Episode 81: Why Business Reviews Are Gold- And How to Get Them Automatically

Episode 81: Why Business Reviews Are Gold- And How to Get Them Automatically

Brandon Schoen:
The truth is guys there's information overload on the internet. These days it's like a giant fire hose. And so people don't have time to think even so like, they're literally just looking at the top level, like most reviewed who's the best in 10 seconds, they can make a decision. And first of all, if you're not there and if you don't have those reviews, well, then you've totally get missed. Right?

Brandon Condrey:
But even on the algorithm side from Google, like if you don't have the reviews from an SEO perspective, you're not going to show up. Not just that people don't trust a company that doesn't ever have reviews, you may literally miss being displayed in search results because you don't have any reviews.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And so it is gold guys. It is literally gold because it's future growth. It's future leads for your business. You don't have to pay for those reviews will be out there for years and years to come. So the hard work pays off and it sticks out there. It's like a log of everything that anyone's ever said about your business.

Brandon Condrey:
And so we've beat you over the head with reviews are important. You need to survive. So let's tell you how we used to do it.

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, Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to level up, take it to the next level and win in your local market. I'm your host, Brandon Schoen. And I'm joined by my lovely, amazing cohost over here,

Brandon Condrey:
Brandon Condrey that's me. I'm lovely today.

Brandon Schoen:
You are lovely and you are a spreadsheet ninja amongst other things. And today, guys, we're going to really get into the numbers of reviews. We're going to talk about some really exciting stuff about why reviews are gold. And we're going to show you guys a consistent system to get them automatically coming into your business, to build your business. Take it to the next level. So Brandon let's tell him just some quick things in this episode to get them excited. We're going to talk about the first one, which is really exciting. Tell him that one,

Brandon Condrey:
That hopefully by the time this is published and you're listening to it, that we would be the number one reviewed cleaning company in the entire state of New Mexico, which is pretty cool.

Brandon Schoen:
That is really cool. So we're going to share the whole journey, how we got there guys, we're going to talk about cognitive bias. Some psychology, why reviews are pure gold and how you can use this and leverage this to help grow your business. Number three, Brandon list. Tell them what that one is.

Brandon Condrey:
You were going to tell you how we did reviews in the early days when we first started. And then we're going to tell you how we do it. Now that's a little bit more automated and we'll share some numbers on why that means such a huge difference to becoming the number one reviewed company in the state.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely we're guys, we're going to share with you how you can do some simple, easy ways. Everybody can use it to grow reviews for your business, including leveraging family and friends, how you can use new teams when you're launching new teams to do this. We've talked about this before, but we're telling you again, and the guys we're going to just talk about the overall longterm game, how to become the dominant authority in your market. So you can locally, a lot of this comes from reviews. And if you stay to the end guys, we're going to share with you kind of a new experiment. We're going to be testing out, which is possibly going to be helping everybody get more reviews, but stay tuned until the end. And we'll share that kind of idea and that experiment with you and see if we can all benefit from it. So yeah, let's jump into the show. But before we do guys, before we do, since this is all about reviews, we have to practice what we preach and really hammer this. We haven't been getting as many reviews from you guys, the listeners, and we really, really need your help. So let's tell them what to do, Brandon.

Brandon Condrey:
Wherever you're listening to this, there is an option to leave a review. So if you're on Spotify, listening to us, there's an option. Leave a review. If you're on iTunes, leave us a review. I use pocket casts to do this, but there is an option inside of pocket cast to leave reviews. So essentially every podcast platform has the ability to leave a review. There is no that I'm aware of yet. There is no fancy automated software to review podcasts just yet. But if we figure that out someday, we'll let you know. But in the meantime, because this is a review based episode, please, please, please. If you are getting value out of the show in any way, you just like listening to us, making noises, whatever, we could really use the help with you guys leaving us some, hopefully five star reviews on wherever you get your podcasts.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And guys that's exactly it. Like what we just did right there. That's what you need to be doing with your customers. Like literally ask for the review, just like we did with you. Like pull out your phone right now, leave us a review. Tell us how you liked the show. How's it impacting your life? How's it making it better, whatever it is, do that with your customers say, we need your help. We need to grow our business. Like, can you help us right now? Like whether it's pull out your phone right now or leave a little thing that they leave behind or an email social media posts, but you got to get uncomfortable to ask. Sometimes it's uncomfortable to ask people for favors. This is your business. This is your livelihood. You gotta be able to ask for the review. And so we just want to be an example for you guys. We almost ask every show, but we really want to drive it in on this episode guys. Cause it is that important. And you should always be doing this with your customers. So with that said, let's dive into the show. Guys. Let's cover how in the world are we five reviews away right now from becoming the most reviewed cleaning company in the state of New Mexico. That's pretty cool.

