Episode 11: Impacting Your Business by Gaining More Reviews

Episode 11: Impacting Your Business by Gaining More Reviews

Brandon Schoen:
That review, like I said, it's gold! So it's gonna come back to you tenfold over the next few years, or what, 10 years, even like people are going to consistently see that. So that's an investment.

Brandon Condrey:
And then you can tweak some stuff on the SEO side, too, like reviews that have pictures rank higher on Google system than reviews that don't.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey everybody what is up! Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners this is your host Brandon Schoen and I am joined by my co-host

Brandon Condrey:
Brandon Condrey, the spreadsheet Ninja.

Brandon Schoen:
The spreadsheet Ninja. And we're in the house providing more fresh, amazing content for you guys. We're so happy to be here. Thank you guys for being here. Thank you for your time. And today we have a really exciting episode for you guys. It's all about review getting and how to dominate your market with your first 100 reviews, your first, whatever, however many reviews, but I feel like 100 is a really good number to shoot for. And guys stay tuned till the end, because we're going to spill the beans on our own personal review strategy that we've kind of specialized and perfected into this awesome little process that we use to batch lots of reviews all at once. We do it pretty much every quarter. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about how we launched our business with getting a bunch of reviews and launching right out of the gate and how much that helped us. So lots of cool stuff to jump into today. So without too much going into more, let's talk about some house cleaning real quick Brandon.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So as usual, we'd like you to subscribe and leave us a review. That way you kind of get notified when we got new episodes. If you have any questions, we're always open to getting questions from you. We love talking to our listeners and making sure that you're as well informed as you can be. So you can reach us at hello@profitcleaners.com and we're still doing the masterclass, and we'll keep doing that for the foreseeable future, but you can register for that at Profitcleaners.com/masterclass. But since we're always asking for review, we thought it would be kind of fun to read you a couple of reviews that you guys have left, because you've actually been doing that. You've been leaving us some really awesome reviews and there's so much fun to read. We read every one of them and we picked out a couple of choice ones. So let's have the first one.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So I'm Mark Hayward. Thank you, Mark. And you said on your review, where can I find out more about the episodes? And he says, I love it. Do you have a transcript or a summary of the episode? If so, where can I find it? And the answer Mark, thank you for doing that. The answer definitely is we have transcripts. We have show notes guys at the end of every episode, just go to the Profit cleaners.com click on the episode, the most recent one or whatever one you want to listen to. We've got the show notes, the whole transcript, everything we said, plus links, resources, whatever we talked about in the show. If you guys aren't getting those, make sure you go grab those. You can download a PDF of the transcript. You can grab a bunch of that stuff and hopefully helps you out.

Brandon Condrey:
So the websites where that's at, and then you should have a little bit of snippet of notes on whatever podcasting app you're going to use on the episode description. But the real good stuff is at profitcleaners.com.

Brandon Schoen:
That's right.

Brandon Condrey:
Okay. Also the next one is from Nicholas Lavanos. He said "Nice. Each episode of Profit Cleaners guided me in my cleaning business. I'm absolutely a major fan of this podcast." Thank you, Nicholas. We're a fan of you and all of the other listeners as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. Thank you, Nick. And then one more from Gilbert Black. Thank you, Gilbert. He says, "A new perspective to my business. Each episode of the Profit Cleaners gives me another viewpoint about my cleaning business that I could have never thought about. Brandon made this incredible and astounding Profit Cleaners is my most loved podcast and I am so grateful it exists."

Brandon Condrey:
So, so awesome to be someone's most loved podcast. The question Gilbert is, which Brandon were are you talking about? There are two of us.

Brandon Schoen:
I know it's super confusing. You know, I don't know who are we Brandon.

