A bath remodel lead costs $176 at the average Re-Bath unit, and a sold job costs $1,796 in ads. Between those two numbers sits one that nobody records. Of the estimates you booked last month, how many actually happened?
Walk over and ask. Not how many estimates were booked, which the calendar knows. Ask how many of them the estimator actually sat.
Most offices answer with a feeling. Seventy percent, maybe. Then somebody goes to check and finds the calendar cannot tell them.
That is not your office being sloppy. Nothing in the building produces that number.
Many CRMs mark the appointment done when its date passes; check whether yours does. A homeowner who was out counts as a completed appointment. So does one where only one of the two decision makers was home. Both cost your estimator an afternoon and the drive.
Your ad account stops earlier still. It knows a form arrived. It does not know whether anyone opened a door.
So the two systems that could answer the question each stop one step short of it. The step they both skip is the expensive one.
Re-Bath's 2026 franchise disclosure filing, covering 122 units, does not file it. We went through what they do file in a separate post.
If a franchisor does not file it across more than a hundred units, your own reporting was never going to produce it by accident.
We found no published no-show rate for this trade. A page that hands you a typical one without a source is guessing.
So instead of a number you cannot check, here is the arithmetic you can.
It costs you twice, and the two halves behave differently.
The first half is out of pocket. You spend the drive whether or not the door opens, so all of it counts. The minutes there and back. The minutes the slot blocks. What an hour of that estimator costs you, all in. The vehicle.
The second half is the sale the slot would have made. That one only counts if nobody else takes the slot. Refill it and you lose the drive but keep the chance at the job.
So one missed visit costs you two things added together. The drive, the vehicle and the blocked time. Then your close rate times the gross profit on a job, times the share of slots you do not refill.
Put your own nine numbers in and the page shows the working.
What one missed estimate costs you
A point of no-show rate is one visit in a hundred. So a point a month is your visits a month, divided by a hundred, times the cost of one missed visit.
That is the number to hold in your head, because it tells you what a fix is worth before you buy one. Say a point is worth $900 a month to you. A reminder system at $200 a month then has to move your rate by about two tenths of a point to pay for itself.
You cannot work that out without knowing your rate. Which is the whole problem.
Print last month's booked estimates. Every one, with the date and the name.
Sit with whoever ran the calendar and go down the list. For each one: did the estimator sit with the homeowner, yes or no. Not "was it marked complete". Did he sit.
Count the noes. Divide by the total. That is your rate, for one month, measured rather than guessed.
It takes an afternoon and it is the only way to get the number today.
One month is one month. A bad week of weather or one estimator on holiday moves it.
Do it again the month after and you have a trend instead of a reading. The arithmetic does not change; only your confidence in it does.
Ask the question. Write the answer down, even if the answer is "nobody knows".
Then print the list and count it by hand, once.
Whatever it turns out to be, you will have a number where you had a feeling.
No. Many systems mark an appointment complete when its date passes, whether or not anybody attended. That is why the count has to come from the person who ran the day, not from the record. Ask your estimator, go down the list, and mark each one by hand. The gap between the two counts is usually the point of doing it.
We found no published one, and anyone who quotes one without a source is guessing. No franchise filing we read files it. That is exactly why counting your own is worth an afternoon. Your number is the only one that can tell you what a fix is worth.
Because a sale tells you about two things at once and you cannot separate them. If sales fall you cannot tell whether fewer people opened the door or whether more of them said no. The visit that happened sits between the two and splits the question in half.
Count it against the slot it missed and again against the slot it filled. A move costs you the first drive and the first blocked hour, and those are real. If you only count the second one, a homeowner who moves three times looks like one clean appointment.
Start before the visit. When the homeowner picks a time for your office to call and confirms it the day before, your office stops chasing forms. We count the confirmed calls and judge each ad by what one cost, so the ads learn to find people who pick up instead of people who fill in forms.
You hear the price on our second call, before you sign anything. Your ad account and every lead stay yours.
What comes with it depends on where you start, with ads running or with none. You get it on one page before you sign anything. The longer answers.
Lovro Lucic, on US hours from Zagreb. You deal with me, not a team. Your page, your number and your calendar stay in your time zone. Call me at +1 (866) 989-4568, answered by me 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Eastern, or pick a time on the calendar.