There is a lot of confident advice written about how small service businesses should handle their leads, and almost none of it is based on looking at what they actually do. So we looked.
We assembled a dataset of 3,523 US service businesses that publish a contact email address in public open data, then measured three things that matter for whether a lead ever reaches a human: what kind of email address they publish, whether it points to a person or a department, and whether they have a website at all.
The headline numbers are below. The more useful finding is that the averages hide enormous differences between trades — a plumbing company and a roofing company are running fundamentally different operations, and the data shows it.
Key findings
- 48.0% publish a role address (info@, office@, service@) rather than a named person. Roofing is the highest at 56.5%.
- 40.9% of plumbing companies use a free consumer email (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) as their published business contact — more than double the rate of roofing (15.5%) and landscaping (15.9%).
- 83.9% do use their own domain, so the majority have cleared the basic professionalism bar. The gap is concentrated in specific trades.
- 95.0% have a website. The "contractors don't have websites" cliché is out of date. The real gap is not presence, it is responsiveness.
Finding 1: Nearly half of service businesses hide the human
The single most common pattern in the data: 1,691 of 3,523 businesses (48.0%) publish a role address rather than a person's name. The customer writes to info@ and has no idea whether it reaches the owner, an office manager, or an unmonitored inbox.
This matters more than it sounds. A role address is usually a shared inbox, and shared inboxes are where accountability goes to die — everyone assumes someone else picked it up. When a homeowner emails three contractors about a leaking roof, the one whose email lands in front of an actual named person tends to answer first, and answering first is most of the game.
Finding 2: Plumbers are the outlier on free email
Across the whole sample, 16.1% publish a free consumer email address. But that average is misleading. Broken out by trade, plumbing sits at 40.9% — nearly two and a half times the rate of roofing.
Why the gap? The most plausible explanation is business structure rather than sophistication. Plumbing has a much larger share of true owner-operators — one licensed plumber, one truck, no office staff — while roofing and cleaning skew toward crew-based operations that needed an office identity earlier. When you are the entire company, the Gmail account you have used for fifteen years keeps working, and nothing forces the change.
Finding 3: The website gap is basically closed. The response gap is not.
95.0% of the businesses in our sample publish a website. The old advice — "contractors need to get online" — is solved for practical purposes. Only 176 of 3,523 had an email but no site.
That reframes where the actual problem sits. It is no longer discovery; customers can find these businesses. It is what happens in the hours after a customer makes contact. A website that generates a form submission into a shared info@ inbox that nobody owns is not a lead-generation system. It is a lead-collection system, and those are very different things.
Full breakdown by trade
| Trade | Businesses | Free email | Role address | No website |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roofing | 425 | 15.5% | 56.5% | 0.9% |
| HVAC | 266 | 31.6% | 40.6% | 3.4% |
| Cleaning | 260 | 22.7% | 52.7% | 1.9% |
| Plumbing | 208 | 40.9% | 35.1% | 1.9% |
| Electrical | 123 | 23.6% | 52.0% | 4.1% |
| Landscaping | 113 | 15.9% | 49.6% | 3.5% |
| All trades | 3,523 | 16.1% | 48.0% | 5.0% |
Trades shown individually where the sample includes at least 100 businesses. The "all trades" row includes every service business in the dataset, including trades below that threshold.
What this means if you run one of these businesses
Three practical conclusions come out of the data, in order of how much they are worth:
1. Put a name on the inbox
If you publish info@, that is fine — but somebody specific has to own it, and it needs a rule for how fast it gets answered. The businesses that lose work are rarely the ones with bad service. They are the ones where a message sat in a shared inbox over a weekend while the customer called two competitors.
2. If you are on a free email, the cost is trust, not deliverability
Your Gmail works fine. The issue is that a $14,000 roof replacement quote arriving from a Gmail address reads differently than the same quote from your own domain. For a two-truck operation that is often the difference on a big-ticket bid. Moving to a domain address is a one-time afternoon of work.
3. The website is not the bottleneck — the follow-up is
Since 95% already have a site, the marginal dollar is almost never better spent on a redesign. It is better spent on what happens between "customer submits form" and "customer hears back." That is a process problem, and process problems are the ones that automate cleanly.
If you want to see what that looks like without hiring anyone, we built three free tools that handle the three most-skipped steps: turning a job description into a quote, chasing an overdue invoice, and asking for the review after the job. No signup, nothing stored.
Methodology, and what this data cannot tell you
We assembled the sample from public OpenStreetMap business records for US service trades, keeping only records that published an email address in the email or contact:email field. That produced 3,523 businesses across all 50 states, weighted toward California (332), Texas (280), Florida (219) and New York (179). We classified each record on email domain type (free consumer provider vs. own domain), local-part type (role address vs. named), and whether a website was listed.
The most important limitation: this is a sample of businesses that took the trouble to publish contact details in open data. That is a self-selected, more digitally engaged group than the trades as a whole. The true share of service businesses running on free email is very likely higher than the 16.1% we measured, not lower — the least online businesses are, by definition, underrepresented here.
Second limitation: OpenStreetMap records are volunteer-maintained and can lag reality, so a business that professionalized its email last year may still appear with an old address. We did not attempt to verify current-day accuracy of each record, and we did not contact any business as part of this analysis. Underlying map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License.
Why we ran this
We build automation for service businesses, so we spend a lot of time being told what this market is like. Most of what gets repeated is either a decade out of date or a statistic with no traceable source. Publishing our own numbers, with the limitations stated plainly, seemed more useful than repeating someone else's.
If you want the aggregated dataset for your own analysis or coverage, email nexusaisolutions26@gmail.com and we will send it. Attribution appreciated, not required.
The gap in the data is the gap in most service businesses
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