Brandon Condrey:
Just saying! Let's launch into it guys. We're gonna let's cover some basics here first. So we'll talk about the importance of reviews. And I think Brandon Schoen kind of has a different perspective on that, given that you ran so many online businesses with the marketing thing and reviews were do or die, you had to get them.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And really, I mean, you think about it online guys, like people have even less trust because they're not local. You could be anywhere in the world, right? So they really look at reviews, especially on the online world. But when we were selling things on Amazon, whether it was books or physical products, that was always kind of, our goal is to get at least to a hundred reviews. And so, you know, when that happens, you kind of, it's kind of this snowball effect that you kind of get to this point where there's enough social proof. That's what reviews are there. Social proof that prove to people they can trust you. They can work with you. They're going to have the similar experience of this person over here said, so it immediately is this major influencing factor in making a decision to work with you. So think about reviews. I like to think of them as pure gold. They're literally worth their weight in gold because they can drive your future business so, so effectively and so much faster and further, because that is really what people want to know is can I trust you to work with me or come into my house, do all these things, right? So like I said, we used to launch our Amazon brands, get a hundred reviews and then the products would just kind of take off after that. And I feel like with this business, it's very similar. And that was my goal in the beginning too, is let's get it to a hundred reviews as fast as possible. Now we're past that. Obviously things are really taken off, but I think that's a good goal everyone should shoot for, Right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. I mean, you need them, like if you think, okay, I think I'm qualified as a millennial. I think you are too, maybe the next one gen Z or whatever they are.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I was born in 85. So I think I'm in the 80 to whatever the gap is.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So we call ourselves millennials, you know, over the course of our lives, the internet became a big deal and then online reviews just went along with it. So now I feel like I can't make any decision without looking its reviews like when new city we're going to go look at some restaurants to go eat at which one are we going to pick? Let's look at the reviews. And when we got started and trying to do this, one of the things we did as part of our pre market analysis, before we pulled the trigger on putting money into it was let's go look at the competitor's reviews in town. And it was, I don't know, flabbergasting is a word I would use. Yeah. So there were companies that had been here for decades that had 10 or 20 reviews and they were bad reviews. And then there were companies that had over the last six months, it's 10 or 21 star reviews in a row. And the owner didn't reply to anything just left that open for anybody to just be like, well, we're not going to go to that guy. Cause clearly they don't.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And worse yet the owners of some of these companies, we're noticing, we're getting in like arguments with people in the reviews and they were like combative. And they were like, no, you did this. And we actually did everything. Right. And it was like, wow, that is a really bad.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. We'll talk a little bit more about that. I think down the road too, for sure. But you definitely don't want to fight with your customer. So like you can, to a degree, the customer is always right. Like, I definitely agree with that, but you know, if your customer assaulted an employee or something and then left a one star review, then I feel like you can put a snarky reply up, but by and large, you don't want to do that. So we'll, we'll cover the specific.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just keep in mind, like, even if it's not a review yet everything you say to a customer on the phone or any interaction you have with them, just pretend like that interaction, whatever you say is going to be published online. And if you think of it that way you can kind of save yourself from a lot of problems. Um, even, you know, if you get emotional and something happens and you want to like be mad and angry, just take a seat for a second, just cool off. Because what we often do, you want to reply to those negative views right away, but you want to do it in a way that's not combative. That's not antagonistic. You want to really, like you said, their customer's always right. And even if they're not technically right, you still online, that's there.

Brandon Condrey:
There's kind of suck it out. Don't take it further. I'll tell you about the first time that I got it. One star review for us, but how that went for me.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And then Brandon, well, he wasn't able to get any more one star reviews after that, but we'll tell you more about that. That's funny, but yeah, guys, so really overall, it's really important obviously for social proof, it's important for rankings, even in Google and these places. I'm not sure how Facebook is ranked, you know, your pages and stuff, but definitely Google your maps pages, your different networks, whether you're on next door or Yelp or home advisor or whatever you're on to grow your business reviews are what gets people to work with you? And it also pushes you up in the search engines, especially in Google, the more reviews you have, not only are you going to show up higher because there's more content on your listing, more reviews, more contents. But yeah, it's just going to be easier for people to find you and easier for people to trust you and work with you right away.

Brandon Condrey:
So that's a perfect segue into where should you focus on getting reviews? And the short answer, I think is wherever you're getting customers. So if you started on Facebook as a really small operation and you still get most of your recommendations on Facebook, then focus on Facebook and getting a bunch of reviews there. If you're like us, when we first started, everything came through Google. So we focused on Google first. And then once you get that to whatever number you're looking at, we're focusing on a hundred. So you got your Google reviews to a hundred. Cool. Now you can shift gears to doing Facebook or Yelp or Wherever it is that people are finding you the most Focus on that one first and then branch out to.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. And it doesn't mean you can't have a review or a profile on multiple networks at the same time, but we're just saying guys, focus on the one or two, that's getting you the most results. And then once you build those up, those are going to be your bread and butter for getting more customers in. Cause that's like you said, everyone's finding you on Google or the Facebook or whatever it is. Those are really the best platforms we've found. So yeah, that step where to focus on getting them and then you can always be exploring new channels guys, even if there's something we haven't mentioned here, experiment, you know, see if you can find leads on a new channel that launched in your city or maybe there's some other thing that you're wanting to experiment with. Just try it.

