Take out midnight to 6am, every day, which is 42 hours, and you're left with 71 hours a week when somebody could plausibly be ringing and nobody is picking up. It breaks down like this:

Seventy-one against fifty-five. You are unreachable for more of the week than you are reachable, and that's before anything goes wrong — before a job runs long, before you're in a basement with no signal, before you're already on the phone to a supplier.

Redo it with your own hours. If you knock off at 4pm on a Friday, add another two. If you answer Saturday mornings, take four off. The exact figure matters less than the shape of it, and the shape holds for almost every one-truck business.

Which of those hours actually ring

Not all 71 are equal. Two different kinds of call land outside working hours, and they behave differently.

The first is the genuine emergency. A tank lets go, a pipe splits, a toilet overflows. These arrive at any hour and the caller is not shopping around. They want somebody who answers, and they will work down a list until one does.

The second is quieter and probably bigger: the person who noticed the problem during the day and only got round to doing something about it at half past seven, once the kids were down. That is not an emergency. It's a normal job, worth normal money, and the only reason it goes to somebody else is that they rang at a time you weren't answering.

The second kind is worth paying attention to precisely because it doesn't feel urgent. Nobody rings you back at 9am to say they tried last night.

What those hours are worth to you

Three numbers, and they have to be yours rather than an industry average:

• A. How many calls you miss outside working hours in a fortnight.
• B. The share of the calls you do answer that turn into paid work.
• C. What an average job bills at.

A × B × C is what a fortnight is worth. Double it for a month. Say you miss six calls in two weeks, you win about half the ones you speak to, and a job averages $400: 6 × 0.5 × 400 = $1,200 a fortnight, so roughly $2,400 a month walking past.

Now be honest about the discount. Some of those six were wrong numbers. Some were price-shoppers who were never going to book. Some would have rung you back in the morning anyway. Halve the result if you like. It's still a number worth looking at, and you got there with your own figures rather than somebody's marketing page.

What people actually do about it

Five options, roughly in order of what they cost:

• Nothing. The calls go to voicemail. This works better than it sounds if your work comes from repeat customers and referrals, who will leave a message because they know you. It works badly for anyone who found you on a map or a search result.
• Ring back in the morning. Free, and it recovers the calls that left a message. The catch is that an emergency caller has usually booked someone else by then, so what you recover is the quiet evening jobs and not the urgent ones.
• A spouse or an office person. Reliable, and the caller gets a human. It also means somebody's evening is now on call, which is a real cost even when it doesn't appear on a bill.
• An answering service. A human answers in your name and passes on a message. Get quotes rather than trusting a figure from an article; the pricing varies enormously and per-minute plans behave very differently from per-call ones once a chatty caller gets going.
• Forwarding to something that answers automatically. Your phone rings first, and only the calls you don't reach go anywhere else. This is what our own product does, and it costs $10 a month plus $5 per captured lead — the pricing page shows exactly what counts as captured.

The last three need conditional call forwarding switched on. The first two do not. It's a free network setting and it takes about thirty seconds: here are the dial codes by carrier.

Measure it before you buy anything

Two weeks of actual data beats any of the above. Open your phone's call log tonight and go back fourteen days. Count the calls that came in outside your working hours and that you didn't answer. Ignore anything you recognise as a supplier or a mate. Then check which of those numbers you ever spoke to afterwards.

That last step is the one that changes minds. If half of them rang back the next day, you have less of a problem than you thought. If almost none of them did, the calls didn't wait for you.

When this isn't your problem

Plenty of plumbers have more work than they can take. If you're booked three weeks out and turning people away, a system that catches more calls is solving something you don't have — it just adds names to a list you'll never get to. The honest answer in that case is to put your prices up, not to answer more phones.

It's also not your problem if the calls you miss are reliably calling back. Some trades and some towns work that way. The fourteen-day count is how you find out which one you're in.

If the count does come back badly, the next thing worth getting right is what happens when you finally do ring the person back — what to say when you call a plumbing lead back.