Brandon Condrey:
I do want to mention that we did record an episode about reviews. It was episode 11. It was in September of 2020. That one was kind of a primer. It was like, here's what you should do with reviews. Best practices for reviews and telling you, you should go seek them out. So some of this stuff is going to repeat the concepts in those episodes, but some of you listeners may not be going back and listening to our entire archive. So some of this may be a little bit repetitive, but try not to view it as repetition so much as a habit building on your part. We're trying to really hammer home that we talk about this stuff a lot, because it really matters. It can make or break you versus the competition, I think is kind of the idea.

Brandon Schoen:
I heard it another way I've heard it said before is sometimes people go to church and they're like, why is the pastor still saying the same thing over and over again? I've already heard this one before. And he says, because you need to hear it. Like you guys haven't been listening. Like you need to do it and you need to actually hear it again. So like we're telling you guys, because this is so important. Even if you've heard it before, you need to hear it again and you need to hear it again until it's like drilled into your business and you're doing it all the time. So that's literally how important this stuff is.

Brandon Condrey:
So how did we get in our position? We are currently sitting at a 4.7 star Google rating with 297 reviews. The number one cleaning company in the state is Mary maids of Albuquerque. And they are at 302, also with a 4.7 star rating. So we are five stars away. How do we find ourselves in this position? Merry maids has been in business since who knows when 30 years, whatever they've been here a long time, long time is the point. And we've been in business less than five. How did we do that?

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. How did we do that? And man, I just feel so good because I remember when we started the businessman and that was a big goal of ours is beat out the competition, all these different ways. One of them was reviews and rankings and all this other stuff, visibility. We are really up there now. And this is a big monumental shift. I feel like this is like a big tipping point for us. So yeah, I guess let's first of all, just touch on again. Why are reviews so powerful? And I think the biggest thing I can think of from my marketing background is it comes back to psychology. That humans are very much inclined to make a decision. You guys should go learn about cognitive biases. If you haven't learned about cognitive biases, there's lots of them. We all have them. And we all live our lives pretty much day-to-day whether you know it or not based on certain biases you have, and some of them are good. Some of them are bad, but the one that makes people purchase a certain product or kind of sways them one way or the other to work with a cleaning company. For example, one of them I found is confirmation bias. Social proof is another word that gets thrown around in the marketing realm all the time, which is just basically testimonials, right? You've heard the testimonials. What are people saying about your business? But once people have that confirmation bias, that enough other people said that this is a good company to work with. That just confirms to you internally, psychologically, whatever, you know that, okay. That's enough for me to make the decision to work with this company. And sometimes it's by sheer number of reviews. Sometimes it's just another enough other people saying what you want to hear that it's like, okay, they trust them. And this, this isn't that and all that.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. I think part of that is people might be scared of using a company that's brand new. They have no reviews or they have one or two, if there's 300 people that have confirmed an averaged out to 4.7 stars. And you know that that person or business likely knows what they're doing. I know that one of the places that I use it the most is like trying to pick a restaurant, especially in a city that I don't live in. I'm going to look at the reviews for those restaurants to really try and figure that out. So these things are important. And if you're leaning into the psychology, you do want a lot of reviews. You want as many as possible because that in the tribalism sense of being a human, if other people are doing it, then it's cool and I'm going to do it too. That's kind of the concept. So you do need those reviews and they're gold because each one just pushes more on that social proof, cognitive bias, the more you have, the more people are going to lean into it and be like, well, this other one looks cool, but it only has 10 reviews. This one is 4.7 with 300 reviews. Like, I mean, they clearly have a lot of experience here. So I'll go with that one. I think that happens pretty frequently.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. I was just listening to somebody the other day that somebody, his wife say, well, I just looked up the top reviewed companies. And that's how we picked that. Literally think about how you pick reviews when you purchase a product on Amazon or anything you ever do. Normally you look through reviews, right? And so when you think of your own behavior, well, this is the same process that your customers are, your would be potential. Customers are going through. And the truth is guys there's information overload on the internet these days, it's like a giant fire hose. And so people don't have time to think even so like, they're literally just looking at the top level, like most reviewed who's the best in 10 seconds, they can make a decision. And if you're not there, first of all, if you're not there and if you don't have those reviews, well, then you totally get missed. Right? You missed the boat.

