78% vs. 30%

In January 2026, two owners on a podcast tried to answer a simple question: What’s your booking rate?

One was Dalton Hatch, who founded DH Plumbing in San Antonio. The other was John Wilson, one of the podcast’s hosts. John runs The Wilson Companies in Akron, Ohio, a much bigger shop that gets about 1,000 calls a day.

Dalton said his booking rate was as high as 78%. John said his was 30%.

That sounds like Dalton’s team is twice as good. What would you be thinking if you were John? CSR training? Maybe rewriting their scripts?

John asked one question instead: “What calls are you counting?”

Not every call is a customer

Then he explained his own number. John’s 30% counts every call that comes in: customers, vendors, HR, accounting. Plenty of those callers never wanted a plumber.

Dalton said he counted every call too. John said that would be high.

Dalton wanted to see how John’s numbers worked. “When we’re done,” he said, “I wanna see that.”

Same word, different math

Two owners. Two booking rates. And neither one could say yet whose team was better.

They both called it a booking rate. They just weren’t counting the same calls. Same name. Two different stories.

We call that the Dashboard Illusion: thinking more information means a clearer picture. Instead, different reports tell different stories, leaving your team unsure of what needs attention.

Pick the wrong number, and you could spend a month fixing a team that isn’t broken.

Whose team was better? As far as we know, neither owner has shared the answer publicly. If you ever get to meet them, here are four questions to settle the debate:

1. Which system is each shop on? Two shops on different software can get two different booking rates from the same calls.
2. Do their systems track the same numbers? Does each one count every call, or only customers asking for service? And what counts as booked?
3. Do their teams follow the same process? Who answers, what gets written down, and what happens to the calls that don’t book?
4. What is John’s other booking rate? John said there’s a second booking rate besides the raw one, but he didn’t share that number on the show. How does it compare to Dalton’s?

You don’t need to settle their debate. Settle yours.

Your Moneyball move: Ask your team John’s question: “What calls are we counting?” Then make every report use that same number.

One scoreboard. No debates.

That’s Moneyball for the Trades.

In Chapter 5 of Moneyball for the Trades®, you’ll discover how two other shops found out their numbers didn’t mean what they thought.

Sources: Owned and Operated, episode 208, January 21, 2026, around minutes 50–52. Owned and Operated show credits (John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies). Axial company profile, The Wilson Companies, Akron, Ohio.