Thursday, 2:40pm. Your lead installer is on a ladder on the second storey of a 1920s semi, pulling a rotted sash out of an opening that's a half inch out of square. His phone rings in his pocket. He can't answer it. It rings again at 2:44. By the time he's down, it's 3:15, there's a voicemail with no callback number, and the number comes back to a mobile that now goes straight to voicemail.
That caller booked with somebody else by Friday lunchtime. You paid roughly £180–£250 to make that phone ring. You will never know what the job was worth.
That's one leak. Most window companies have seven, and almost none of them show up in the P&L as a line item. They show up as a quieter month than you expected, with no obvious reason why.
Here's the arithmetic.
The numbers this post runs on
Swap in your own figures, but these are reasonable for a small-to-mid residential window company:
- Average contract value: $11,400 (eight windows, supplied and fitted)
- Gross margin: 38%, so $4,330 gross profit per job
- Cost per qualified lead: $220 blended across paid search, LSAs, and the free referral traffic that drags the average down
- Lead-to-sale conversion when the process actually works: 25%
- Monthly lead volume: 60
Sixty leads at 25% is 15 jobs. Fifteen jobs is $171,000 booked and roughly $65,000 gross profit a month. That's your ceiling with the leads you're already paying for. Everything below is the gap between that ceiling and what you actually booked.
The front end: before anyone has talked to you
This is where the biggest money goes, and it's the part most owners never look at because there's no record of what happened. A lead that was never answered leaves no paperwork.
Leak 1: The call that rings out
Contractors miss somewhere between a fifth and a third of inbound calls. Call it 25%. If 40 of your 60 monthly leads come in by phone, that's 10 missed calls a month.
Maybe three of those call back. The other seven dial the next company on the results page. At 25% conversion, that's 1.5 jobs a month, or $17,100 in booked revenue. Annualised: $205,000. You also spent $1,540 a month on those seven leads to get nothing.
The fix isn't a better phone. It's a rule about who answers it and what happens when they can't: every missed call gets a text back within two minutes and a callback within fifteen, with the attempt logged somewhere other than that person's own head.
Leak 2: The web form that sits until tomorrow
Your contact rate on an online enquiry collapses after the first hour. Someone filling in a form at 9pm is filling in three others. If you ring back at 10am the next day, you're the third company to call and the second one they've already turned down.
Say 20 of your 60 leads arrive by form and half of those get a response slower than 24 hours. That's 10 leads converting at maybe 10% instead of 25%. 1.5 jobs a month gone, another $17,100.
Realistically you'll recover most of this with nothing more than a notification that actually reaches whoever is on duty, instead of an email alert buried under supplier invoices.
Leak 3: The measure that nobody confirmed
Residential measure appointments no-show or reschedule at around 10–15%. On 45 appointments a month that's five wasted slots. Three get rebooked. Two don't.
Two lost appointments at 25% lead conversion isn't two lost jobs, it's 0.5 jobs, or $5,700 a month. But the cost is worse than the revenue: you also burned two hours of a measure tech's day, plus fuel, plus the slot a serious buyer could have taken.
A confirmation text 24 hours out and a second one the morning of kills most of this. It's the cheapest fix on the list.
The middle: quote to decision
The front end leaks leads. The middle leaks deals you've already spent money on, which makes it more expensive per unit.
Leak 4: The quote that takes four days
Every day between the measure and the quote arriving is a day the homeowner is talking to someone else. In replacement windows, the first credible quote in the door wins more often than the cheapest one.
If your turnaround is three to five days and a competitor's is same-day, you lose a share of the deals you'd otherwise have won on merit. Call it 0.6 jobs a month, $6,840.
This is nearly always a data problem, not a laziness problem. The measurements are on a clipboard, the pricing is in a spreadsheet that one person owns, and the quote can't be built until the estimator is back at a desk. When the measure tech can enter openings, options, and photos against the lead record on site, and the quote pulls current pricing automatically, the four-day turnaround becomes a same-evening turnaround without anyone working longer. That's the part of ExteriorPro that earns its keep for most window companies before anything else does.
