Somewhere inside your phone system there's a 19 second recording of your voice, made in a truck, with the window half down, in a year you can no longer name. You've never listened to it. Every person who has ever called you has listened to all of it. This is what it actually says to them, translated out of voicemail and into English.

You know these lines. You've left half of them on other people's machines. The translations are what runs through a caller's head in the second and a half before her thumb finds the red button.

"Hi, you've reached Dave"

Translation: you have reached a recording of a Dave who no longer exists. That Dave had different prices, a different van, and a guy named Kyle who quit in March. The current Dave is under a sink in a crawlspace with a flashlight in his teeth. He is not, in any meaningful sense, reachable.

"Sorry we missed your call"

Nobody missed anything. The phone rang face up in a cupholder while its owner was elbow deep in a compressor. He saw it. He made a fast calculation about which of two paying jobs was worth more in that exact second, and the caller lost. Which is fine. Honest, even. The apology is the part that stings, because the caller can hear that it's a form letter read aloud.

"Your call is very important to us"

Translation: your call ranks somewhere below lunch. Everyone has quietly agreed to stop hearing this sentence, which is the only reason it has survived this long. I think it's the most useless string of words in small business, and it's still bolted to the front of greetings in every trade in the country. If it were true you'd have picked up.

"Please leave your name, your number, and a brief message"

Homework. A stranger called your business with money in her hand and you handed her a three part task with a time limit and no confirmation that anyone will ever grade it. Note the word "brief." That word is a scar. It means somebody once left four minutes about their mother's boiler and you never got the last ninety seconds of your life back.

"...and we'll get back to you as soon as possible"

The load bearing word is "possible." Not soon. Not today. Possible, as in, permitted by the laws of physics. Lorraine with the burst hose bib hears that word and is already dialing the next number on the Google results page before your greeting has finished. She's not being disloyal. There's water coming out of her wall.

"Our office hours are Monday through Friday, 8 to 5"

Translation: please schedule your emergency for a weekday morning. There's a second message buried in there that most owners never notice, which is that the after hours version of you doesn't exist. So the 7:40pm caller doesn't bother leaving anything. Why would she? She's just been told the building is empty.

My dad had an answering machine with a microcassette in it, and you could hear the tape hiss for half a second before he spoke. Awful sound. But it never claimed to care about you, and it never once used the word "important," and there was a strange dignity in that. Thirty years of making the machine more polite. Zero years of making it more useful. Anyway.

The beep

The beep is the only honest character in this whole production. The beep says: fine, talk into the void, I'll hold your words in a box that a man in a crawlspace opens on Sunday night when he remembers. The beep has never lied to anyone.

"The mailbox you have reached is full"

Translation: you're roughly the twelfth person to try this, and the eleven ahead of you already hired somebody else. It's the closest a phone system ever comes to reading a business its own obituary out loud.

What the caller actually wanted to ask

This is the part that really stings. Go back through the messages you did get and look at what people were calling about:

  • Are you open Saturday
  • Do you do tankless, or just standard
  • Roughly what does a system swap run
  • Can somebody come Tuesday morning

Four questions. Not one of them needed you. They needed your hours, your service list, a price range you could recite in your sleep, and access to your calendar. You built an entire voicemail system to guard information you'd happily shout across a parking lot.

The research is grim in a way that's almost funny. A 411 Locals study of 85 businesses found that 62 percent of calls to small businesses go unanswered. The Numa Small Business Phone Report found that 85 percent of callers who reach voicemail never call back. Stack those two on top of each other and your greeting starts to look like a short ceremony you perform while a customer leaves.

The fix is boring, which is why it works. Rocketship answers on your own business number, in a voice, at 2am on a Sunday if that's when the call lands. It knows your hours, your services and your prices because you told it once. It answers Lorraine's question about the hose bib, books her into your Google Calendar for Tuesday at 9, takes her name and number, and hands the call straight to your cell if she says the word emergency. There's a free tier, and paid plans start at 12 dollars a month.

Before you do anything else today, call your own business from your own phone and put it on speaker. Listen the whole way through. Past the apology, past the homework, all the way to the beep. That's your sales pitch, running 24 hours a day, and you didn't write it. A guy in a truck did.