Brandon Condrey:
Yep. But even on the algorithm side from Google, like if you don't have the reviews from an SEO perspective, you're not going to show up. Not just that people don't trust a company that doesn't have reviews. You may literally miss being displayed in search results because you don't have any reviews.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And so the whole other part of this is it's harder work upfront to get those reviews and to get that visibility and move your listings up and all that stuff for the search engine optimization part of it. But once you get there, it's amazing because it's like Google turns on this fire hose of like free traffic, almost that you don't have to pay for. It's just, people are noticing you now you're up on the front. You're getting the most reviews are you are the most reviewed or one of the top, like we've been top five for the last couple of years here, but we've gotten a ton of business from that. And it builds people's trust in us. They read it. They say, oh, I read your reviews.

Brandon Condrey:
This is also how we got on the news more than once. That's how we've been in magazines. More than once some person got assigned a cleaning story at a news place during COVID or a magazine during spring cleaning season, how are they going to find out who to interview, who are the best cleaning companies in Albuquerque? And then we show up with 300 reviews, boom, let's call those guys. And then as long as you answer those emails, like these things count, like it's social proof, not just to customers, but to media and things of that nature. Like we're trying to hammer it home here, that these things are really important for you. And you do need to put some mental effort into getting these.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And just think of it now. Like we're right behind the top guys, which is a franchise it's like big old corporate franchise, which in my opinion guys, when I talked to people and we do our research, people don't always really want to work with the big companies. They want to work with the local guys. Right? So that's your opportunity to rise up, even if you're right below those big franchises, but you're the very next guy and you're the local one. And that's what people want to work with. Well, that's huge as you're working your way up, just know like you might not be number one overnight, but it's a process and it's a journey. And when you get there and especially as you start getting in the top position, just by building those reviews, Google will put your listing higher and higher. And there's some other things we'll talk about, but it is gold guys. It is gold because it's future growth. It's future leads for your business. You don't have to pay for those reviews will be out there for years and years to come. So the hard work pays off and it sticks out there. It's like a log of everything that anyone's ever said about your business and also how you reply to those people. So that's the other part of it is you got to reply and be active, whether it's positive or negative reviews, you got to be in the game and showing that you care and you're taking it, showing people you care.

Brandon Condrey:
So we've beat you over the head with reviews are important. You need them to survive. So let's tell you how it used to do when you're brand new. Some of the software that we use now didn't exist. I think back then, so we were waiting in it. So the way that we did it in the beginning, all right, we're literally brand spanking new. We have no customers, no reviews. We did free cleaning for people in the neighborhood. We cleaned a couple of neighbors, next door, neighbors, friends, family. We identified some teacher friends of ours that you historically won't pay for this kind of a service. And we cleaned their house for free to train the teams, but also to in exchange, get a review so that when we did actually go live with the website and the ads and all the stuff that we had like 10, 15, I don't remember what we launched with, but it was not an insignificant amount. You wanted it to be not zero is the point. So that was how we did it brand spanking new. Then as we grew, when we would launch a team, we essentially did the same thing. So team two's coming on, let's take them out for some training cleans with some other different people. Cause you can only leave one Google review. You can only leave one Facebook review. So let's go find someone who hasn't left us to review. Do it again. That got us a little bit of the way. And then we got into a good routine where once a quarter we would do a review push. So four times a year, we would leave these little cards out. We would tell the teams that they're going to get a bonus. Like if someone mentions your team specifically in their view, like team three is the best. I love whoever ran it at the time, Christine. And we would give you $5 in cash. I think we went to the bank and took out something like $1,500 in fives. And every single person on your team just got five bucks in cash. Whenever you got a review mentioned. And we did it for, I think it was like two weeks, every quarter. And so that always got us a little boost, 10, 20 reviews. And they always they're cumulative. They just stack on. So that was how we did it in the beginning. And I think it worked pretty well. I think we were aggressively pushing it from a grassroots perspective.

