From the desk of: Dustin Scaffide
Let me tell you about a deal I lost.
Not because the numbers were wrong. Not because the seller changed their mind. Not because another investor outbid me. I lost it because nobody picked up the phone.
It was a Tuesday. I was in a meeting — one of those calls that could've been an email but somehow ran 45 minutes. While I was stuck on mute pretending to pay attention, a motivated seller called my main business line. They'd gotten my direct mail piece three weeks earlier, finally decided to pick up the phone, and got... voicemail.
They didn't leave a message.
I didn't know they called until I checked my call log that evening. By then, they'd already talked to two other investors. One of them made an offer that afternoon. The deal was gone before I even knew it existed.
Assignment fee on that property? Conservatively $10,000.
Here's the thing that keeps me up at night about that story: it wasn't a fluke. It was a pattern.
I started tracking it. Over 90 days, I counted the calls I missed — the ones that went to voicemail, the ones where the caller hung up before the beep, the ones that came in after hours or on weekends when I was trying to have a life.
The number was staggering. On average, I was missing 4-6 calls per week from potential leads. Not all of them were deals — some were tire-kickers, some were wrong numbers. But the ones that mattered? I had no way to tell, because they never left a message.
Do the math with me. If even one of those missed calls per month was a real deal — one motivated seller, one assignment at $10,000 — that's $120,000 a year walking out the door because nobody answered the phone.
I wasn't losing deals to better investors. I was losing them to my voicemail.
That's when I stopped trusting the phone system I had and started building one that actually worked.
The problem wasn't that I was lazy or didn't care about my leads. The problem was structural. I had one phone number, one voicemail box, and no way to differentiate between a seller calling from a direct mail piece and a lender returning my call. Everything went to the same place, and most of it died there.
What I needed was a system that could:
So I built it. I called it PhoneFunnel.
PhoneFunnel runs on Twilio — the same infrastructure that powers phone systems for companies 100x my size. But instead of a complicated enterprise setup, it's streamlined for investors and small business owners who need it to just work.
You get seven pre-built campaign flows, each with its own extension and custom greeting. So when a seller calls from your "We Buy Houses" mailer, they hear a greeting specific to that campaign. When a buyer calls from your rent-to-own ad, they get a different experience. Every call is tracked, routed, and captured.
Voicemails get transcribed automatically and delivered to your phone via SMS and email within seconds. No more listening to messages — you read them, decide if they're worth a callback, and move on.
Spam gets caught and blocked. VIP callers get whitelisted. Your team gets access with their own permission levels. And all of it feeds into a dashboard where you can see every call, every campaign, every lead — in one place.
The part that matters most? The cost.
PhoneFunnel is a one-time investment of $497. You own the system forever. The only ongoing cost is your Twilio usage — typically a few dollars a month for the phone number and pennies per minute for calls. We're talking $5-15/month in real-world usage, not $200/month for a SaaS phone platform you don't control.
No monthly software fees. No per-user charges. No "upgrade to get call recording." You get everything, and it's yours.
I think about that $10,000 call sometimes. Not with regret — with clarity. That missed deal is the reason PhoneFunnel exists. It's the reason I stopped treating my phone system like an afterthought and started treating it like what it is: the front door to my business.
If your leads are calling and nobody's answering — or worse, they're calling and you don't even know — then you don't have a phone problem. You have a revenue problem.
One-time purchase. Full system. Every call captured.
Because the next $10,000 call is coming. The only question is whether someone picks up.
Book your 15min strategy session.
