The Missed Call Crisis in Oklahoma's Trades

If you've ever been under a house in El Reno, halfway through cutting out a busted section of pipe, when your phone starts buzzing nonstop in your pocket, you already know this feeling. You finish the job, crawl back out, and see three missed calls and a voicemail you don't have time to listen to. Somewhere in Oklahoma City, a kitchen is flooded, someone's panicking, and they've already called the next plumber.

Most tradespeople don't have a "marketing problem." They have a missed call problem. The jobs are out there. The phone rings. But the people in highest demand — the ones who are actually good at what they do — are the same people who can't sit by a phone all day waiting for it to ring.

When the phone rings and no one can answer

Picture a homeowner in Guthrie. It's 7:30 p.m., the main line backs up, and sewage is coming up in the tub. They grab their phone and search "plumber near me." A handful of highly rated Oklahoma City and Yukon plumbers pop up. They start dialing, one after another.

You know exactly which plumber gets that job.

In the data behind this story, the scale of the problem is brutal. A big chunk of calls to small businesses never get answered at all. Most people don't leave voicemails. And when they hang up, they don't wait — they just keep going down the list.

From the homeowner's perspective, it's simple: they're in crisis and they need help now, not "whenever you get around to checking messages." From your perspective, you've just lost work you already earned through years of good reviews and word of mouth.

Why this hits solo trades so hard

If you're a one- or two-person shop in the OKC metro, you basically have three bad options: try to answer the phone while you're on a ladder or under a house, pay for a full-time receptionist you can't really afford, or let everything go to voicemail and hope people leave a message.

The math on a receptionist doesn't work for most solo or small shops. Once you factor in salary, taxes, and benefits, you're talking well north of 50,000 dollars a year for someone who's only there 40 hours a week. Emergency calls don't care about business hours. Pipes don't just burst Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.

So, like a lot of folks in Choctaw, Shawnee, or The Village, you end up with the "fourth option" that no one talks about: your spouse becomes the unofficial, unpaid, 24/7 receptionist. The business phone never stops. It rings during dinner, kids' events, weekends, holidays. Answering or ignoring it always feels like the wrong choice.

Over time, that doesn't just burn out your family. It quietly bleeds revenue from your business. Every missed call is someone who tried to give you money and couldn't get through.

How much is one missed call really worth?

If you look at a typical plumbing job in the Oklahoma City area — say a few hundred dollars for a smaller fix and over a thousand for bigger emergencies — missing just a couple of those calls a month adds up fast. In the clip above, we walk through how a solo plumber can easily lose tens of thousands of dollars a year from missed calls alone.

And that's just the first job. Many of those customers would have become long-term repeat clients. They would have called you back for the next problem, and the next. Instead, they ended up with another contractor who simply picked up the phone first.

You've already done the hard part: built a reputation, collected good reviews, taken care of people in places like Yukon, El Reno, and Guthrie. The phone ringing is proof that it's working. The leak is happening at the exact moment you can't answer.

A new way to protect the work you've already earned

For decades, there wasn't a real fix for this. You either had someone glued to the phone, or you lived with missed calls. But in the last few years, something new has become possible.

Instead of thinking about "getting more leads," imagine a system whose only job is to protect the leads you already have: when someone in Oklahoma City calls your number, it actually gets answered — day or night. A friendly voice asks what's going on, gets the basic details, and doesn't rush the caller. The caller gets a confirmed time on your calendar. You get a clean notification with the job info while you stay focused on the work in front of you.

No one is asking you to become a tech person. You don't need to know how it works under the hood. What matters is what it does: it stops good jobs from slipping away to voicemail while you're out doing the work you're known for.

Built in Oklahoma, for Oklahoma trades

That's the whole reason RingBack Pro exists. I'm Chris Garlitz, a 22-year Air Force and Army veteran based in Yukon, and after my military career I went back into construction management and trades work. I watched Oklahoma contractors — plumbers, electricians, and other trades around OKC — lose jobs every single week for one stupid reason: nobody could get to the phone in time.

For years, there just wasn't a realistic answer. The tech wasn't there yet, and the economics for small shops didn't make sense. I knew what the fix needed to look like: something that would answer, talk to customers like a human, and book jobs without you having to stop working. I just had to wait until the tools caught up.

Now they have. I built RingBack Pro to do one thing for plumbers and other trades in the greater Oklahoma City area: stop the missed-call leak and give you your evenings back.

If this sounds familiar, here's your next step

If you're a plumber or tradesperson anywhere around OKC — Yukon, El Reno, Guthrie, Moore, Edmond, Shawnee, Lawton, or beyond — and you're tired of watching calls slip away while you're on the job, you're not alone. This is a quiet crisis almost every small home-service business is facing.

Watch the short "Missed Call Crisis" clip above when you've got a few minutes between calls. If it feels uncomfortably familiar and you want to see what it would look like in your own business, let's talk. No sales pitch, just a conversation about how many of those calls you can realistically get back.

Want to go deeper?

This podcast episode breaks down the full economics — the $54,600 annual loss, why hiring a receptionist is a trap, the national labor shortage, and how AI changes the math for a solo shop.