Why Your Receptionist May Be Worth Six Figures

You can probably pay your receptionist six figures, as long as they answer the phone on time.

That sounds like a stretch until you run the numbers on what a ringing phone actually costs you. So let's run them.

So let's say you're buying leads at around $150 each. When you answer the phone immediately, about ten percent of them turn into signed jobs, and each signed job is worth $30,000 in gross profit. At a ten percent close rate, it takes ten leads to land one project. So, that's $1,500 to win a $30,000 job.

But... What happens when the phone rings 3 times?

On Google's Local Services Ads, Google watches how quickly you answer the phone. When it rings more than three times, they want more money. That could easily increase your cost per lead by twenty percent - $180 per lead. Now that signed job costs $1,800.

Okay, so what if you call back in 5 minutes? There's a well-known MIT study that saw an 80% drop in the odds of qualifying a lead when you wait 5 minutes instead of 1. So that ten percent close rate falls to two percent. That's $9,000 per job.

So if you're paying $9,000 to sign a job and you could be paying $1,500, you save $750 every time the phone gets picked up on the first ring. After 140 calls, that's a six-figure salary. Everything after that is profit.

Put a real person on that phone who picks up every time, and the seat you think of as "just answering calls" turns out to be one of the highest-leverage roles in the company. Six figures starts to look cheap.