Picture a Sunday afternoon in November.

A homeowner's garage door spring just snapped. He types "garage door spring repair near me" into Google, taps a button that says "have AI check pricing," answers three quick questions and goes back to watching football.

Then Google's AI picks up the phone and starts calling garage door companies in his zip code.

At one of them, the office manager answers. The robot says it's calling from Google on behalf of a customer and asks what a spring replacement costs and when they could come out. She says what she's said ten thousand times. "Oh, we'd have to send a tech out to look at it before we can give you a price."

The robot says thank you and hangs up.

About 30 minutes later, the homeowner gets a text summarizing who said what. Two companies gave a price range and a time slot. Hers got listed as, more or less, "wouldn't say."

Guess who doesn't get the job.

And the owner of that company? He thinks Google's been spam calling him.

This is already happening. Google started testing it back in early 2025 with nail salons and auto shops. It rolled out to most of the country in Search later that year. And at its big developer conference this past May, Google said it's pushing the feature into home repair. If you run a local service business, the first person calling you about a job is increasingly not a person.

Most owners have no idea it's happening. They think it's a weird robocall. They hang up. Or worse, they let it go to voicemail.

So let's talk about how to answer the robot, because the way you've been answering the phone for twenty years is about to cost you money.

Now the uncomfortable part.

That "we'd have to come take a look" line has always been a sales tactic. You get in the door, you build rapport, you look the homeowner in the eye, you close. And for a human caller, it worked fine.

The robot doesn't care about rapport. It has one job. Collect a price and an availability window from several businesses and hand the customer a comparison. No number, no spot on the list. That's the whole game.

Think about what the customer actually sees. A short list. Company A, $250 to $350, can come Thursday. Company B, starting at $289, tomorrow morning. Company C, would not provide pricing. You know which one is getting skipped.

Invoca, a call tracking company, studied how these AI calls actually go. About a quarter never got answered at all, and nearly half of the businesses that did pick up still couldn't give a price. Picture that. A customer with a credit card in hand asks the most basic question in business, and half the room shrugs.

That problem was always there. The robot just put it in writing and texted it to your customer.

I can already hear the objection. "Dan, every job is different. I can't quote a roof over the phone."

Correct. Nobody's asking you to.

You need a range and an anchor. That's it.

"A standard garage door spring replacement is usually $250 to $400, depending on the door. We can be there Thursday afternoon."

That sentence gets you on the list. It doesn't lock you into anything. It tells the customer you're real, you're reasonable and you can show up. Your tech still goes out, still diagnoses, still sells the upgrade. You just got invited to the party first.

Here's how to build your ranges without losing your mind.

Pull your last 50 to 100 invoices for your five most common jobs. Not every job you do. The five that make up most of your inbound calls. For a plumber that's probably water heater replacement, drain clearing, toilet repair, leak detection and garbage disposal. For a groomer it's bath and trim by dog size. For an HVAC company it's a diagnostic, a tune-up, a capacitor, a full system replacement and a duct cleaning.

Now look at what you actually charged. Throw out the weird outliers. Find the price that 80 percent of jobs landed between. That's your range.

If you'd rather not do math tonight, export the invoices to a spreadsheet, drop it into ChatGPT and ask it to give you the 10th and 90th percentile price for each job type. Five minutes. Then sanity check it with your gut, because you know your business better than a spreadsheet does.

For big ticket stuff, use a "starting at" number or a per-unit number. "Most full roof replacements on a typical home in our area land between $14,000 and $22,000. We give you an exact number after we inspect it." Real roofers say some version of that on the phone every day. Now say it to the robot too. And yes, charge for that inspection. I haven't climbed down off last week's soapbox.

Ranges in your head don't help when your office manager is on the phone at 4:45 on a Friday.

Make a one-page price card. Taped next to every phone. Saved as a note on every company cell. Loaded into whatever your answering service or AI receptionist uses.

It should have five things for each common job.

The job in plain English. "Water heater replacement, standard 40 or 50 gallon tank." Not your internal SKU.

The range. Low and high. Rounded to clean numbers. Nobody trusts $273.

What changes the price. One line. "Depends on gas or electric, and whether we need to bring it up to code."

The next opening. This changes daily, so the card says where to look. "Check the schedule board. Give the soonest real slot."

The one line close. "Want me to put you down for that slot? It takes two minutes."

Then train on it. Not a memo. Role play it. Have someone call in pretending to be a robot. It sounds silly. Do it anyway. The first time your team hears "Hi, I'm an automated assistant calling on behalf of a customer," they freeze. The tenth time, they rattle off the range and the slot like it's nothing.