Leak 5: The quote that was sent and never chased
Here's the one that costs the most for the least reason.
Most replacement window sales close on the third to fifth contact. Most salespeople stop at one or two. You sent the PDF, they said they'd discuss it with their partner, and nobody touched that file again.
Thirty quotes a month, fifteen of them unchased past the first follow-up, maybe eight of those were genuinely still live. Recovering a quarter of them is 1.2 jobs, $13,680 a month, $164,000 a year.
You already paid for the lead. You already paid for the measure. You already paid for the estimate. The marginal cost of a follow-up call is four minutes. There is no other activity in your business with that return, and it fails purely because nobody can see at a glance which quotes are 72 hours old and silent.
Leak 6: The price that was true in March
Vinyl, glass units, hardware and freight have all moved in the last two years, and they didn't move once. If your quote template still carries last quarter's unit costs, every job you sell from it is a job you sold at the wrong margin.
You won't see this as a lost deal. You'll see it as a good month that didn't produce the cash it should have. On 15 jobs a month, a 2.5% margin slip on materials is roughly $2,800 a month in gross profit, $33,600 a year, and you'd have won most of those jobs anyway at the correct price.
Two habits fix it: a quote validity window printed on every estimate (30 days is standard, and nobody argues with it), and a monthly cost review that updates one central price list rather than six copies of a spreadsheet.
The tail: the leads you decided weren't leads
Leak 7: "Not this year"
Someone asks for a quote in October, gets the number, and decides to do it after Christmas. In most window companies, that lead is now dead. The file closes, the follow-up stops, and in March they buy windows from whoever's advert they see first.
Window replacement has a long consideration cycle. Twelve to eighteen months between first enquiry and signing is normal for a full-house job. If you're generating 60 leads a month and roughly 10 of them are genuine "later" buyers, you're accumulating 120 warm, pre-qualified, already-measured prospects a year and doing nothing with them.
Re-engaging those at even 5% is half a job a month, $5,700, at a lead cost of zero. The work is a dated reminder on the record and a short, non-pushy call. Not a newsletter.
Add it up
| Leak | Jobs/month | Revenue/month | Revenue/year | |---|---|---|---| | Missed calls | 1.5 | $17,100 | $205,200 | | Slow web response | 1.5 | $17,100 | $205,200 | | Measure no-shows | 0.5 | $5,700 | $68,400 | | Slow quote turnaround | 0.6 | $6,840 | $82,080 | | No quote follow-up | 1.2 | $13,680 | $164,160 | | Stale pricing | — | $2,800 GP | $33,600 GP | | Dead "later" leads | 0.5 | $5,700 | $68,400 | | Total | 5.8 | $66,120 | $793,440 |
You will not recover all of it. Some of those callers were tyre-kickers, some were shopping three quotes for a landlord who was never going to buy, and some were your competitor's estimator checking your pricing.
Recover a third and you're adding roughly $22,000 a month in booked revenue and $8,300 a month in gross profit without spending another dollar on advertising. There's also $4,400 a month in lead spend currently being poured on leads nobody worked, which is the part that should sting most.
What to fix first
Don't try to fix all seven. Pick in this order, because this is the order of cost-to-fix versus money recovered:
- Missed-call text-back. One afternoon of setup. Biggest single recovery.
- Quote follow-up discipline. A list of every quote sent, its age, and its last contact date, reviewed every Monday morning. Costs nothing but attention.
- Appointment confirmations. Automated, 24 hours out, plus morning-of.
- Quote turnaround. Get measurements and pricing into the same system so the estimate doesn't wait for someone to get back to a desk.
- Everything else. Pricing review and dead-lead re-engagement are worth real money, but they won't fix themselves until the first four are habits.
The common factor in six of the seven is the same: nobody can see, in one place, what state each lead is in and when it was last touched. Whiteboards, a shared inbox, and a sales guy's memory work fine at three jobs a month. They fail quietly and expensively at fifteen.
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