One week and a spreadsheet: what you lose after hours.
Forget the industry statistics. Your own log for seven days will tell you more than any of them, and it costs nothing.
You have a feeling you are losing work after hours. You cannot prove it, so nothing changes.
One week and a spreadsheet will settle it. Not an industry number from a company blog. Yours.
Set it up in five minutes
Six columns. Paper is fine.
- When it arrived (day and rough time)
- Where it came from (phone, email, form, Instagram, WhatsApp)
- What they wanted, in four words
- When you replied
- Did it turn into work? Yes, no, or never replied
- Could a sentence on your website have answered it?
That last column is the one nobody thinks to add, and it is where the answer lives.
Run it for a full week
Not three days. A week, including the weekend, because the weekend is half the point.
Log everything, even the timewasters. Especially the timewasters. They are a finding too.
Four things to work out at the end
What share arrived outside your hours? Most owners guess low. If it is under a fifth, stop worrying about this and go and fix something else.
How long did people wait? Measure from their message, not from when you saw it. Those are different numbers and only one of them is the customer's experience.
Did the slow ones convert worse? Compare the ones you answered within an hour against the ones that waited overnight. This is the number that decides whether to spend anything.
How many were just facts? Count the yeses in your last column. For most businesses it is over half, and that half needs no tool at all. It needs a page.
Put a value on it
Take the enquiries that never replied. Multiply by how often you normally win work, and by what a job is worth to you.
That is a week. Multiply by fifty and you have a year, roughly.
It is a rough number. It is still a hundred times better than the figures that get quoted at you, because every part of it came from your own business.
Be ready for the boring outcome
Plenty of people run this and find the loss is small. Their customers are patient, or their work is planned weeks ahead.
That is a good result. You now know not to spend money on it, and you can stop feeling vaguely guilty every evening. Knowing the problem is small is worth the week on its own.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.