It's the third Thursday of the month. You're under a deadbolt on a commercial change-out, hands full, phone buzzing in your back pocket. By the time you check it twenty minutes later, the missed call is two hours cold.
You call back. No answer. The voicemail is a guy who got locked out at 9:40, called you, called somebody else at 9:42, and was in his apartment by 10:15.
That call wasn't worth $0. Let's actually do the math.
A typical residential lockout in 2026 runs $150–$250 depending on time of day and complexity. A car lockout runs $125–$200. So at minimum, a single missed lockout costs you the price of a ticket — let's call it $175 as a round middle.
That's the visible cost. The math gets uglier from there.
Lockouts are a wedge. A customer who used you for a 10 p.m. lockout in May is the customer who calls you in October to rekey the house after a roommate moves out. They're the customer who recommends you in a neighborhood Facebook group.
Conservative estimate: 30% of lockout customers become a second job within 12 months. Average second-job ticket: $300 (rekey or lock change). So per 10 missed lockouts, you're losing roughly 3 follow-on jobs worth ~$900.
So far: $1,750 in lockouts + $900 in follow-ons = $2,650 per 10 missed calls.
This one is harder to quantify but real. Happy locksmith customers tell two or three friends in the next 12 months. A customer who couldn't reach you tells nobody — they don't talk about the locksmith they didn't use.
If you estimate 1 referral per 5 happy customers at an average ticket of $200, that's another $400 in lost referral revenue per 10 missed lockouts.
Running total: ~$3,000 per 10 missed lockout calls.
About 1 in 8 customers who can't reach you leaves a frustrated review on Google or Yelp. Not because you were rude — because they were stressed and you weren't there. One bad review correlates with roughly 4% fewer call conversions on Google for the next 6–12 months.
For a small shop doing 200 Google-sourced calls a month at 40% conversion and $175 per ticket, a 4% conversion drop = ~$11,000 over the next year. From one missed call that turned into one frustrated review.
They forward calls when they're on a job. Sounds obvious. Most locksmiths still don't.
They invest in coverage that runs while they work. An answering service — human or AI — is the single highest-ROI add for a one-truck locksmith. Vallo runs about $80/month and books jobs directly. The math works after one captured lockout.
They look at the missed-call log weekly. Your phone bill or call routing system shows every missed call. Most operators never check it. The ones who do tend to staff-up coverage within a quarter.
The missed-call problem isn't a one-time $175 loss. It's a compounding leak — direct, referral, and reputation costs all stacked on top of each other. Even at a conservative read, missing one lockout a week costs a locksmith $10,000–$15,000 a year.
The fix doesn't have to be elaborate. Forward your phone. Get coverage that books, not just messages. Check your missed-call log.
If you want to see what 24/7 coverage looks like without the price tag of a human call center, try Vallo free. Setup is five minutes.