Brandon Schoen:
Right. And we actually did have people come over from other companies and bigger corporate company, franchise type cleaning companies and say that they would do similar things. So, you know, this is not like completely new. It's not rocket science, but like other companies that do the same thing, they would actually, the bad thing that they did was that one of their team members that came to us did so well at getting reviews that they couldn't even pay her.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. They told them we pay you like $20 for every review or something. And she jumped on that. That was Christine and she got 50 or something that mentioned her by name and then they couldn't pay. And so she quit and she came to us.

Brandon Schoen:
Don't do that. Definitely!

Brandon Condrey:
Whatever system you put into place, you need to be able to deliver on it. So you gotta do that. So here's the other thing, right? You get the abuse of there. I'm not saying that we reinvented the wheel by doing review pushes. What I'm saying is that we were cognizant enough as a new company to be doing anything. If you are brand new and you are focused on really doing the best clean possible, but you're not on the flip side of that coin, getting the reviews out of the customer that thought you did the best clean ever. You're leaving money on the table because if you're not doing anything, then you're just, you're kind of floating there. It's going to be hard to get above. People's above the fold on Google to get where you need to go if you're not pushing their reviews.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely. And so we tried different things though. Guys, like Brandon said, we had the teams out asking typically what they would also have is a little like business card, just a real inexpensive business card with their logo. And it would say, we love hearing from our customers, like tell us how we did. And it would just say like our website forward slash review, you can set up some type of link like this on your website or just a page that direct people to then it says, do you want to leave a review for us on Google, on Facebook? And it just links. That's all you got to do is link it to the place for them to review.

Brandon Condrey:
This is making it easy for your customers to leave a review. So if you have your website.com/review on that webpage, you control where that goes. So when we did it ourselves, we just had links to our Google my business listing and the Facebook listing. And so they could pick whichever one they wanted to. And it just took them directly to go leave a review. There was a mid solution we had with an SEO company that violated Google's terms of service. And we got away with it for a while, but that was called a review gating. So like it was basically the review webpage of ours now forwarded to this other webpage. It pulled in our Google listing. And then if they left us a three-star or less, it would send us an email saying, thanks. And here's the thing that was going to be reviewed. But we like cut it off. If they left four or five, it let that one through. So that's the gate review gating. Well, if Google finds out that you do that and it has happened, they'll just come in and strip all of your reviews period. So you got to play nice with Google, so don't get crazy with it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, we don't do that anymore.

---

Brandon Schoen:
Hey guys. So how can Profit Cleaners help you? Three ways first off, head over to a podcast or if you're on YouTube, we've got loads of free content. We're republishing the podcast here as well. Check out the podcast. That's a great place to start.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. Next you can grab our 10X marketing course to help you bring your business up to seven figures, get a bunch of customers. You can check that out at ProfitCleaners.com/courses. And then lastly, if you just hit to the website in general, ProfitCleaners.com, there's lots of free tools on there. All the podcast episodes are on there. And then there's also free masterclass that we run every week that you can still register for.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Check out the show notes and all sorts of resources. So hopefully that helps you guys. We'll see you guys soon. Take care, keep it clean.

Brandon Condrey:
Keep it clean.