And here's a tip that sounds obvious and nobody does. Tell your team that the robot is a real lead. The customer is real. The job is real. The robot is just the customer's assistant. Treat it like you'd treat a customer's spouse calling on their behalf. Polite, clear, fast.

Remember the stat about a quarter of these calls going unanswered? That's the cheapest problem in this whole email to fix, and the most expensive one to ignore.

You probably already know you miss calls. Every owner does. What you might not know is that the robot doesn't leave a voicemail and wait for you to call back next Tuesday. It moves to the next business on the list and texts the customer the results. You were never in the running.

So the rule is simple. Every call during business hours gets answered by something that can give a range and a slot.

That something can be a person, a good answering service or an AI receptionist. I'm agnostic. I've seen all three work and all three fail. What fails is a phone that rings into the void while your tech is under a sink.

If you're on Go High Level, it has an AI voice agent you can load with your price card and calendar, and it'll answer every call that you miss. Feed it the same one page price card your team uses. Same ranges, same language. Test it by calling it yourself from your cell and pretending to be a picky customer. Then call it again pretending to be the Google robot. If it fumbles either one, fix the script before you trust it with real money.

Whatever you use, set up missed call text back too. Somebody calls, nobody answers, they get a text within 60 seconds. "Sorry we missed you, this is Mike's Plumbing. What can we help with?" That won't save you from the robot, but it'll save you from the humans, and they still buy most of what you sell.

Some of you are reading this and thinking, "Great, I'll just turn it off."

You can. Google lets businesses opt out of these automated calls through the advanced settings in your Business Profile.

Here's my unpopular take. Unless you genuinely can't take any more work, don't.

Opting out doesn't make the feature go away. It just means the customer's comparison text shows your competitors and not you. All you did was hand the job to the guy down the street.

The only owners I'd tell to opt out are the ones who are booked solid for months and are drowning in tire kickers. If that's you, congrats, raise your prices. Everybody else, stay in the game and learn to play it.

The robot doesn't call every business in town. It picks from the businesses that show up well in local search. If you're buried on page three of Google Maps, you're not even getting the call.

So the basics matter more now, not less. Five things to clean up this week.

Your Google Business Profile categories. Pick the primary category that matches the job people actually search for. "Plumber" and "Plumbing Supply Store" sound close. To Google they're completely different businesses. Add every secondary category that's honestly true.

Your services list. Google lets you list services and, for many categories, add prices to them. Put your ranges there too. Same numbers as the price card. Consistency matters, because if your profile says one thing and your office says another, you look shady to the human and confusing to the machine.

Your hours. If your profile says you're open until 6 and the robot calls at 5:30 and nobody's there, you just failed the test on your own home field. Make your listed hours match the hours a human or a bot will actually answer.

Your phone number. One number. The one that actually gets answered. Not the owner's cell that he silences at dinner.

Your reviews. When two businesses quote similar prices, reviews tip it. Ask every happy customer for a review that mentions the job and the price being fair. "Showed up on time, price matched what they quoted on the phone." That sentence in a review is gold right now, because it's exactly what both humans and robots are trying to figure out.

Now for the part that'll make some of you squirm.

Put your ranges on your website.

I've had this fight with clients for years. "If we post prices, competitors will undercut us." Your competitors already know your prices. They hear them from customers every day. The only people who don't know your prices are the people you're trying to sell to.

Posting a range pays off a few ways. It filters out the bargain hunters who were never going to buy from you anyway. It builds trust with the serious buyers, because you're not hiding the ball. And it gives every AI tool that reads the web a clear, consistent number to repeat about you.

A simple "What it usually costs" section on each service page is plenty. Range, what changes the price, how to book. Done.

Will some people see $14,000 to $22,000 and leave? Yes. Those people were going to burn your Tuesday afternoon and then hire the guy charging $9,000. Let them leave.

I want to zoom out for a second.

Right now the robot asks about price and availability. That's version one. It's not hard to see where this goes. Booking the appointment. Asking about warranties. Comparing your reviews against the guy down the street before the customer ever sees a website.

The businesses that win that world aren't the ones with the slickest ads. They're the ones that are easy to understand. Clear prices. Clear hours. A phone that gets answered. A promise they keep.

Some guru will sell you this as an AI strategy. It's just running a tight shop.

You don't need a consultant for this. You need about three hours and a pot of coffee.

Step four is the one that'll hurt. Do it anyway. Every owner I've ever made do it learned something they didn't want to know about their own front desk.

The robot isn't your enemy. It's just the world's most impatient shopper, and it's going to keep calling. Give it a number.

Talk Soon,

Dan

Dan Kaufman

Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. Reply with ROBOT and tell me what you sell and your three most common jobs. I'll send back the exact phone script I'd want your team saying when the Google call comes in, ranges and all.