Asked what manual admin costs them, most owners describe a feeling rather than a figure: probably a day a week, certainly a lot. The number has simply never been worked out, because the hours are spread across the week in small pieces rather than sitting in one block.
Missed follow-up is the same. It does not appear as a loss on a P&L. An enquiry that never got a second message just stops replying, and there is no line for revenue that never arrived.
Both figures can be calculated, and neither calculation is complicated once the inputs are clear.
The time cost.
4.33 is the average number of weeks in a month. The hourly cost is what that person's time is worth to the business, not only their salary divided by their hours, because it includes the work they are not doing while they are on admin. As a worked example, six hours a week on invoicing and scheduling at £40 an hour comes to about £1,039 a month. That is not cash spent. It is capacity that goes on nothing else.
The cost of missed follow-up.
This isolates the revenue tied to the follow-up gap rather than the value of every lead. It is the harder figure to look at, because it describes enquiries that already arrived and went nowhere, not because of price or fit, but because the follow-up never happened or happened too late.
Running your own numbers.
Astro's free ROI calculator runs both formulas. Enter weekly admin hours, the hourly cost, monthly enquiries, conversion rate and follow-up rate, and it returns both monthly figures. No email is required.
The calculator shows the size of the problem. Ask Astro looks at the same areas in the context of your own processes, and at what a system would need to take on to reduce them.