Front Door Check

What is actually happening

Nobody has timed your front door. That is what this measures. After hours it is a voicemail box, a form nobody is watching, and an inbox that gets read tomorrow morning. Meanwhile the person who called is calling the next name on the list, because they have a problem today.

This is a reliability problem, and reliability is measurable. Until someone writes down how long each step actually took, "we're pretty responsive" is an opinion.

How this gets sold elsewhere

Answering services sell you people. AI receptionists sell you software. Marketing agencies sell you "speed to lead" inside a retainer. Mystery shopping firms sell you a measurement, but their programs are built for chains with ten or more locations, they do not publish rates, and their method depends on pretending to be a customer.

Notice what none of them sell: a record of how your front door works right now, before you buy anything. There is a structural reason for that. Their revenue starts when you buy the fix, so the baseline is the one thing they have no reason to produce.

That is the whole of this service, and it is free.

What we do

We arrive at your front door the way a customer does — openly, as Anacay, using only what you publish publicly.

We submit your contact form and time the reply. We call during business hours and time how long it takes to reach a person. We call after hours and on a weekend and note what happens — a person, a voicemail, a dead line — and whether anyone calls back, and when. We email the address on your site and time that too.

Then we write down what happened, with timestamps, on one page.

We do not pose as a prospective client. We do not record anyone. We test what you have published to the world, and if anyone asks who we are, we tell them.

What you get

One page. Each path — form, phone in hours, phone after hours, email — with what happened and how long it took.

Alongside it, the menu of fixes with their real market prices, from somebody who sells none of them: what an answering service costs, what an automated receptionist costs, and what the phone system you already pay for probably does that nobody switched on.

You keep the page whether or not you ever work with us.

What we measure

Time from first contact to a human reply, on each path. Share of calls that reach a person. Whether a voicemail gets returned, and how fast.

That is your baseline. If you fix anything, we run it again and you can see what changed.

An illustrative example — not a client

We have not measured your business yet. That is the point of the check. What follows is what the independent research says about businesses in general, so you know what we are looking for.

The largest properly independent study of response times examined 2,241 companies and found an average first response of 42 hours, with 23% never responding at all. It was published in the Harvard Business Review in March 2011 — old, and nothing better-designed has replaced it.

More recently, a third-party researcher testing law firms found about 40% answered the phone, about 33% responded to email, and 48% could not be reached at all. Clio, 2024, and the firm publishing it sells legal software, so we label it accordingly.

We are not going to hand you a dramatic annual loss figure built on three assumptions. We are going to hand you your actual timings, and you can do that arithmetic with numbers you trust.

What this is not

Not a sales call with a report attached.

Not a grade on whoever answers your phone. The setup is what is being tested, not the person.

Not mystery shopping. We do not pretend to be anyone.

If you are a law firm, a practice or anything regulated

We use only what you publish and we do not record. If your intake is covered by patient-privacy rules, we never ask for or accept patient information in the test, and nothing we collect is about a person — it is about a clock.

What this costs

Nothing, and nothing follows from it automatically.

We are not going to send you a proposal because you accepted a free measurement. You get the page, it is yours, and if you never speak to us again that is a perfectly normal outcome — we would rather be the people who did that than the people who used it as a way in.

If you do want to fix what it shows, we will tell you what we would do and what it would cost. One fixed number, named after we have seen the work, not before.