27 September 2026 · 5 min read · Oscar Markham
The real cost of saying I will get back to you
Almost every business we look at has the same leak in the same place: enquiries arrive, somebody means to reply, and by the time they do the customer has booked elsewhere. It is not a marketing problem and no amount of budget fixes it.
First is not a small advantage
A homeowner who contacts three businesses forms a provisional decision when the first one replies, and compares the other two against it. Being first means being the benchmark.
For urgent work — a leak, no heat, a broken appliance — it is close to decisive. Whoever answers gets the job and price barely enters into it.
Work out your own number
Take last month's enquiries and the jobs that came from them. Then estimate how many of the ones you lost went to somebody who replied sooner.
Most owners land somewhere between a quarter and a half. At an average job value, that is usually a larger number than their entire advertising budget.
What to change, in order
An automatic acknowledgement that gives a specific time you will ring. Not a robot message — a sentence that sounds like you.
Then a fixed slot in the day for quoting, rather than 'the evening', which in practice means Sunday.
Then a price range on the phone for the jobs you have done a hundred times, instead of a site visit that delays everything by three days.
- Auto-reply naming a time you will ring
- A fixed daily slot for quotes, not evenings
- Phone ranges for standard jobs
- One follow-up on quotes after four days
- Someone else answering when you are on a roof
The uncomfortable bit
Response time is not a marketing spend, it is an operational habit, and it is harder to change than a budget.
But it is free, it compounds, and until it is fixed every euro spent on advertising is buying enquiries that leak out the same hole.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.