Remodeling contractors
Forty minutes there, an hour at somebody's kitchen island, forty minutes back, and a proposal written at half nine at night. Megan asks the questions on the phone that decide whether that evening is worth driving to.
She rang on Monday and said she wanted to redo her kitchen. You asked a couple of things standing in a stairwell with a saw going and could not hear half of it, so you booked the visit, because that is what you do.
Now you are in traffic with a tape measure on the passenger seat. You will be there an hour. She will show you a folder of pictures, all of which are eighty-thousand-dollar kitchens, and somewhere around the forty-minute mark she will say her brother-in-law does cabinets and she just wants to know what the rest would run. You will drive home. You will write it up on Sunday because there is no other time. And you will not hear back.
That is not a bad customer. She is a perfectly nice woman who did not know what she was asking for. The problem is that you found out in her kitchen instead of on the phone, and the difference between those two places is an evening you will not get back and a Sunday you spent on a proposal nobody read.
Every remodeler runs this arithmetic without writing it down. The estimate is free, which makes it feel like marketing. It is not marketing. It is the single largest unbilled cost in the business — your time, at the hour of day when you have the least of it, plus the design thinking you hand over in conversation before anyone has signed anything. A general contractor building new construction gets a set of drawings and a bid package. You get a folder of pictures and a question about whether the wall is load-bearing.
And that is only half of what your phone carries. The other half is the woman whose kitchen you are already in the middle of, who is living in the house while you do it, who has been washing dishes in a bathtub for three weeks, and who rings at ten past seven because the tile came in and it is not the tile she picked.
She is not a lead. She is the reason the next four leads exist. And she is calling at exactly the hour you are driving to Wexford.
A remodeler's line carries three different businesses at once: selling the next job, running the current one, and standing behind the last one. Most answering setups can only see the first.
"Roughly what would a bathroom cost?" There is no honest answer, because the version where the toilet stays where it is and the version where you move the stack are not the same job. What she actually needs is two minutes of questions, and what she usually gets is either a made-up range or a booked visit that wastes an evening.
Three weeks into a kitchen, washing up in the bathroom, and the tile came in wrong. This call is not about tile. It is about whether anybody is paying attention, and it decides whether you get the referral or the review.
Cabinet hardware, grout colour, which way the island seating faces. Small decisions that cost nothing and stop everything, because the tile setter cannot start until somebody picks. Every day this sits unreturned is a day of somebody's labour you are paying for or losing.
Cabinets pushed four weeks, a vanity discontinued, windows that will not make the date you built the schedule around. You need this today, because every trade behind it is booked against a date that just stopped being true.
An architect's set, or a neighbour who watched you do the house two doors down. This is the best call of the month and it arrives with no warning, usually at lunchtime, usually while you are in somebody's attic.
A door that dropped, caulk that split over the winter, a drawer that never ran right. Twelve months on, they are your warranty obligation and your best salesperson at the same time.
Sometimes they are genuinely comparing. Sometimes you are the third number so the second one looks reasonable, and occasionally they want a scope written out that they will hand to somebody cheaper. You can usually tell in ninety seconds on the phone. You can never tell from a voicemail.
The trade traffic comes early. Suppliers, the cabinet shop, a tile setter checking whether Tuesday holds — between seven and eight, while you are loading the truck or already on a site with a compressor running.
The homeowners come in two waves. There is a lunchtime wave, from people ringing three contractors on a break at work, and there is the evening wave — half six to half eight, after dinner, once a couple has talked to each other about the thing they have been circling for a month. That second wave is where the real jobs are. It is also the wave that lands while you are eating, driving to an estimate, or writing up the last one.
Then there is the season, which every remodeler feels in the same two places. January through March, when people have spent the holidays looking at their own kitchen and decided. And the autumn panic, which is the same conversation every year: somebody rings in late September wanting it finished before Thanksgiving, and depending on your cabinet lead times that is either a straightforward yes or a promise you cannot keep. Getting that question answered on the first call rather than after a site visit saves everybody a difficult conversation in November.
What answers now is a phone in a nail bag, on speaker, in a room with a router running. Or it does not get answered, and the caller — who is on a break at work and has two other numbers open in another tab — rings the next one.
Megan picks up in your company's name, sorts the client from the shopper from the supplier, and asks the handful of questions that decide whether an estimate is worth booking. The ones worth your evening get a slot. The ones that are not get a straight answer while it still only costs two minutes.
Most remodelers, asked what a missed call costs, reach for the value of the job. That is the right instinct for a plumber and the wrong one for you, because your loss has two halves and only one of them looks like a lost job.
Start with the half you can compute. Take the kind of project you actually want more of — not an average across everything, because a vanity swap and a whole-floor gut are not the same business. Ask your phone provider for inbound against connected, broken out by hour, and look specifically at the lunchtime and evening bands. Then be hard on the result: assume most of them were shopping, halve what is left, and halve it again. Whatever survives is a real number and it is usually still uncomfortable.
Now the half nobody computes. Count the estimates you drove to in the last two months and mark the ones that were never going to close — the folder of pictures, the brother-in-law, the scope that got handed to somebody cheaper. Each of those cost you an evening and a Sunday. Estimates are not free to give. They are the largest unbilled line in the business and they do not appear anywhere in your books, which is exactly why they never get managed.