---

Brandon Condrey:
So what do we do now? Here's what we do. We've told you about it before. I will preface this by saying we are not sponsored by anyone on this podcast. Although if anyone from podium is listening, we're happy to entertain an offer, but we do like the service a lot. So we got hit up on a cold call email from podium. Podium is a software that texts your customers automatically in our case, it's automatically because it integrates with our CRM. So if you are a service fusion user, there's a couple of there's many that they work with. So integrated with us. So on our end, when the teams hit job finished, it would fire off a text to that customer saying, Hey, your cleans all done. Would you mind leaving us a review? And when they click that, it takes them to a webpage. It says, do you want to do Google or Facebook? You control where you want those reviews to go. So they do have options. Yelp is not one of them, but they have like home advisor you could do. And there's a bunch of services you can integrate with it. But we just chose to focus on Google and Facebook. So they click whichever one they're going to do. It's a one to five star, a little slider. You pick that there's a box to enter text and you hit go. And so I didn't think this was going to be this revolutionary compared to what we were already doing by putting it on a business card. But man, nine months later, we have almost doubled the amount of reviews that we had and it's happening automatically in the background. We don't really do those review pushes anymore where we leave out cards. This just happens. And people, those sales guy from podium, when we signed up had told us that psychologically speaking, the best time to leave a review is like, while you're still there, you're with the customer, you ask them, did we do a good job? Yes. It was an amazing job. Great. Would you mind leaving us a review? And so you do have the option in podium to not automate it the way that we did, but you could give the teams the responsibility of shooting the text, like making eye contact with the customer. Like, would you mind filling out the review? Like this is maybe the little uncomfortable part of it, but they'll feel pressured to do it. And they just told you to your face that you did a good job, so they better leave a good review. You know what I mean? And so then they do and it, it makes it easy for them to do it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, absolutely. And this goes back to systems, guys, this goes back to making it easy and fun to do business with you. But like Brandon said, what a great opportunity when someone says, wow, the house looks great. So maybe in the earlier days we were in the house actually to do this, or maybe the teams are still there. Maybe they come back home though an hour later. And I think what happens is it's like within a couple hours of the team's hitting finished, that this message comes through. So it is by the time they've gotten home or right as they're getting home, basically they see their house. They're like, oh wow. It looks great. They see the flowers. They know we've been there. Right? And they get this text message. And it says, if you love to clean today, let us know your thoughts, let us know your feedback. It makes it super easy. Right. Is the point. And that's what you want to do is make it easy on your people and give them that opportunity. People want to tell you feedback, the other cool part about podium that we haven't totally experimented a lot more with, but we just like left on the automated reviews. Cause we were like, we really wanted to be aggressive with that. But the other thing that's really cool is you can switch it on to another setting where it actually just gets feedback and people can say one through nine. What was their experience today? Which is another thing you should always be doing is getting feedback and serving your customers, right?

Brandon Condrey:
Yes. If you come from the software world, this is called a net promoter score. So on a scale of zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend this to a friend? So that is an instant feedback thing that we haven't used a lot, but it is a feature that's built into it. You can do surveys in it. You can do marketing blast, text messages. You can take payments through it. If you want to, podium is a robust platform. We primarily used it for its reviews and I have some numbers for you. So we signed up with podium in June of 2021 in the last 12 months, which has really since June. So whatever that is 10 months, 10 months, including the one that we're in April, we got 166 reviews in the last 10 months. So for instance, in June, when we launched it, we got 15 total reviews in may, the month, right before that one. And in April the month before that, two. And so ever since then, June was 15, then it was 7 18, 10, 9, 12 25 in December of 2021, 27 in January of 2022. And those little tiny chunks, like I just told you that we did were view pushes manually back in the day, we were getting 10 20 reviews. And that was hard. That was a lot of work. And we had to pay our teams to do it well. Now we're paying a software to do it. It's not inexpensive. I mean, podium is $500 a month, but the results stand for themselves. We doubled our reviews in 10 months. So we went from a hundred and like 70 ish when we started to like 197 right now. And hopefully by the time that you're hearing this, we're over 305 to get to the top spot in the state, but we're flirting with it after five years in business and only really a year of pushing reviews with a software versus a company that's been around for 40 years. And they're kind of there, they've had the top spot forever, but I love to be the one to dethrone them.