Brandon Condrey:
Especially set channels advertising. Like I remember when we first started Home advisor was kind of underground, I guess, for lack of a better word Angie's list merged with home advisor. And then they started running all these TV ads. And so we had a decent home advisor rating, but if you want to focus more on that, then do it. Those platforms are all built around reviews as well. And so that determines how you show up within them, those lead generators too. So Home advisor, Thumbtack, all of them have reviews. If you're a provider on there and you should focus on them, we actually ran into a problem because when people would leave a negative review on Home advisor, it would get copied to Angie's list. Cause it's the same company, but they wouldn't copy our reply. Do you remember having to deal with that? Do you remember? We had to call them up and they were like, Oh yeah, that's definitely a software bug. We'll figure out what to do about that. And I honestly don't know what happened with that in the end, but those are just kinds of the things. It just goes to show you that you need to stay on top of all those sources. Because if you get a one star review in Yelp that people are all looking at, but you didn't see it come in, you still got to jump in there and deal with it. Even if you don't get any customers from Yelp, you still got to make sure that you're publicly replying.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. Which is a huge thing. Even like those one star reviews or three star, two star or whatever, the lower reviews, if they go unnoticed, then people are actually going to read those first people like to go immediately to your one star reviews and they want to see what did you do wrong? And how did you, did you reply to it at all? Did you like fight with them about it? And so that's kind of think of it, like that's your, their first impression of you at least be replying to those reviews, you know? And if you can do it in a great way, that's like positive and like shows you have good customer service, that's really the way to do it. So we'll get more.

Brandon Condrey:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, we're going to move into it right now. Like that's a great segue to the negative reviews and how do you deal with them? So I'll tell you my one star review story, which is pretty funny. So let's hear it. We had hired Claudia, our office manager. She had been handling the phones. She was out doctor's appointment or something. And I was like, well, I don't have anything to do. So I'm going to be a good office manager and do what Claudia does. And so we had a customer's credit card, the sorry, there was a check that bounced actually. And so it showed up as we got a return fee. So we had to pay 25 bucks because that check cut bounced. So I called up that customer and said, Hey, just giving you a call about this unpaid check. She was like, Oh, sorry about that. We got broken into and robbed and they stole the checkbook. So we had to cancel the account. I just forgot to give you the new one. And I didn't think I did anything bad. I was like, alright, well, no problem. I mean, just let me know how you want to take care of it and mail one in, or I can take a credit card. She was like, I'll mail you a check. And she hung up. I was like, alright, cool. And then she left a one star review everywhere, Google, Yelp, Facebook. And it was that I was the most un-empathetic person for their home invasion robbery thing. And the only reason I didn't treat it, like a big deal is because she didn't treat it like a big deal. She set off the cuff. Right. We got robbed. I'm like, Oh, that sucks. I'm really sorry. We got to get paid though. So yeah. So anyway, you posted a great reply to online, everywhere about how, you know, everyone has a bad day. I think it was just kind of being very personable about it. Like there's no excuse. I mean, that was stupid. So sorry.

Brandon Schoen:
We, yeah, we still took responsibility for it. I think that's the biggest thing. Just take responsibility, even if it's your fault. Even if like, maybe you don't remember it, but maybe there was like a tone in your voice and they thought it was like, they thought you were mad at them. Or it's hard to understand sometimes how these things happen. But a lot of times, if people are having a bad day, they're having a bad day and everything's going wrong and it doesn't matter if you did it right or wrong, they're going to leave a bad review anyway.

Brandon Condrey:
So we did actually, we emailed her about apologies and everything. And then she actually went back and edited the review. So her original text was up, but she put at the bottom like an update, you know, they emailed, I feel bad about saying all this stuff, you know, but whatever. So, you know, it showed that you could actually see the progression as a potential customer. There was a negative review, our response, and then her edit. Yeah. That changed the customer's outlook, potential customer that, okay. Never mind. I mean, they talked to her about it. We didn't just leave it hanging out there. So there was that, right?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And that's, I think honestly, what these customers just want to see, they're going to look at your negative reviews and just start, I wanted to say something real quick. If you're not getting any negative reviews that you're probably not helping enough people. And I learned this, like even in the online world, we would only start getting, go look at Apple, go look at Google, go look at any huge company. They might have a hundred thousand five star reviews, but guaranteed. They have 10,001 star reviews too. And also it's always a factor that when you're going to be helping and making enough impact, having a volume, you're going to eventually stumble across someone. That's not going to like your thing. And don't take it personally. Just, no, actually that's a good sign. That's I told you the first time we got some of our negative.