That is the arithmetic that makes phone screening worth more to a remodeler than to almost any other trade in this library. A plumber's phone problem is missing work. Yours is missing the good work while spending your evenings on the bad.
There is a third cost, and it is the one that decides whether you are still doing this in ten years. The client living in the dust who could not reach anybody about the wrong tile does not usually complain — she just tells the story that way afterwards. Two years later somebody asks her who did her kitchen, and the answer is a sentence about how it turned out fine but they were hard to get hold of. You will never see that on a report.
Against all of it, answering is billed by the second Megan is on a call. A screening conversation runs two or three minutes and either saves you an evening or books you a real one.
Pay As You Go is $29 a month plus $0.88 for each minute Megan spends on calls, with no included minutes. Professional is $199 a month and includes 500 minutes, then $0.45 a minute. Growth is $499 a month and includes 1,500 minutes, then $0.38 a minute. Enterprise is priced by conversation. Every plan includes the entire product — the plans differ by included minutes only — and calls are billed in real seconds, never rounded up to the next minute.
Tuesday, 12:40pm. Could be a supplier, a current client, or somebody who saw the sign in a yard.
MeganThanks for calling Marchetti Remodeling, this is Megan, an AI assistant. How can I help you today?
Hi — we're thinking about doing our kitchen and I wanted to get an idea of pricing.
MeganHappy to get that moving. Pricing depends almost entirely on how far the work goes, so let me ask a couple of things and then we can get somebody out. Are you looking at replacing what's there — cabinets, counters, appliances in the same layout — or are you moving the plumbing or taking a wall out?
We want to take out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. We've actually had an architect draw it up because we weren't sure if it was holding anything.
MeganThat's useful, and it tells me this is a real project rather than a refresh. Two more and I'll leave you alone. Do you have a timeframe you're working toward, and has anyone else been out to look at it yet?
We'd like it done before we host at Christmas. And no, you're the first — our neighbours on Ellery had you do their basement.
MeganThen let's get Dave out while you're still first in the queue. He has Thursday at six or Saturday morning at nine — and bring the architect's drawings out when he comes, because that's the thing that will make the number real rather than a guess.
An illustration of how Megan handles this kind of call, not a recording of one. Her opening line is the disclosure she actually speaks.
Are we replacing what is there, or are we moving walls and plumbing? That one question separates a refresh from a gut, and it is the difference between an estimate you should drive to and one you should handle another way. You set the questions. She asks them in the same order every time, which is more than most of us manage on a job site with a saw going.
Somebody who is three weeks into a kitchen and living in it does not get asked what sort of project she is considering. She is transferred, or reaches you as a same-day message with the job named. That distinction is the whole game on a remodeler's phone, and it is the one a generic answering service cannot make.
"They need a grout colour before Thursday" is not a message to read at the end of the week. Decisions that hold a trade and suppliers reporting a slipped date can be set to reach you within minutes, because everything booked behind them is built on a date that just changed.
The September caller who wants it done before Thanksgiving is better told about cabinet lead times in the first two minutes than in your truck in November. Megan can state the lead times you give her as facts, which turns an awkward conversation into an early one.
Transcript, recording and summary per call by email. Six calls between eleven and two become four minutes of reading, and you know which one is the referral with drawings before you have washed your hands.
She does not price work. Not a ballpark, not a per-square-foot figure, not "most kitchens run about". Remodeling numbers said early follow you into every conversation afterwards, and a figure given before anyone has seen a subfloor is a negotiation you have already lost. She can state the things you have told her are facts — that you do not take projects under a certain size, that estimates are free, that cabinets are running a given number of weeks — and she stops there.
She does not tell anyone whether a wall is load-bearing, whether a permit is needed, or whether their plan will pass inspection. Those are answered by somebody standing in the room, and occasionally by an engineer.
She does not authorise a change. A client asking to move the island six inches is captured and routed to you. Nobody's change order gets agreed on a phone call with a receptionist, because the version that is not written down is the version that gets argued about at final payment.
She does not text. Megan works over the phone and the record reaches you by email — transcript, recording, summary. A great deal of remodeling coordination now happens by text, particularly with subs and with clients sending photos of tile, so that is a real gap and better weighed now than discovered in month two.
And on a pre-1978 house where the work will disturb painted surfaces, she does not advise anybody about lead. She can capture the age of the house so that the RRP question is on the table before you are standing in a hallway with a sander, but the certification, the containment and the disclosure obligations are the firm's and they stay the firm's.
The 2am burst pipe goes to whoever picks up — and it is rarely the company with the best reviews.
Read more →You cannot answer a phone with both hands inside a live panel — and that is when it rings.
Read more →Half your inbound is not a lead. It is a framer asking whether Thursday is still on.
Read more →The topcoat hides the prep. So she judges you on the parts she can see — and most of those happen before anyone opens a tin.
Read more →Pay As You Go is $29 a month plus $0.88 for each minute Megan spends on calls, with no included minutes. Professional is $199 a month and includes 500 minutes, then $0.45 a minute. Growth is $499 a month and includes 1,500 minutes, then $0.38 a minute. Enterprise is priced by conversation. Every plan includes the entire product — the plans differ by included minutes only — and calls are billed in real seconds, never rounded up to the next minute.
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