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.

Twenty an hour is where the counting begins

Twenty dollars, forty hours, fifty two weeks. That's 41,600 dollars 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 of payroll tax. Federal FICA, plus whatever your state charges for unemployment, sits on top of the wage, and it isn't a rounding error. Don't take my word for the size of it. Your payroll provider itemizes the employer contribution on every single run, and it's in your portal right now, one login away.

Add paid time off. Two weeks of vacation and six holidays is sixteen working days where the money goes out and the phone still rings. Call it 2,560 dollars for an empty chair.

Add sick days, which are meaner than vacation because you can't plan around them. Vacation gets scheduled in March. The flu arrives on the Tuesday your biggest quote is supposed to land, and either you cover the desk yourself or nobody does.

Then the tail of small stuff that never makes it onto the budget spreadsheet:

  • The job ad, the interview hours, the two weeks you spend paying someone to learn your price list
  • The software seat, the desk, the chair, the headset, the extension on the phone system
  • Turnover, and you already know how long your last three front desk people lasted

Put it together and a twenty dollar an hour receptionist is a fifty to fifty five thousand dollar decision. That's the honest number. It's also the wrong number to be arguing about, because even at fifty five grand you aren't buying what you think you're buying.

Count the hours you're not covering

A week has 168 hours. Your full time receptionist covers forty. Subtract lunch. Subtract the bathroom, 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.

Thirty something out of 168. Fifty five thousand dollars to cover a fifth of the week.

The other 130 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.

411 Locals looked at 85 small businesses and found 62 percent of calls to them went unanswered. Eighty five businesses is a small sample and you're welcome to argue with it. Better idea: pull your own carrier log for last month and count the calls nobody picked up. Then look at the timestamps.

Voicemail is not coverage

Most of us kept voicemail out of habit, the same way the fax number is still printed at the bottom of your invoices. The Numa Small Business Phone Report found 85 percent of callers who reach voicemail never call back. They don't leave a message and wait patiently for you. They hang up and dial the next result, and the next result answers, because the next result is 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, writes down a name and a number, and sends it over for you to return in the morning. The caller standing in two inches of water is not waiting until morning.

Quick tangent. Picture the receptionist at a two van HVAC outfit who knows, cold, that the Carrier install on Maple is Thursday and that the customer's dog bites. No software is replacing her, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Back to the ledger.

What the empty hours are worth in dollars

Do this one on a napkin. Take your average job value. A plumber might call it 480 dollars. 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 take the missed calls from the carrier log that landed outside business hours. 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. Eight jobs. At 2,400 a job that's 19,200 dollars, 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.

So what do you actually do

Rocketship's AI receptionist answers on your existing business number, all 168 hours. It knows your hours, your services and your prices because you told it. It answers what the caller asks, books straight into your Google Calendar, takes the caller's name and number, and hands the call to a person when a person should have it.

Free tier to start. Paid plans from 12 dollars a month. Set that next to the 19,200 and the argument gets short.

Keep your receptionist, by the way. 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.