Most business owners know how to calculate fixed costs like rent and equipment and variable costs such as wages, utilities, materials, etc.. related to providing goods and services. But there is another kind of cost to consider. Lost opportunity costs. These are harder to measure but certainly, are real. One example of lost opportunity is if a potential patient comes to your site and looks around but for whatever reason leaves. If your company has a bad online reputation or no reputation, a percentage of potential buyers will shy away and seek another vendor.

Recent research shows that on average a bad review on a site like Yelp scares away an average of 30 potential customers. For anyone with a fairly large ticket item – a Dentist or an Emergency Restoration company a single bad review can potentially cost a hundred thousand dollars or more over the lifetime of a customer.

By using our lost opportunity calculator you can calculate what the real costs are including the lifetime value of a customer and the referrals that are potentially lost.