Brandon Condrey:
I'm definitely the more anxious out of the two of us. And so I used to stress out about every single one of those negative reviews that we got on. Like, we're doing it wrong. Like, what are we doing wrong? This is exactly what you said to me back then, like three years ago. Like if you're not getting a negative review, like you're not doing enough business, you're not touching enough people. Like there's a certain subset of the population that are just going to be pissed off in general and you can call, try and throw everything. The thing that you can under to deal with it, but they're still going to be pissed and that's it. So that's what kind of helped me just not stress about that stuff anymore. Is that yeah. Yeah. I mean, like for the one negative review that we got, we got ten five stars. So it's just, it is what it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So just focus on getting back to those five stars. Really just think about how your other future customers are going to see that review. And as long as you're replying with something positive, like you're taking responsibility and you know, making them feel like you're totally there to help and serve them and do whatever you can do to be a great customer service person or whatever.

Brandon Condrey:
I mean, totally from a practical standpoint is a cleaning company. Like our GoTo is usually just like, we're gonna re clean your house. And so we have systems in place. We send out surveys to customers, you know, from our CRM. How did you like your last clean? And so normally we're heading off reviews before they become a problem. Like we're very open to receiving negative feedback directly from the customer. So if the customer calls and says, what'd you guys do, you broke my blinds, you didn't do this. You didn't do that. Whatever. You're like, we're so sorry. Can we come out tomorrow and reclean the entire house for free? That's enough to head off a one star review for sure. 99% of the time. Right! Occasionally you'll get a customer. Who's maybe like, I don't know non-confrontational that actually don't want to call and complain to, but they feel comfortable leaving a review online instead, which is maybe a bit paradoxical. But we have gotten customers that left the review before telling us there was even a problem. Like I can't fix what I don't know about. So instead you reply the review, Hey, I'm so sorry. I wish you would have brought this to our attention. We would have been out there to fix it the same day. Cause we had room after the schedule, whatever it is. But like, listen, we're going to reach out. The office's already reached out. We'd like to come back and re clean it for free. And oftentimes those customers will go back and edit the review. They'll change it from a one star to a five star. Like actually it's great. They came out and fixed it. It was just a fluke. It's not like the company is this bad all the time. You know? Like everyone has a bad day. So there's lots of ways to deal with that. But the top customer service is just the way to do it. Like yeah. Did you lose the profit on that job? Because you went back out to reclean it for free. Yeah. You totally took a loss on that. Right. But did you change that one star? If you do a five, right man, that's like worth thousands of dollars on its own.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And I think we've discussed it before, but if you can turn like you're sometimes your biggest problem, customers that complain the loudest will also be your loudest megaphone. If you can, like turn that situation around and they will like become your biggest fan and tell everyone that too, instead of just leaving them there, like to complain about the one star thing that happened to them, turn them around. And like you said, go re clean the house, go do something that turns that situation around that they can't even believe it. And they're like, wow, this company really goes above and beyond. And now I want to go tell my friends about that. Cause I can't believe they did that. And that's really what you're trying to shoot for it to turn it around and reply immediately, but also do whatever you can to turn it in.

Brandon Condrey:
Oh man, I have another example of that too. So early on we had broken a kid's art thing that the daughter had made and the customer was really upset. And so what we had offered was we'll give you the clean for free. We did that anyway, but she was still mad and I was like, look, there's this place in town where you book a spot and you go in with your kid and you like paint this piece of pottery. And then they fire it in to kill. And I was like, what if we just pay for you to go and make a new memory? I'm in the end, she wasn't interested in that. Anyway. She was just one of those people that are gonna be super pissed off. But that kind of thinking outside of the box, like we'll pay for you to just recreate the thing either we broke. We're really, really sorry. That type of stuff is what the franchise companies are not going to do with a franchise company is going to be like, here's a 10% discount off your next one. Sorry. Yeah. And they're the ones that have all the ones that are with us.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, exactly. And even if you can do things to kind of like counteract that this from even happening. So like one of the things that we do is if we do break something, which happens from time to time, we're human beings, we make mistakes. Right. But if we do break something, we have a little leave behind note that we say, Hey, sorry, we broke something. And we're just like super upfront and honest with you.

