1. The calculator is an estimate, not a promise
The loss calculator takes numbers you type in and runs them through published industry averages. It produces an illustration of what a response-speed gap typically costs a business like yours. It is not a prediction about your shop, a guarantee of recovered revenue, or a promise of any result.
Your actual numbers depend on your market, your rates, your capacity, your crew and a dozen things no calculator can see. Nothing you enter is transmitted to us. The arithmetic runs in your browser and stops there.
2. Which numbers are ours and which are the studies'
This distinction matters and we keep it visible on the page itself.
| Figure | Whose it is |
|---|---|
| 100x more likely to connect at 5 minutes vs 30, 21x more likely to qualify | The study. MIT (Dr. James Oldroyd) and InsideSales, published by Harvard Business Review, from a study of more than 15,000 leads |
| Roughly 80% of deals need 5 to 12 follow-ups; 44% quit after one; 92% quit before the fifth; only 8% go past five | The studies. InsideSales and Invesp follow-up research |
| Only 3 to 5% of buyers are ready to purchase at any given moment | The studies. Widely published buyer-readiness research |
| The 0.60 "winnable" factor and the loss-rate table (under 5 minutes 0.04, within 30 minutes 0.28, within an hour 0.42, same or next day 0.60) | Ours. This is our own model, calibrated against the studies above. It is not published by Harvard, MIT or anyone else, and we do not claim that it is. |
Say it plainly
We use real published research to justify the shape of the model. The specific loss percentages are our estimate. Anyone telling you Harvard published a loss-rate table for mobile diesel repair is mistaken, and that includes us if we ever say it. We have not.
3. Response-rate data is borrowed from adjacent trades
This is the most important thing on this page. Nobody has ever measured speed-to-lead, callback rates, after-hours share or follow-up persistence for mobile diesel and heavy-duty road service specifically. No such study exists. We looked.
So every response-behavior figure on the site comes from a neighboring trade:
| Figure used | Where it is actually from |
|---|---|
| 20 to 30% of calls go unanswered | General automotive service call analytics (Marchex) |
| Roughly two thirds of callers hang up without leaving a voicemail after 7pm; 75% who reach voicemail never call back; more than half of voicemails are never returned | Franchise dealership service departments (Numa) |
| 16% of contractors follow up the same day on an unsold estimate | Residential and commercial roofing (ServiceTitan) |
| 52% of shops do no customer targeting; 72% lead with a discount message | General auto repair, 500 shops surveyed (IMR Inc.) |
| 50 to 60% of customers do not return the following year | General auto repair (R.O. Writer) |
We believe these are reasonable comparisons and we label them on the page where they appear. They are not measurements of your trade. If you think mobile diesel behaves differently, you may well be right, and we would rather you argue with the comparison than be misled by it.
4. Trade-specific figures, and their sources
Some figures are from heavy-duty repair and we treat them differently. Labor rates, technician wages, parts margins, average work-order values and shop-profile data come from Fullbay's State of Heavy-Duty Repair reports, produced with ASE and the American Trucking Associations' Technology & Maintenance Council. Per-truck repair and maintenance costs come from the American Transportation Research Institute. Business counts come from IBISWorld and the US Census Bureau.
Operating figures such as the share of revenue from emergency and after-hours work, typical revenue per service truck and quote conversion rates come from trade press rather than surveys. They are informed estimates and we treat them as such.
5. No affiliation with any company we name
DispatchZap is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or partnered with any company named anywhere on this site. That includes companies we cite as data sources and companies we compare ourselves against.
All trademarks, trade names and logos are the property of their respective owners. We reference them only to identify them and to make honest comparisons, which is nominative fair use. Statements about other companies, including the April 2022 acquisition of Dieselmatic by Fullbay, are matters of public record and are accurate to the best of our knowledge as of the date at the top of this page. If we have something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
Prices quoted for other companies' services are their published prices as of July 2026. Prices change. Check with them directly.
6. About "20 years" and "10,000+ businesses served"
These are Ryan McKinney's career figures across all industries over two decades. They are not a count of DispatchZap customers and they are not a count of mobile diesel or heavy-duty repair businesses.
DispatchZap is a new product in a trade we have deliberately chosen to focus on. We are not going to dress that up. What we bring is twenty years of turning phone calls into booked work in other trades, and a system built specifically around how road calls actually arrive.
7. No guarantee of results
We do not guarantee any particular result, revenue increase, job count or return on investment. Any figure, example or scenario on this site is an illustration. Your results depend on factors outside our control, including your pricing, your capacity, your market and how you handle the calls we hand you.
Break-even statements such as "about 1.5 road calls a month" are arithmetic based on typical figures, shown so you can check them against your own. They are not a promise that you will capture those jobs.
8. What we do not do
- We do not quote prices to your customers. The intake gathers information and hands the job to you. This is a design rule, not a setting.
- We do not commit you to any job. You decide whether to take work, every time.
- We do not guarantee that every call will be captured. Phone networks, carriers and software all fail sometimes. We work to minimize it; we cannot promise perfection.
9. Text messaging and phone numbers
You register your own A2P brand and campaign, and you buy and own your own phone number. We help you through it. Carrier fees, messaging fees and telecom charges are billed to you by those providers directly at their rates, not by us. Carrier approval is controlled by the carriers and is not something we can guarantee.
10. Not professional advice
Nothing on this site is legal, accounting, tax or financial advice. Margin figures, profit models and pricing benchmarks are general information. Talk to your own accountant about your own books.
11. Good faith, and how to correct us
Everything here is published in good faith and believed accurate as of the date at the top. Sources get updated and industries change. If you find something wrong or out of date, email [email protected] and we will fix it or take it down.
We would rather lose a sale than keep a number we cannot defend.