Put a number on the leak
Most businesses know follow-up is slower than it should be. Almost none of them know what that costs, because the loss never appears on an invoice. This works it out from four figures you already have.
Your numbers
Everything that arrives: forms, email, DMs, referrals.
What a typical client is worth to you, once.
Your close rate as a percentage. A rough figure is fine.
The ones answered late, or never. This is the only number most people have to guess at, and guessing low is the safer error.
Fill in all four and the number appears here. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.
Why this number is invisible
Every other cost in a business announces itself. Software renews, staff get paid, ads bill monthly. A lead that went cold because nobody replied for three days does none of that. It leaves no trace, files no complaint, and quietly books with somebody else.
So it gets treated as though it were free, and the business concludes it needs more marketing. It usually does not. It needs to stop losing the inquiries it has already paid to generate, which is both cheaper and faster than finding new ones.
Why the number starts empty
The previous version of this calculator opened with a figure already on screen. That is a common trick and it does not work, because a number you did not produce is a number you do not believe. It reads as decoration.
This one shows you nothing until you have entered your own figures, and then shows its working. If the arithmetic looks wrong to you, the panel is there so you can see exactly where you disagree with it. A calculator that hides its method is asking for trust it has not earned.
What to do with the figure
Treat it as an upper bound and a prompt rather than a forecast. It assumes every late-answered inquiry is lost, which is not true, and it cannot know how many would have waited for you. What it does reliably tell you is the order of magnitude, and whether this is a rounding error or the largest fixable problem in the business.
If it comes out large, the fix is rarely a redesign. It is usually intake that routes an inquiry to an owner on arrival, an automatic first reply so nobody sits in silence, and a follow-up sequence that runs without anyone remembering. That is what website optimization and digital operations actually do, and the website audit is where you find out which of them you need.
The more useful version of this exercise
Stop guessing at the fourth field. For the next month, record every inquiry and how long it took to get a real reply. It takes a minute a day and it replaces the only estimate on this page with something you measured. Most people who do it are surprised, and not in the direction they expected.
Two things usually come out of that month. The first is that the average is fine and the worst cases are terrible, which means the problem is not speed in general but a handful of inquiries that fall through a specific crack. The second is that nobody owns the crack. Both are fixable in days rather than weeks, and neither is visible until somebody writes the times down.