Here's a number most contractors on Long Island have never actually run.
An office employee to answer your phones and chase your leads costs about $75,000 a year once you count salary, taxes, and the mistakes. Two of them — one for the phones, one for follow-up — is $150,000. Every year. Forever.
Now here's the number that should bother you more: 62% of calls to home service businesses go unanswered during working hours. You're on a roof. You're in a crawlspace. The phone rings, it goes to voicemail, and that homeowner calls the next roofer on the list. That call was worth $8,000–$15,000. Voicemail ate it.
So the real cost isn't the $150,000 you'd pay people to catch those calls. It's the money falling through the hole right now while you don't.
What we did about it
We built AI employees. Not chatbots — employees. Ours are named Rachel and Ozex, and they make and answer real phone calls, have real conversations, book real appointments onto a real calendar, and log every outcome — who they talked to, what was said, when to call back — into a CRM you can read in plain English.
They work every day. They don't call in sick. They don't forget to write down the callback. And the whole system costs about $36,000 a year at our top tier — $114,000 less than the two humans, working seven days instead of five.
We're not guessing this works. It's how we run our own company. The call that led you to this post may well have been one of ours.
The math for your business
Take your average job value. Say $9,000 for a roof. If missed calls cost you just one job a month, that's $108,000 a year leaking out of a phone nobody answered. Plug that hole at $1,997/month and the system pays for itself with the first saved job — everything after is margin.
That's the whole pitch. No “digital transformation.” No dashboard you'll never open. A phone that always gets answered, a follow-up that always happens, and a report you can read in 30 seconds.
See it working
Call us at 516-360-2000 — and pay attention to what happens if we can't pick up. That's the product. Or book 20 minutes and we'll run your numbers with your job values, free.
Atreum AI is an A-Plus Network company. We build AI employees and apps for businesses that would rather do the work than chase the paperwork.
