Every missed call is a missed deal.

You're up a ladder, or under a sink, or halfway through a basement. Your phone goes. You can't answer it. That was a customer ready to book, and they've just rung the next name on their list.

For a lot of trades and home-services businesses, that's where the money leaks. It happens in the gap between a lead getting in touch and someone getting back to them. When the owner is the one doing the work, that gap is the whole working day.

One home-services firm had counted the damage. Around 300 missed calls, and the deals that went with them.

So they had a responder built, on ChatGPT and Zapier.

It runs like this. A lead gets in touch. A chatbot, running on ChatGPT, answers in real time. It handles their questions, then walks them to booking a consultation. Behind the scenes, a simple table stores each lead's details and what's already been said, so the bot keeps the conversation flowing instead of starting cold. A person still does the job on site and closes the deal. The bot makes sure nobody gets missed while the work is happening.

In the first year, the bot booked 30% of the firm's appointments and brought in more than $134,000 in revenue. In some cases it booked better than the in-house salespeople did.

A third of their bookings came from leads that, the year before, would have rung out while someone was on a roof.

Most owners assume growth means more leads at the top. But if you can't catch the ones already calling, more traffic just means more missed calls.

So work out your own number. How many enquiries reach you when you can't pick up, and how many of those you never call back. If you're doing the work yourself, that number is bigger than you think. A responder that answers straight away and books the consult is how you stop paying for leads you never speak to.