Ask an owner what their receptionist costs and you'll get an hourly rate. Twenty an hour. Twenty-three if you're in a city and the last two hires walked. That figure is where the answer starts, and the part nobody writes on the whiteboard is the part that pulls the most money out of the business.

So let's do it as a ledger, top to bottom, with arithmetic you can redo on your own books tonight. My numbers are placeholders. Swap in yours. The shape of the thing won't change.

Full-time: twenty an hour is where the counting begins

Twenty dollars, forty hours, fifty-two weeks is $41,600 a year. Most owners stop right there, which is a bit like pricing a work van off the sticker and pretending insurance doesn't exist. Now add the employer side:

  • Employer FICA at 7.65 percent of wages: about $3,180
  • Federal unemployment tax at the effective 0.6 percent on the first $7,000: $42
  • State unemployment, which swings hard by state and by your claims history: call it $500
  • Workers' comp on a clerical class code, cheap but not zero: about $120
  • A desk line, a headset, a seat in your software, payroll processing: about $480
  • The job ad, the interview hours, and the two weeks you spend paying someone to learn your price list: about $800 in year one, and again every time you re-hire

That adds up to roughly $46,700 before turnover, and you already know how long your last three front-desk people lasted. Don't take my percentages as gospel. Your payroll provider itemizes the employer contribution on every run, and it's in your portal one login away. The paid time off is already inside the $41,600, but it's money for an empty chair: two weeks of vacation and six holidays is sixteen working days when the pay goes out and the phone still rings. Sick days are meaner, because you can't plan around them. Vacation gets scheduled in March. The flu arrives on the Tuesday your biggest quote is due, and either you cover the desk or nobody does.

Part-time: why the cheap version isn't

Someone at a chamber mixer will tell you to just get somebody part-time for the phones. Fifteen hours a week, twenty, whatever you can afford. It sounds cheap out loud and stops sounding cheap the second you write it down. Say you run a two-van garage door repair outfit in Wichita. Springs, openers, the occasional panel after somebody backs into their own door. Average ticket about $340, a full door replacement closer to $1,900, and you spend your day on a ladder or under a torsion bar. You hire twenty-five hours a week at $18, mornings and early afternoons.

Twenty-five hours at $18 is $450 a week, or $23,400 a year. That figure lodges in your brain and never moves, and it's wrong. FICA is $1,790. FUTA is $42. State unemployment is perhaps $300. Workers' comp is about $70. The line, headset, software seat and payroll processing come to about $480. Hiring and ramp-up run about $800 in year one. Total: $26,882 for a twenty-five-hour week.

Then you don't get 1,300 hours either. Twenty-five times fifty-two is 1,300, the number you multiplied in your head. Take out six paid holidays and four sick days at five hours each, because you'll give her those or she'll go work at the dental office down the road that does. That's fifty hours, so you're buying 1,250 hours of somebody at a desk. $26,882 divided by 1,250 is $21.51 an hour. Your $18 hire costs $21.51, and that's the figure to hold in your hand when you decide whether this is worth doing.

The good version of this hire is really good. A sharp front-desk person learns which callers are tire-kickers, remembers that the Hendersons on Oliver Street always call about the same sticky sensor, signs for the parts delivery, and talks an angry customer down before he types up a one-star review. Picture the receptionist at a two-van HVAC outfit who knows, cold, that the install on Maple is Thursday and that the customer's dog bites. No software replaces her, and I won't pretend otherwise. I'm also selling you something, and I'd like you to notice that.

Count the hours you're not covering

A week has 168 hours. A full-time receptionist covers forty. Subtract lunch, the ten minutes she's on hold with a supplier, and every moment the second line rings while she's already on the first. Call it thirty-something hours of real phone coverage out of 168. Close to $47,000 to cover about a fifth of the week.

The part-timer is worse. There are 8,760 hours in a year. Your 1,250 paid hours cover 14 percent of the calendar. The other 86 percent goes to voicemail exactly like it did before you hired anyone. $21.51 an hour buys mornings. Evenings, weekends, her lunch break, and the two weeks in July when she's at her sister's wedding are all still a recording asking people to leave a message they won't leave.

And the uncovered hours aren't empty. That's when a homeowner walks into the basement at 9:40 on a Sunday night and finds two inches of water. That's Saturday morning, when people finally have a free hour to call about the kitchen they've been thinking about since February. That's 7:15 on a Tuesday, before the office opens, when someone books the day's first dental appointment because they're awake anyway and dreading it. Garage doors break at 6:40 on a Sunday morning when somebody can't get the car out to make a shift, and that person calls three companies in a row until one picks up.

Voicemail and answering services aren't coverage either

Most of us kept voicemail out of habit, the same way the fax number is still printed at the bottom of the invoice. A caller on a service call mostly doesn't leave a message and wait. They dial the next result, and the next result answers, because it's a guy in a truck who picks up while driving. An answering service does something different: a human picks up, bills you by the minute or the call, writes down a name and number, and sends it over for you to return in the morning. The caller standing in two inches of water isn't waiting until morning.

What the empty hours are worth

Do this one on a napkin. Take your average job value. A plumber might call it $480. An HVAC company doing a full system swap, $2,400 and up. A dental practice should use whatever its own lifetime-value math says a new patient is worth, which is a lot more than one cleaning. Now pull your carrier log for last month and count the calls that landed outside business hours and went unanswered. Assume, generously to yourself, that only one in five would have turned into work. Multiply.

Say the log shows forty after-hours misses in a month and you're the HVAC company. That's eight jobs. At $2,400 a job it's $19,200 in one month, from people who already found you and already dialed. Run it on your own log before you believe my version of it. Then notice which line item you've been calling expensive.

What the other side of the ledger looks like

Rocketship answers the number you already have, through call forwarding, at every hour there is. It knows your hours, your services and your prices, so when a caller asks what a spring replacement runs, they get the price instead of a promised callback. The job goes straight into your Google Calendar with the name, number and address captured, and when the call really needs a human, it transfers to you. Keep your receptionist if you have one. She's the one who knows about the dog on Maple. She's also asleep at 9:40 on a Sunday night, and so, right now, is your phone.

Answering is one step in a longer job. The same product finds buyers by name, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting. Launch is $24.99 a month ($20.83 billed yearly), plus a $5 line if you want a dedicated number, so about $30 a month or $360 a year, against $26,882. Compare annual figures rather than per-hour ones: software's per-hour cost is a magic trick, and the honest comparison is what you pay for the year and which one is awake at 6:40 on Sunday.

There's a limit to flag. Launch includes 30 voice minutes a month, roughly a dozen calls of two to three minutes. The HVAC example above, forty after-hours calls, is closer to 100 minutes. Frontier ($79 a month) includes 80, Mission Control ($149 a month, dedicated number included) includes 150, and on any paid plan a top-up is $15 for 50 minutes. Count your own minutes before you pick a plan. Recover one $340 service call and you've covered a month of Launch plus the line more than ten times over. Recover one $1,900 door replacement and you've covered the whole year.

A missed call is a customer who didn't get an answer. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required. Answering your existing number is included; a dedicated line is $5 a month.