Brandon Condrey:
Oh yeah. It's two folds. Like we broke it. If it's small, the little broken thing is on top of the note, we're sorry we broke this. The office will call you. But really what's normally happened is that the office has already actually called and left a message. So by the time that the customer gets home, they already know that we broke something because we left them a voicemail when they get home and see that it was like a salt shaker, most of the time were like, ah, it's no big deal. We've had that thing for years. No one cares. Right? And sometimes it's a really big deal. And then you go over above and beyond to replace it. Or our mentor in Denver Corby told me that he had hired an artist one time to make a lamp that was broken, that this customer had gotten from Italy or something. And so it was a glassblowing lamp and he hired a local glassblower to try and copy it as best as possible from pictures. That to me is like way over the top customer is going to go leave a review. Like you guys, this is crazy. They broke a lamp that I paid 20 bucks for on vacation 10 years ago. And then they regretted it with a local artist. It's insane for probably way more money than that. But that type of customer service is what will mitigate those reviews.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! People almost can't believe that you're even telling them this kind of stuff. And another one that I remember Corby telling us that I couldn't believe from the beginning was they had flooded a whole house, like brand new wood floors. And it wasn't even them. It was like some other contractors came in while they were cleaning and they like left some knob and done or some valid flooring goal. It was like an inch of water on the floor. And the owners came home and they blamed the cleaning company and he blamed Corby his company. And he took ownership of it. He paid for it. And I don't know how he did it that this day I'm like, I mean, we have insurance and stuff for that. And we've replaced a bunch of things before in houses. Sure. But yeah, I mean, it's all about going the extra mile. So people are just like, Wow. Yeah. And they can't believe so the,

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, the antithesis of that is that if you see the reviews where they it's a one star review, like you got water all over my floors and they got damaged, the bad cleaning company owner is going to go in there and be like, well, it was dry when we left. So it must've been your fault. Or like your plumbing has a leak or something. And realistically like, I mean, that may have not been your fault. Like it may have been the plumbing, but right. Because they've already mentally associated. They went to you with the blame. They've already mentally associated that you were the one that screwed it up. The negativity is already attached to you. So the best thing you can do in that situation is to try and bail out of that so that you can win that customer back to tournament of the cheerleader. So that's how you.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, exactly. And we do have like a hundred percent guarantee or if we break something, we replace it. Of course it doesn't happen that often, but man, people love it when we're there to, by their side and we're not blaming them and saying, Oh, it's all your fault. We're taking the responsibility. People love that. That goes on for many, many, you know, they'll tell other people about that.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So I think you guys got the message on the negative reviews and the customer service. Customer service is amazing. Yeah. That's what saves it. Right. Occasionally you'll get a customer who says crazy things. Like we had a customer who made multiple new Google accounts to tell them that we were leaving their doors unlocked or that we let their pets out and their false information. She was mad that we fired her because she was kind of not willing to adjust to a schedule change that we made. So we just said, we think it's better if we just go separate ways. And she was like, thanks, great. And then left ten one star reviews. So what you do in that case is you actually report those reviews to Google. They have a system for saying that like this isn't true, this didn't happen. And you know, the Google's gonna work the algorithm on the backend, but they know that it was 10 different reviews within a five minute span, all from the same IP address. So that's probably highly suspect on their end. So they'll just clear them out. And the same thing might happen if you are disrupting your market and you're a competitor, they may also go leave a bunch of one star reviews. And so there's a button within Google to report a review is like this isn't a customer of ours, or they're talking about a separate business. Like maybe we're in Albuquerque, there is a mountain range called the Sandia is there's a bunch of companies that have Sandia in the name. So sometimes we get a review for something that is like not a cleaning company or an oil change place or whatever. And so you just report those to Google and then Google will just come in and take them off. And all the major social platforms have some mechanism to report.

Brandon Schoen:
Right! Absolutely. And so I think that's a good way to go with that one. Then also we actually were wondering on that one, if we should like contact our attorney at one point, cause she was really going, like she was, I think it was five or six reviews. We contacted an attorney. We were like,

Brandon Condrey:
Can we send a cease and desist something?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Something to stop this craziness. And he ended up saying, don't poke the bear. Right. Or whatever.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Just leave it alone and see if it goes away. Like if it keeps going and can do it. Cause she was another business owner and you know, my lizard brain was like, well, let's go leave a bunch of one star reviews on her business. Right. That's not going to solve anybody's problem. It's just going to add fuel to the fire.

