How many calls is your salon actually missing?

Most shop owners have a rough sense that they miss calls. Very few know the number, because a missed call leaves no trace — there is no record of the person who rang, got voicemail, and rang the salon down the road instead.

Start with your phone bill

Your carrier can show inbound call counts, including the ones nobody answered. Pull a month. The gap between calls received and calls answered is your starting figure, and for a busy two-chair shop it is usually larger than the owner expects.

Work out what one of them is worth

Take your average ticket — not your highest, the average across everything you do in a week. Multiply by the number of missed calls. Then multiply again by how often a client comes back in a year, because a missed call is rarely one appointment; it is a client who now has somebody else's number saved.

The part that stings

Roughly six in ten people who reach a voicemail do not call back. They ring the next shop on the list. That is not a failure of your service — you were doing your job, with your hands in someone's hair. It is simply the arithmetic of a phone that rings while you are working.

Whatever you do about it, do the sum first. It is usually the number that makes the decision obvious.