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How to get a work telephone number without carrying two phones
A work number you can switch off at six, hand over when you leave, and keep off every public listing. Here's how to get one and what to check before you do.
If your work number is also your personal number, you already know the problem. Customers call at nine in the evening. You cannot hand the line to anyone when you take a week off. And the number your clients have is the same one your mother has.
A separate work number fixes all three. Here is how to get one, and what to check before you pay for anything.
Three ways to get a work number
A second line on your existing phone
Most people should start here. A second-number app gives you another real, dialable number that rings on the phone already in your pocket. No second handset, no second carrier bill. Calls and texts to the work number arrive in the app; everything else carries on as normal.
It is the cheapest option by a distance, usually a few dollars a week, and the fastest — you can be working in a few minutes.
A second line from your carrier
Most carriers will sell you an additional line, and newer phones can run it as an eSIM alongside your existing one. It costs considerably more than an app, but the number behaves like a normal mobile number in every respect, which matters if you need reliable SMS from banks and verification services.
A full business phone system
Extensions, hunt groups, hold music, a receptionist menu. Once you have staff who need to transfer calls to each other, this is the right answer. Before that it is expensive overhead for a problem you do not have.
What a work number actually buys you
Hours you can enforce. This is the real prize. A separate line can be silenced at six without silencing your family. Trying to do the same with one number means either taking the call or ignoring a ringing phone, and most people take the call.
A number you can hand over. When you hire someone, go on holiday, or sell the business, the work number goes with the job. Your personal number cannot, which is how people end up fielding calls for a business they left two years ago.
Separation you can see. Work calls arrive flagged as work. You know what you are picking up before you answer it — useful on a Saturday.
A local presence. Most services let you choose the area code. If your customers are in one city and you are in another, a local number gets answered more often than one that looks out of town.
One number to burn. If the work number ends up scraped and sold, you can replace it without telling your bank, your doctor and everyone you know.
What to check before you pay
- Does it do SMS, including pictures? A lot of business happens over text. Some cheap services handle voice only, and plenty cannot receive picture messages — which matters more than people expect when a customer sends a photo of the thing that is broken.
- Will banks and services text it? Some verification systems refuse to send codes to app-based numbers. If you plan to use this number to register anything important, test that before you commit.
- Can you port the number out? If you build a business on a number, you want the right to take it with you. Check this on day one, not when you want to leave.
- Does the number survive a lapsed payment? Some providers recycle numbers quickly. For a line printed on a van or a business card, that is a serious risk.
- What happens to your call records? Worth knowing how long they are kept and what the provider does with them, particularly if your work involves anything confidential.
- Area code availability. If a specific local code matters to you, confirm it is actually on offer before you sign up.
Setting it up so it works
Getting the number is five minutes. Making it useful takes a little thought.
- Record a real voicemail greeting. Say the business name. A default robot greeting on the number printed on your invoices undoes the point of having it.
- Set your hours and mean them. Decide when the line is on. Put it in the app's do-not-disturb schedule rather than relying on willpower at 9pm.
- Put the new number everywhere, in one sitting. Invoices, email signature, website, Google Business Profile, social profiles, van, business cards. A half-migrated number is worse than no migration, because you now watch two lines.
- Tell your regulars once. A short message to existing customers saves months of calls to the old line.
- Use separate numbers for separate things if you run more than one venture. Different greeting, different hours, no confusion about which hat you are wearing when it rings.
Is it worth it?
If you are running anything where strangers need to reach you — a trade, a practice, a side business, freelance work — yes, and it is one of the cheapest problems you will ever solve.
If your work number is only known to colleagues who respect your evenings, you can skip it. The value is in the boundary, and you only need the boundary if something is currently crossing it.
PhoneHub is published by AffinityClick, which also operates Hushed, a second phone number app of exactly the kind described above. We say so wherever it is relevant.