Brandon Schoen:
Don't fight fire with fire basically. And like, yeah. That's the other thing is like the flip side of this is a, yeah, don't go back to those people or those other businesses and like slander them and go and do the same thing back, you know, it's just be a downward spiral of negativity and whatever else comes up.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So before we get to the part where we're going to tell you what the strategy is for reviews, I kind of already talked about it. I like the little, the little bonus tidbit is that we gave you that we had looked at our competitor's reviews before we started. But you as a cleaning company owner should continually read your competitor's reviews. Like, I don't know, put some time on your calendar once a month, once a quarter or whatever you feel like is appropriate and go read your biggest competitors reviews. Look at the three stars and below how recently, where they left. I checked competitor reviews all the time and just served by new who left these when? And so like you can see when people do pushes to like build up the numbers, but you want to do the opposite of whatever they're doing in there. So if they've got one star reviews, all man, I remember we had a customer call in, it was out of state. They were trying to get cleaning services for their parent who was elderly and lived here like, Oh man, we use this company. They were terrible. And they gave me the name and I was like, well, I'm going to go look them up. Let's see what they were terrible about. And literally every single review in the last three months was one star and they all had the same thing. I canceled service. He kept charging my credit card that happened over and over and over again. And so clearly that guy was either an idiot because he didn't know how to take the banking stuff out of the system or he's being malicious. And he was continually charging the credit card. That is the super quick way to get shut down for fraud, get charged with crimes. You're dealing with charge backs all the time from the banks. So anyone who looked at that company name because he was still sending out adverts and stuff. And so like these people had just seen it on a postcard or whatever. And so they did it that way. But if you'd gone to look at the reviews, like, man, there's a bunch of consistent complaints. And so like your lesson as an owner is like, yo, if someone ever cancels, I have got to make sure that I delete the credit card out of the system like that day. So they don't accidentally get charged the next time because Yes.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. And it goes back to even when you used to develop like mobile apps and stuff, and this is what we would do. We would read all the negative reviews. We want to make an app like this, we'd read all the negative reviews and we would be like, everybody loves this about it, but they hate this, this and this. So we're going to make an app that does everything they love. Plus the things that they hated about it. We're going to do those things better. And so that's the same thing. Every negative review your competitors have is an opportunity for you to take that and do it better in your company. So if everyone's complaining about the billing, do billing way better. If everyone's complaining over here about them not showing up the right way or spilling oil on their driveways or whatever, the problem is just don't do that. Do it better, do it. No way different and immediately you're going to stand out. Yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So that's, that's easy. That's just a good way to continually improve and you don't even have to do it. You just have to go read how your competitors screwed up and then make that change in your business and you'll do better as well.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah so let's dive into, what's our review strategy? How do we get so many reviews so quickly? Should we start with that one? Or should we tell them how we launched the business with reviews? Either one,

Brandon Condrey:
Let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about how we launched it in the beginning and how we got reviews when you were brand spanking new that one's hard to do as a new company.

Brandon Schoen:
So yeah, when you're very first starting out, like we said, we looked at the reviews. There's hardly any even companies that had been around for a long time. So we kind of basically, you want to set the foundation right, right from the get go. So what we did was we, we know we're going to launch on this date, right? We don't have any reviews. Nobody knows who we are. If we go do a thousand door hangers tomorrow, they're going to go look us up and be like, well, who zero reviews? Who are these guys? I'm not going to work with them. Right. So we contacted friends, family, teachers we knew, neighbors we knew, right?

Brandon Condrey:
Anyone that we knew there's a neighborhood. Like if you put your hat and your spouse's had your significant other's head all together. And a couple of friends, the average person knows eight people. They have eight really good friends. So between the three or four people that you could talk to you, that's 32 people. So if you can go out, find those houses, those cleans in the beginning serve two purposes. One, they were training runs. We're doing them for free. We're going to clean your house. We're going to be in there observing them, cleaning to make sure that we correct whatever mistakes that we see happening. Right. And two, they were kind enough to leave us a review in exchange and exchange. And so that was great. That's how we got. And when we actually took paying customers, we had like 15, 20, I don't remember the numbers, but we had more than a dozen of five star reviews. And it's because we hustled to get those with intention. There was a strategy.

Brandon Schoen:
Right? And there's this reciprocity that comes with that. When you do something and offer value to somebody for free, even like we're doing right here, we're going to clean your house for free. They almost feel compelled. Not just that they know you, but they feel compelled to return the favor. And that's just a human nature type thing. Right. We just want to help each other out. And so a lot of times, even those people that know you they'll actually go out of their way to like tell a little story or write an even better review. So yeah, we started right out of the gate with, I want to say five or 10 reviews on day one that people went and looked us up. Even though we were brand spanking new, like they were like, wow, these guys are already kicking butt and doing good and I want to work with them. And yeah.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. So if you're brand new, do that, start there. If you've been in business, but you don't have any reviews, pick your five customers that, you know, love you and just tell them like, listen, we really need these. There's really help us out. Can you just please do it and then make it easy for them? Send them a link. Like here's the link to my Google listing or here's the link to my Facebook listing. Just click the leave a review. Right. I remember in the beginning, when we had set up, we're going to talk about the webpage funnel thing in a minute here. But we had recorded a video on how to leave a review. And like, you could watch it, like when you went to the page that showed you how to do it, I was like, this is what you do. And that was for the truly sort of like tech ignorant people. Like this is a really help, can you put it in here?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So it's just like be aggressive in the beginning to immediately have that impact immediately have those reviews. Cause even like right out of the gate, man, we were already surpassing. Like people had been around for years, two reviews, you know, and they weren't even.

