Should you hire a receptionist, or outsource the phones?

There's a point in a growing trade business where the phone stops being manageable. You're missing calls you can hear ringing, customers are waiting on callbacks you keep forgetting, and the obvious answer arrives: hire someone to answer the phone.

It might be the right answer. But it's worth doing the arithmetic honestly first, because the wage is the smallest part of what a hire actually costs — and because a full-time person still leaves the exact hours uncovered where you're losing the most work.

What a receptionist really costs

Take whatever hourly rate a competent front-desk person commands in your area — call it $X/hour — and work it through. Every figure below is a placeholder for you to replace with your own; none of them are claims about a typical business:

• The wage itself: $X/hour across a full-time week, every week, whether the phone rings forty times that day or four.
• Payroll costs on top: employer taxes, workers' comp, unemployment insurance. These are not optional and they're a real percentage above the wage.
• Benefits, if you offer them — and increasingly you have to, to hire anyone good.
• Recruiting and training: the time you spend hiring, then the weeks before they know your service area, your pricing, and which calls are emergencies. That ramp is real and it's paid at full rate.
• Coverage gaps: holidays, sick days, lunch, appointments. Someone has to cover, and that someone is usually you.
• Management: an employee is a person you now manage. That's your time, permanently.

Add those up honestly and the fully-loaded cost is meaningfully higher than the wage you first pictured. That's not an argument against hiring — good people are worth paying for — it's an argument against comparing a salary figure to a software price and thinking you've compared like with like.

The part the arithmetic misses

Here's the thing that catches people out. Even a great full-time receptionist covers roughly nine to five, Monday to Friday. And a large share of the calls you're currently losing don't arrive then — they arrive at 7pm, on Saturday morning, during the storm, in the middle of the night when the pipe bursts.

So you can make the hire, absorb the full cost, and still be exactly as unreachable at the moments that produce your most urgent, highest-value work. Meanwhile during business hours — when you or someone in the van could plausibly have grabbed the phone anyway — you're now paying someone to sit through the quiet stretches.

When hiring genuinely is the right call

To be fair to the option — there are real cases where a person is the answer, and you shouldn't talk yourself out of it:

• The role is bigger than the phone. If you need someone doing scheduling, invoicing, chasing payments, ordering parts and greeting walk-ins, you're not hiring a phone-answerer, you're hiring an office manager. That's a different decision and often a good one.
• Your calls are genuinely complex. Long consultative conversations, sensitive situations, heavy negotiation — a skilled human is hard to beat.
• Volume is high and steady all day. If the phone is busy from 8 to 5 without let-up, a dedicated person is being used properly rather than waiting around.
• You want someone who is yours. Knows the regulars, knows your quirks, part of the business. That's worth real money and it's a legitimate reason.

The middle options people forget

It isn't a binary. Before committing to a full-time salary, the options in between are worth weighing:

1. 1Part-time cover for your busiest window — real help at a fraction of the cost, though the coverage gap gets wider, not narrower.
2. 2A traditional answering service — humans, extended hours, usually billed per minute or per call. Ask hard whether they *book* work or just take a message, because those are very different products at similar prices.
3. 3An AI receptionist — answers every call including simultaneous ones, at any hour, for a flat predictable cost. Newer, and worth testing on your own real calls rather than taking anyone's word for it.
4. 4A hybrid — something that answers everything around the clock, plus a person for the calls that genuinely need one. This is where a lot of businesses land once they stop treating it as either/or.

How to actually decide

Three questions, answered with your own numbers rather than a gut feeling:

1. 1When are you actually missing calls? Look at your phone records, not your impression. If most of the misses are outside business hours, a nine-to-five hire doesn't solve your problem no matter how good they are.
2. 2Is the job bigger than the phone? If yes, hire a person. If it's genuinely just "someone needs to answer," you're paying a salary for a narrow task.
3. 3What's the fully-loaded cost against the alternative? Wage plus payroll plus benefits plus ramp plus cover — versus a flat monthly fee. Compare the real numbers, not the headline ones.

Plenty of businesses do this honestly and still hire. That's a good outcome — they just did it knowing what they were buying.

Where June fits

June answers your business line live, 24/7, in your business's name — including nights, weekends, and the calls that come in while you're already on another one. No payroll, no ramp-up, no cover to arrange. For a lot of small trade businesses she removes the pressure that made hiring feel urgent, and for others she covers the nights and weekends while a person handles the daytime. You can set her up and hear her answer a call yourself before deciding anything, which is a fairer test than any comparison table.

Related: 24/7 coverage without hiring, an honest AI vs. human receptionist comparison, and how much an answering service should cost.