Brandon Schoen:
Absolutely, man, this is a huge way to dethrone them. And just again, focus on building taller and not worrying about everybody else. Don't even worry about the competition. When you start putting these systems in place. It's amazing. You'll just blast right past the competition. It's a true system guys. So leverage it, leverage technology, leverage software. It takes some work to get set up. But what Brandon was just saying, right there is so huge. Like when I would do e-commerce products and launch them on Amazon and there's all sorts of communities that we were a part of to get reviews and stuff for the good influencers to review a product for you, it would cost sometimes hundreds of dollars or more just for one person to write up a big blog post and write up a review for you and share it out there and all this stuff. So you're talking 500 bucks to get 20 or 30 reviews. I don't know what the math is on that, but it's like 20, 30 bucks a review. Like that's super cheap. Actually, when you put in perspective that that review is going to build your business for years and years to come and it's going to stay out there publicly. It's going to beat that. One of the factors that helps people work with you over everyone else, just because you have more numbers, whatever it is, that is so huge. So look at the big picture here guys, and that's pennies penny.

Brandon Condrey:
So I highly encourage you to take a look at something like podium, podium. We're obviously a fan of it has worked very well for us. There are other ones that I've heard of one is called nice job. I think. So there are other services that will do something like it, but you should be looking at this. And if we had to do this over again, like people ask us like podcast listeners and people in the Facebook groups ask us, like, what would you do if you like started over again? And we've talked about that before, like with leasing cars, instead of buying them outright and things like that. But this would have been one of the things that we would have done first. I don't know if it existed when we started, but it sure does right now. So if you're listening to it and you are a brand spanking new and not, you kind of figuring out like, well, what should I focus on? Here's a way to focus on something that's really important without you having to actually focus on it. You can book a software to do it for you. And then that is taken away in the background. I remember one of my favorite things we did when we first started, I did it in June of last year. I made our review count at the time and every other competitor's review count. And then I worked backwards. We had a couple of months of data, I think from podium, we're getting X amount of reviews per week. And then I calculated, we should surpass this company on this date and this company on this date. And I kind of forgot about it, but it got everyone really excited. Cause if we just keep pressing on asking for the reviews, then man, like suddenly you're top dog and the state. And I don't think we tried that hard to do it honestly. And it's just really cool.

Brandon Schoen:
Well, you don't have the spreadsheet pulled up, but I remember the numbers. You said our top competitor, which was a franchise Merry maids, got like 50 some reviews in the last year we got 126, right? It's almost three times as many.

Brandon Condrey:
Well not 166. If you look at our other dashboard, but we need to get over three X, what they got in the same timeframe. So that's what we're doing versus what they're doing.

Brandon Schoen:
And that's like automating it. This is not like a bunch of extra work and doing these review pushes like we used to, which was very manual labor, very more, lot more work. And so guys, this is work upfront a lot more work upfront, but you do the hard work upfront and it pays off. It's just like when you start any business, especially this business, there's a lot more hard work upfront. You put in the work and then systems get into place. People get in place and it gets easier and easier as you go. And so this is a perfect example of that. And it is a like actually when we first launched it, we kind of went overboard and we had to do an all sorts of messaging and all this stuff. We were trying to like test it out and experiment. And our team got kind of mad at us and they were like, Hey guys, this is too much. So we just kind of toned it back right to the review system. Brandon, is that how it ended up working? Well?

