Why Tradies Are Losing $2,000 a Week After 5pm
Every missed after hours call is a job you handed to someone else. Here is the math most trade businesses never look at.
A burst pipe at midnight does not wait for business hours. The customer picks up the phone, calls whoever they can find, and the job goes to whoever answers.
Most trade businesses do not answer after 5pm. They send callers to voicemail or let the phone ring out. The customer hangs up, scrolls to the next result, and someone else gets the booking.
The average emergency trade job in Australia is worth $380 to $600. If you are missing three of those a week, and most solo operators are, that is over $1,000 in lost revenue. Per week. Before you have even opened up in the morning.
The reason businesses do not answer is not laziness. It is the math. Hiring an after hours operator costs $25 to $45 per hour. A quiet night might only bring in one call. It does not make sense on staff.
But it does make sense on AI. An AI dispatcher does not sleep, does not need a break, and costs a fraction of a human. It can triage the call, collect the job details, and send the booking to your phone before the customer hangs up.
The tradies who figure this out first will not just recover lost revenue. They will start taking jobs away from competitors who are still sending people to voicemail.
After hours is not a nice to have anymore. It is where the jobs are going.