Churn rate

Churn measures the share of customers who stop doing business with you over a period: customers at the start, minus those who left, divided by the starting count. A monthly churn of 3% — common in services — looks harmless but amounts to losing roughly a third of your customer base in a year. Churn's complement is retention, and both are measured by cohort.

For a tradesperson, churn is rarely a pricing problem: customers drift away mainly when they can't reach you, when a quote went unanswered, when the promised callback never came. Yet an existing customer costs far less than a new one — the acquisition cost approaches zero. Cutting churn for local businesses often starts with an obvious move: answer the phone, or make sure requests reach you.