Brandon Condrey:
So it does reviews automated and it also will accept incoming texts. So if someone texts our business line, this is where it goes. Service fusion has a different incoming text line. So it texts us here. Like I was in here and looking at the dashboard and there was one from this morning where someone sent us a text out of the blue, like, Hey, do you do move out? Cleans? And Caitlyn, one of our service reps or customer service manager jumped in and was like, yep, we do move out. Cleans. Like, do you want to get an estimate? And so this is a way that we're cutting off this person potentially going to our website and booking a spot with Matt, like taking up a spot on his calendar, which could potentially be like 10 days from now. It usually move out. It's happened pretty fast. So instead Caitlin just got this person's email right away and was able to fire them off an estimate in like five minutes. So five minutes we've interacted with them. So like there is sales leads, you things that you can use it for it's robust is what I'm saying. So you should take a look at it.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. So like make it fit your business, but this is what we've been using. We love it. And it's worked out really well. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. If you guys want to use it and check it out and maybe we'll throw some other goodies in there, but basically guys, this is your business. So use something that works for you. Look at, take a look at podium and see if it works for you too. It's real simple to integrate into your current website and then let's move on. Like how can people just in general, if they're not going to invest in a technology or something like this just yet. I think we've already mentioned about leveraging friends and family.

Brandon Condrey:
Yeah. I mean, we talked about it at the beginning. So like your friends and family want you to succeed. So the thing about Google reviews and Facebook reviews, Amazon has a thing that says it's a verified buyer. We know that the person bought this product and they left a review on it. Google doesn't do that. I mean, let's, maybe it's a little bit of a gray area, but like, yeah man, you just launched like the shoot, a text message to your group of friends. Like, Hey guys, I just launched. It would be really helpful. If you left me a five star review, they don't have to necessarily consume your cleaning service. They could just leave you a blank. Five star review. Like Jason left you a five star review. Congratulations without saying anything that adds to that count the cumulative total of reviews that you have. It'll get you from five to 10, but you could feed them a couple of lines to sale. You could mention me by name and say the so-and-so gives the best customer service. Or you can say a generic statement. Like something like my house has never been cleaner. I'd love it. Or like in our case, we have a tagline claim your weekend, tell them to use it. Like if you've got a tagline like that put in there, like I'm so happy. I get to hashtag claim my weekend this weekend because Sandia Green Clean cleaned my house. Five stars. I don't think most people are looking at reviews are going to dig that deep. Cause like you can click on someone's profile and Google and see where else they'd left reviews. And if all those reviews are from Seattle and there's this one in Albuquerque that might look a little bit weird, but by and large, I don't think anyone's going to care. So that's a good way to leverage friends and family to get you a boost. And I think we're actually going to do that right now. As soon as we finished this episode, I'm going to shoot that text to my darts league and then ask them like, Hey guys, we're five away. If you guys could jump on and leave us a review, it would push us to the number one in the state. And I think that just asking for that from people that you feel more comfortable with is a really good way.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. And this is a perfect example guys, get comfortable being uncomfortable, like be relentless, do whatever it takes. Right? And so if that means like asking some people for some reviews and you're like, that sounds silly, do the silly stuff, do the stuff that nobody else is going to do because that's, we're telling you this is matters. Right? And just along those lines too, like Brandon was mentioning, the part of the benefit is if you can get in their house, there's a huge amount of reciprocity that develops there. When you give somebody a clean for their house, they're like, oh my gosh, what can I do to repay you? You can leave us a review. Like we're trying to train our teams. So that's a win. But if you can leave us a review, that'd be a double win. And just some quick tips, we talked about this in the earlier episode, we talked about this in our marketing course, guys, if you haven't picked that up, there's tons of stuff in there like this, but essentially like Brandon just said, you want to use keywords. So some of the keywords for your review, if you could ask your people to work those into the review would be like, these are the best house cleaners in Nevada, or like best house cleaning, blink your city, a house, cleaning home, cleaning, green, cleaning, whatever the keywords that people are going to use to search your services, tell them to try to work those into the review. Whether it's the title, whether it's the text of the review. And then one thing that's really powerful that we talk about in the marketing course all the time is have those people pull out their phones when the house is all clean and snap, a picture of the clean house, maybe a couple of pictures because you can upload photos to Google and Google loves content and they love different types of content. Not just texts, they like images and other stuff, right? So if you have somebody, you actually upload a review with a picture in it. And that picture is also now geographically located in that house area. So let's say, you're trying to show up your local listing. You're trying to get it to show up in a certain neighborhood or something, get two or three of your neighbors or your friends to do this in their house. When we did this guys, we showed up within a week, like very, very much near the top early in the early days, our, in our specific neighborhood. And it works really, really well. And nobody really does this guys, but it's so powerful. And so this is called like search engine optimization. It's basically, you're just giving Google what they want. They want content. They want high quality content. And if they see a pattern and like, well, there was a bunch of people reviewing five stars in this area. They're going to make your listing the most relevant listing in that neighborhood. So there's a great way to dominate a local neighborhood. Just get some friends and family or some people that you can clean for free in that neighborhood. And tell him to leave her of you with a picture and use some keywords in there. And you guys are going to stomp over the competition all day long.

