What actually rings a painting company's phone: 412 calls, counted

Everyone guesses how many calls a contractor misses and how many are junk. I run a painting company in Omaha, and every call to our main line goes through our own system, so I counted. Here's six and a half months of it.

By Drew Koch, owner of Gladiators Painting and founder of AI Front Desk Helper · Updated October 1, 2026

The numbers, month by month

Read the early months with care. April includes calls from when we were setting the system up, and our spam detection got better over the period. A robocall rule added in September was run back over the older calls, but the zero months probably still undercount. September is the cleanest month in the table, and it's the one I'd quote: more than half the calls were junk.

Junk calls come when you're working

Of the 159 flagged calls, 154 came on a weekday between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Four came after 5, one on a weekend, and none before 8. Robocallers keep business hours, which means they ring exactly when a painter is on a ladder, in a crawlspace or halfway through cutting in a ceiling.

Fridays were the worst: 45 flagged calls, the same number as the calls that weren't flagged. On a Friday, a ring was a coin flip.

When the real calls come in

Of the 253 calls that weren't flagged (customers, people asking for quotes, existing customers, vendors and the occasional wrong number):

The busiest hours were 10 a.m. (38 calls), 9 a.m. (32), 3 p.m. (29) and 2 p.m. (28). Monday was the busiest day with 61, and the 253 calls came from 164 different phone numbers.

So the 35 outside-hours calls are a small slice, about one in seven. For a painting company that's the honest picture: most real calls come during the day, and the problem isn't the night calls. It's that the daytime calls arrive while you're working, mixed in with the junk.

What I take from it, as a contractor

• Picking up every call yourself means picking up mostly junk. In September you'd have stopped work 69 times for robocalls to catch 49 other calls.
• Voicemail isn't a filter. Robocalls leave messages too, and a real customer who reaches voicemail may call the next painter instead.
• After-hours calls are few but not zero. 35 in six and a half months is about five a month. Whether that matters depends on what one job is worth to you.
• If you pay for leads by the call, the junk matters even more. Google Local Services Ads started charging for some missed calls on October 1. See what that changes.

How we counted

• Source: the call log in AI Front Desk Helper for Gladiators Painting's main line in Omaha, Nebraska. Every inbound call from March 19 to September 30, 2026. Times are Central.
• Left out: my own cell phone, which I use for testing.
• "Flagged as robocall or spam" means the system marked the call as spam during or after it. That's the conservative count. Another 30 calls were later marked as spam by hand in the lead list, and they're counted as not flagged here.
• The AI spoke on 352 of the 412 calls. The other 60 ended before it said anything.
• What's not here: a booking rate and dollar figures. The early months mix real calls with testing, and I'd rather publish nothing than a number I can't stand behind.

I'll update this page every quarter with the new months. You're welcome to quote any of these numbers; please link back to this page so people can see how they were counted.

One company, one city, one trade. It's a real sample, not an industry average, and I'd treat it that way.

Questions contractors ask

Related: AI receptionist for painting contractors, what a missed call costs, Google LSA missed-call charges, and after-hours calls.