Brandon Condrey:
So it's just, that's the launch strategy. But what we do now, we're a fully fledged business. We've got multiple teams and hundreds of customers. How do we still push the reviews? You could get complacent and do nothing. And when you see competitors, if you go serve by new, they haven't had a review in 18 months. That's not good either. So what we do instead is with the teams, once a quarter, we will set up a Derby, a rally, a push, like whatever you want to call it, but we're going to pay the teams to get reviews. So, all right, our goal is we want to get 50 reviews over the next week. And so we make a little printout that the teams get to take with them. So the teams are all aware, like this is where we're doing, we're doing a review push. This is also kind of give it like a nice bonus here is that the teams actually try a lot harder when they're knowing that this is gonna be on the internet. So like you do see them push a little bit more like they're already high level cleaners obviously, but they're going to go like super duper great on these. So they go out, they clean, if the homeowner's there, we try to push them to actually like, say, Hey, we're doing your review push. We'd really like it. If you left us sustain and you hand them the card and on the card, there's a short URL and you want it to go to your website. You want it to go to Sandiagreencclean.com/review. And what you do with that web page, from there is up to you. But if you're focusing on Google, then you just put the link that goes to Google. If you just tell them, leave a review, they're like, great. Where am I going to do that? Like, they don't know where to go. Cause there's a hundred sites. Right. But if you say, go to this webpage, it'll tell you what we need. So you do, we're going to push Google this month. Fine. Next quarter. Leave the review on Facebook. Right next quarter. Like we're going to do the reviews on Yelp this time. Yeah. So you can kind of dictate what's on that.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And you can literally just go on, if you're focusing on Google, just go onto your Google maps profile, listing thing and just click on. There's a little thing that you can share that you can use that link, the share link to that. And that's what you can share out. And just tell people, go to this thing, which is our business profile on Google or whatever it is. And that's where you do it. Just direct them. But tell them what to do specifically, do this, you know, give us an honest review. You don't have to tell them, give us five stars, but just, you know, let them decide obviously. And if they've had a good experience, They're going to do that. Going give you a great version.

Brandon Condrey:
I think our page actually says, leave us an honest review. It doesn't say leave us a five star. It actually says, leave us an honest review. So there's two sort of twist to this. One, we incentivize the reviews with the team. So we tell them like for every five star review, you get over this month up to 20 or whatever, we're going to add five bucks on your bonus. Right? And for anything that you get above, any bonuses between and 30, you get $10 a bonus, but you got to cap it somewhere because we did have an employee who came from a competitor who said, we're going to pay you $25 for every review. You get every five star review. And she was kind of a, I call her more of a salesperson, but she was really good at communicating with customers. And she got like 50. Yeah, just five star reviews that mentioned their team specifically. That was, that company is stipulation. It had to mention their team and they did it. And then that was thousands of dollars that they had to pay on a bonus. And they didn't and she quit. And we got her and we got her yet. She was so pissed that they said we were going to do it, but they didn't put a cap on it. They didn't say like up to the first 10 reviews. And so you get 250 bucks. If you can get them all, she got way above that and was going to be paid thousands of dollars. And they told her like, sorry, we can't afford to do that. That's just not smart. If this is new for you and you're going to budget for it, like budget for it. Like you have two teams and six people and you're going to pay 10 bucks, like do the reverse math, I've got 500 bucks to throw at this, how many reviews I want to get and then tell them we need 20. Like whatever, whatever the math works out too. Right.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And you know, just to put this in another perspective, guys, when we used to launch products on Amazon and different places, there was like whole entire review networks of like kinds of people that all they would do is just be like, send me your product for free. Of course. And I will give you a review. So yeah, you're out a little bit of money. Same idea here, you're out a little bit of money. You're paying an incentive to your employees to five bucks or 10 bucks, whatever it is. But that review, like I said, it's gold. So it's going to come back to tenfold over the next few years or what, 10 years, even like people are going to consistently see that. So that's an investment total of it as an investment.

