Someone at a chamber mixer will tell you to just get somebody part-time for the phones. Fifteen hours a week, twenty, whatever you can afford. Sounds cheap out loud. It stops sounding cheap the second you write the whole thing down, so let's write the whole thing down.

Say you run a two-van garage door repair outfit in Wichita. Springs, openers, the occasional panel replacement after somebody backs into their own door. Average ticket around 340 dollars. A full door replacement is closer to 1,900. You spend your day on a ladder or under a torsion bar, which means the phone rings and rings.

So you decide to hire. Twenty-five hours a week, eighteen dollars an hour, mornings and early afternoons. Here's the ledger, and I want to do it honestly, including the parts that make the AI look worse.

The number on the offer letter is the small one

Twenty-five hours at 18 dollars is 450 a week. Times fifty-two, 23,400 a year. That's the figure that lodges in your brain and never moves. It's also wrong, because you aren't the only one getting paid when you run payroll.

  • Employer-side FICA at 7.65 percent (6.2 for Social Security, 1.45 for Medicare): 1,790
  • FUTA at the effective 0.6 percent on the first 7,000 of wages: 42
  • State unemployment, which swings hard by state and by your claims history: call it 300
  • Workers' comp on a clerical class code, cheap but not zero: about 70
  • A desk line, a headset, a seat in your dispatch software, payroll processing: 480
  • The job ad, four interviews, and three weeks of half-speed while she learns what a torsion spring is: 800 in year one, and again every time you re-hire

Add it up. 26,882 dollars for a twenty-five hour week. That's fifteen percent on top of the wage, and nobody has said the word insurance yet. Run it again with your own state's unemployment rate and your own comp class and the total moves. In my experience it doesn't move down much.

And you don't get 1,300 hours

Twenty-five times fifty-two is 1,300, which is the number you multiplied in your head. Now take out six paid holidays and four sick days, because you're going to give her those or she'll go work at the dental office on Rock Road that does. Five-hour days. So that's fifty hours gone, and you're buying 1,250 hours of somebody at a desk.

26,882 divided by 1,250 is 21.51 an hour. Your 18-dollar hire costs 21.51. That's the honest figure, the one to hold in your hand when you decide whether this is worth doing.

Quick tangent, because it matters more than the arithmetic. The good version of this hire is genuinely good. A sharp front desk person learns which callers are tire-kickers, remembers that the Hendersons on Oliver Street always call about the same sticky sensor, signs for the parts delivery, and talks an angry customer down before he types up a one-star review. No software does that. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something, and I'd like you to notice that I'm selling you something too.

The number nobody puts on the spreadsheet

There are 8,760 hours in a year. Your business doesn't need all of them covered. But garage doors break at 6:40 on a Sunday morning when somebody can't get the car out to make a shift, and that person is calling three companies in a row until one of them picks up.

1,250 hours out of 8,760 is fourteen percent. Your part-time receptionist, at 26,882 dollars a year, covers fourteen percent of the calendar. The other eighty-six percent goes to voicemail exactly like it did before you hired anyone. A 411 Locals study of 85 businesses found 62 percent of calls to small businesses go unanswered, and the Numa Small Business Phone Report has the other half of it: 85 percent of callers who reach voicemail never call back.

So 21.51 an hour buys you mornings. Evenings, weekends, her lunch break, the two weeks in July when she's at her sister's wedding in Branson. All of it still a recording asking people to leave a message they won't leave.

What the other side of the ledger looks like

Rocketship answers your existing business number at every hour there is. It knows your hours, your services and your prices, so when a caller asks what a spring replacement runs, they get the price instead of a promised callback. The job goes straight into your Google Calendar. Name, number, address, all captured. When the call genuinely needs a human, it transfers to you.

There's a free tier, and paid plans start at 12 dollars a month. Twelve dollars spread across 8,760 hours is under two cents an hour of coverage. I don't love quoting it that way. Per-hour costs on software are a bit of a magic trick. Compare the annual figures instead: 144 dollars against 26,882, and the cheaper one is the one that's awake at 6:40 on Sunday.

The comparison that's actually in front of you

Nobody sensible is telling you to fire your front desk. Put the AI up against voicemail, because voicemail is who's on shift for eighty-six percent of your year, and voicemail has never booked a job in the history of the telephone. Recover one 340-dollar service call and you've covered that twelve dollar month twenty-eight times over. Recover one 1,900-dollar door replacement and you've covered the whole year thirteen times over.

Run your own version of the sum. Your wage, your state's unemployment rate, your holidays, your average ticket. It takes four minutes with a calculator, and almost nobody does it before they post the job ad.