Brandon Condrey:
So there you go, you got our history, you know how to do it. If you're going to train a team with some free cleans, you know how to do, if you're going to do some free cleans for some friends and family, or just asking friends and family that may not be locally, but we're going to give you one other tool in the toolbox here. So one of the things we thought about doing is if you guys are all brand new cleaning, you guys, the listeners are new cleaning companies and you're struggling to get reviews and maybe don't have the time to execute all the stuff we just told you about even though, you know, is really important. Cause we just told you it's really important. One of the things we talked about doing is like, what if we got a list of people that wanted to get reviews for their cleaning company in exchange for them leaving a review for someone else's cleaning company. So it is essentially a review club of review club, a review group. So if that is something that sounds interesting to you, we're going to gather some names, there'll be a link in the show notes, give us your name and email. And if you want to do that, and if we get a lot of interest out of that, we will set that up and then we'll give you the guidelines for when to do it and who to do it for. And we'll rotate through, like, it will be so-and-so's turn in Massachusetts next week. And then after that, it's going to be California, this guy, and we'll just go through. And that way, like if you're brand new, that'll be just a perk to, as a Profit Cleaners fan that you might be able to get. I don't know, a dozen, a hundred, like who knows how many of you guys are interested with it. But if that is something that intrigues you, please sign up in the show notes.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. We'll put a little form on there for you guys and you can enter your info and we'll follow up with you guys. But I think it'd be a cool experiment. I think it'd be fun to try at the very least to see what we can do to help each other out. And I think it would work. So yeah. Check out the show notes. Sky's as always, we always put goodies in there and stuff to relevant to the show. So if that helps you guys out, if you guys did get value again, if you got any value out of this or any episodes, leave us a review for the podcast, pull out your phone, do it right now, guys like help us out. And we don't run a bunch of annoying ads and stuff like 10 minutes on some of these podcasts. It's ridiculous. Like how many ads people will run. We're just giving you pure content guys. So help us out, leave a review.

Brandon Condrey:
Podiums, going to hit us up and want a 10 minute. Pre-roll maybe we'll talk about it. But for right now, the cost of admission is you guys enjoying what we do and letting other people know that we are trying, we're trying really hard. We put out good content for you guys. And just like you, we own a cleaning business. We're doing it with you right along the way. So sometimes these podcast episodes are hyper-specific to cleaning about broken vacuums or who knows what? But the point is you're learning from a fellow business owner, not just a business coach or a podcast person or whatever. So I think that's part of the benefit here.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah. Sometimes you've got the gurus out there that are flying the jets and stuff, but they've never even done what you're they're trying to teach you to do. It's like what the heck? We're actually in the trenches with you guys. So hopefully you guys feel that and you see the value there, but yeah. So we're grateful to have you guys listening to the show. Hopefully this was awesome. Get out there, get some reviews. You guys know what to do now. It's very well spelled out. Just go do it. Just go take action, get those reviews. And you're going to see your business grow. It's a journey, guys. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but in a year or two or three, you guys can also be the authority in your market. And when you're the authority in your market, that's huge guys. The people are going to come to you and they're not going to ask questions. They're going to be like, you guys are number one. You're the best like can I work with you? And it qualifies you. And it's a huge, huge deal. So get out there, take the action to get it done and do the hard work. And you will see the benefits come in droves. So we're excited for you guys.

Brandon Condrey:
Yep. A happy spring cleaning season, everybody. And in the meantime, keep it Clean.

Brandon Schoen:
Keep it clean.

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.