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What a renovation enquiry is actually worth

10 September 2026 · 6 min read

Most missed-call arithmetic uses a service-call ticket of three or four hundred dollars. For anyone doing renovation work that number is so wrong it makes the whole calculation useless — and usually in the direction that costs you money.

A blocked drain is a $340 job. A kitchen is not. If you do renovation work and you are using service-call averages to decide whether answering the phone matters, you are understating the answer by an order of magnitude.

Start with a real number

You do not need an industry average, you need yours: take your last ten completed jobs, add the invoices, divide by ten. That is your average job. Most renovation contractors are surprised by how high it is, because the memorable jobs are the difficult ones rather than the profitable ones.

For a sense of scale in Ontario, Elm Kitchen Bath & Outdoors publish real 2026 cost ranges for kitchen, bathroom and sunroom work in the London and St. Thomas area — a genuinely useful reference point, and rarer than it should be. Most contractors will not put a number in public at all.

Then the conversion rate, honestly

Of the enquiries you actually speak to, how many become work? For renovation the honest answer is usually between one in five and one in three, because people ring three contractors and compare. Use the number you can defend, not the one you would like.

Now the sum

Missed calls a week, times fifty-two, divided by twelve, times your average job, times your conversion rate. That is what is walking past you in a month. For a renovation business it is routinely a five-figure number, which is why the answer to "should I do something about my phone" is different for you than for a service plumber.

There is a calculator if you would rather move sliders than do the arithmetic. It runs in your browser and asks you for nothing.

The trap in the number

A big number is not a licence to buy the most expensive thing available. The right question is not "what am I losing" but "what proportion of that would a fix actually recover". Nothing recovers all of it. Some of those callers were never going to buy, some wanted a price you would not give, and some rang four people and were always going to pick the cheapest.

Assume you recover a fifth. If the sum still works at a fifth, it works.

And the bit after the phone call

A renovation lead that is answered but then waits nine days for a quote is a lead you have paid for twice and lost anyway. If your bottleneck is turning a walkthrough into a priced, professional quote, that is what Estiquik exists for. Answering the phone is only the first gap.

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