Brandon Condrey:
And then you can tweak some stuff on the SEO side too, like Reviews that have pictures rank higher on Google system than reviews that don't. So that's just what you teach the customer. So on the webpage that you direct them to, you say, it'd be great. If you left us an honest review, if you included a picture, that'd be fantastic. That would really help us out even better. If you can do a video. I remember we got a video Facebook review very early on and that thing got played. Thousands of times people watch that over and over and over again, she took it from a first person shot, showed our car, walked through the house. That's right. Yeah. We were in there cleaning right now and there were blinds were getting done and all that stuff. And so if a picture is worth a thousand words, the videos, the book, man, that was what really showed a lot of people, what we were doing and how excited that customer was in the video. So that's great. Okay. So that's the tweak. You've got to incentivize the teams, but the other thing that you can do, there are a couple softwares out there. Your web developer might be able to do it, but you can use a review funnel and these were great. It's amazing. So like that webpage, how we have it set up now is you go to that webpage. And instead of just clicking to Google, it's actually just a form. They fill out it's one to five stars. If they click four or five stars, they write their review. And then it's like, great, can you put this on Google? And they click that link. And the software that this is built into actually takes that text and copies it to the site. So like, all it does is open up Google maps, copies everything in there with their star rating. All they have to do is hit submit. So it's really easy to do them. But the really fun part about that review funnel was that if they clicked three stars or below, it didn't even give them the option to post online. Instead of just us an email that said, Hey, you've got some feedback. And so that was an opportunity where we could address why it wasn't a five star review. Why are they upset? Call them, do the reclean for free and then send them the review link again. And then this time it's five stars so that it served a bunch of different bonuses that made it easy for the customer to do it. It made it easy for us to pick up customers that weren't happy before they became a problem. Right. So there's a lot of bonuses.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. It's basically like a little insurance plan that like, kinda like monitors, like just helps you to catch those bad ones before they actually go public, which is awesome. I want to see we're reworking our review funnel right now, but I think it was greater.us. The last software tool we were using that would spin those out and kinda like regulate all that. But um, so you guys can hook that up. We'll probably put something in the show notes that shows you guys how to hook that up even, or some further details. But that is a great system look into that. It's like a reputation management is basically what it is on a higher level, but just with some settings and built into a funnel that just directs people the right way and helps you out a lot. So yeah. So yeah. So I think that's pretty much it for that. What else do we need to tell people?

Brandon Condrey:
I think that's the nuts and bolts comment in our notes here. That's like, it's basically the tip that we did at the beginning. So at the beginning we did free clean you can do this when you're expanding. So you got one team now you've got a second one when you first bring them on, they're not going to have a lot of houses, right. So you could bring them on. And while they're training, do the same thing again, do five or 10 cleans for free with this team. So they get trained, they get into the system. Ask for reviews from those people. And then, so you can keep using that strategy of free cleans for reviews over and over and over again, as you grow. And then the goal is just, don't let it stagnate. Like don't be the company that had a bunch of five star reviews. Like you did this one time. Cause you heard this podcast, you did it in late 2020, but now it's 2022. And you haven't had any reviews since then. This is a schedule. It's a system. You just got to keep up with it. Like any other part of your business.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely man. One other just really cool bonus tip. I want to throw in there. We talked about this on our training remarketing webinar. When you guys asked for these reviews, if you have a specific area of town, a zip code, a neighborhood that you're trying to really be more relevant in and show up, especially in your Google maps and your Google, my business listing, ask that customer. When they do the review to take a photo in their house, take a photo of the clean house or whatever they wanna take a photo of and ask them to upload that photo with their review on their phone. And the reason you do that is because Google geotags, tax tags, all these fancy words.

Brandon Condrey:
The location is in the image. So when, when it gets posted to Google, they know that it came from here and not like a stock photo from Shutterstock or something.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So when Google starts seeing a five star review come from this neighborhood and then another one, like kind of down the street and then another one, well, Google is all about relevancy. So now they're like, well, you're super relevant in this area. So now they're going to push your listing to the top. I noticed when we started doing that, a specifically that strategy, our local listing and Google really started to skyrocket. We're now like in the top one, two or three spots almost all the time when I searched like last part of the city, I'll just pull out my phone and see where we rank on that. But that's a cool little nugget for you guys to take away on the review side. And hopefully you've gotten a lot of value out of this little podcast.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah, totally. So as usual subscribe, review, thanks for those reviews. We'll read some more in the future. The masterclass is there, where can they find that?

Brandon Schoen:
Go to Profitcleaners.com/masterclass and ask your most biggest burning questions and challenges and whatever we can help you guys with. You'll also learn a ton of cool stuff on how to continue to grow your cleaning business and add way more recurring customers. So that's the scoop on that! Yeah. We're so thankful for you guys being here. Thank you for your time. Thanks for hanging out with us on the podcast.

Brandon Condrey:
That's right. As always keep it clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it Clean.

Brandon Condrey:
We'll see you guys in the next one.

Brandon Schoen:
See you guys later.

Announcer:
Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profitcleaners.com and remember keep it Clean.