Why Reviews Come First

Employee Bonus Review System

Anyone reading this, will already understand how to operate the Employee Bonus Review System… Still, I’d like to start here with this short story, to highlight the power & importance of this system.

My cousin runs a plumbing business here in KY. He set up the same Employee Bonus Review System I talk about.

In 2–3 years, he went from just opening shop to obviously the #1 player in the area.

#1 on Google Maps

#1 on Google Search

Both with a pretty wide #1 radius.

He’s now doing $5–10m+ in revenue, still in his first 5 years in business, and his area has a pretty small population.

Why That Story Matters

This was pretty much his only marketing method, and it worked because reviews don’t just affect trust. It runs much deeper. Reviews alone are one of the biggest SEO factors for local and regional business, and having high and steady review activity makes you rise on Google overall. For any industry that is search-heavy, (and HVAC is one of the most search-heavy) that means you are growing that baseline visibility, making you either show up or not show up for thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands of searches each month.

So adding reviews increases total visibility over time.

With more reviews and a steady flow of reviews, everything ranks higher, gets seen more, and because you show up looking better, bigger, and more trustworthy, people not only see you more, but also choose you more when comparing their options.

Think about when you are looking for something. It’s pretty common for people to do a quick Google search, click the listing with the most and best reviews, look at their website, and then that’s who they go with, maybe checking out 2, 3, or 4 different businesses.

Now when there’s thousands of people searching each day, the companies showing up here are cranking out jobs at crazy margins with much less ad spend simply because they are showing up, and they are showing up looking like the best and most obvious choice.

Because reviews are so important for this, I have been shifting more and more focus onto tracking one underlying metric:

What percentage of appointments are converting into 5 star reviews?

If you can get that number to 25% or more…

with strong employee incentive bonuses
by gamifying it with your teams
calling out team members who do good, and hyping them up in front of everyone
just making it a priority

You’ll be unstoppable— fast.

The Competitive Wedge

Google Reviews are one of the most important aspects of digital growth, but it’s also important to look through the lens of competition. Everything is always a competition. So we don’t need to just do good with reviews. We need to do better than everyone else, even the current best in the area.

So what are other companies doing, and how do we do better?

This is where that question, what percentage of appointments are converting into 5 star reviews, really becomes important.

Most of the best companies right now understand the importance of reviews, and they are getting a high volume of reviews most commonly by doing high appointment volumes and then sending customers SMS automations after the jobs to collect reviews that way. This can get high review volumes… but requires high call volumes due to the comparatively low Conversion percentage… and so to catch or even surpass your areas leading companies… all we need to do is steadily convert a much higher percentage of appointments to 5 star reviews, and keep that up over time.

Consider this: if the competition gets 2,000 appointments, and 500 worked jobs… and then they turn 10% of those worked calls into reviews. They get a total of 50 reviews that month. It might seem like a lot in terms of volume, but it’s often tiny in terms of the percentage of total calls… and that’s our wedge.

We cannot beat them by playing the same game, when call volumes are not the same.

What we can do is beat them by converting a higher percentage of our appointments into 5 star reviews. For example, if we get 1/10th the call volume (only 200 appointments and 50 jobs), then if we also converted 10% of worked calls into reviews, we’d get 5 reviews… and not gain any ground at all (actually the opposite)… but … we can crush that conversion rate with strong personality, gamifying the review process, and making it a fun, competitive way for crews to make extra money with aligned incentives.

This is why… it can be tempting to copy the methods of the leaders, or the ones who appear to be winning today… and it can be frustrating & counterintuitive when on the surface it appears seemingly the exact same systems simply “don’t work for me”… but the competitive landscape is always changing. The strategy I am speaking about now, will work today… but if everyone tries to do it in 5 years… it will be to late.

You win when you notice & grasp the efficency that no one else yet sees.

I don’t know about you, but thinking back 8–10 years ago when I was working field jobs, if I got a $20 bonus for every review that had my name on it, I’d be getting everyone… I mean— you couldn’t stop me. I’d be getting the customers’ kids and grandmas to do reviews too, whether we sold the deal or not. I’d be chit chatting that extra 5-10 minutes on every job or estimate… and connecting with people, making them laugh there ass off or just whatever it took… and not everyone is me, but on your teams, there are almost certainly some people who could be crushing it that way, and who would be if there was incentive too.

Personally, I would wind up with more reviews than the number of appointments I even went to each month… with this type of incentive structure. Which really is just to say, with strong personalities and aligned incentives… even with one tenth the appointment volume of competitors… we can still beat them on the review volume… which is the single most important digital asset for Organic Search Ranking, Maps SEO, trust, conversion rates, and downstream advertising cost efficency on Google Ads & Meta Ads…

…and if we can beat them on Review Volume today while still doing only 1/10th of their call volumes… imagine what happens as our call volumes begin to rise to similar levels… it becomes an untouchable system.

Untouchable.

The Targets

So overall, a decent starting target and highly achievable target company-wide is to convert 25% or more of worked calls to 5 star reviews.

Now to truly crush and become #1 in the entire region quickly, recruit strong personalities for your teams and gamify the reviews, treating it as the cornerstone of the business. Convert 50%+ of all appointments, not just worked jobs, deal or no deal, into reviews, and watch absolute magic happen. On average, every 10 reviews represents a 2.8% revenue increase… revenue that is stable and organic and pays dividends for years to come.

As opposed to Google Ads or Meta Ads or billboards or anything else, this is the #1 starting point. It is a marketing expense that goes into your own teams, stays with your people, instead of going to platforms, and it’s the highest ROI investment both short term and long term while also improving the efficiency of all other advertising.

The Benefits

Makes the crews happier, makes the customers happier by taking care of them better, boosts referrals, reduces team member turnover and the hiring and training expenses that come with it, reduces pressure to raise baseline pay for teams, aligns incentives, raises overall visibility of the business, and optimizes for growth of a valuable digital asset while steadily reducing future advertising costs.

Quick stats

65% of HVAC customers find their company on Google.
25% through referrals from family, friends, etc.
That leaves only 10% typically through Meta, Angi, HomeAdvisor, etc.

How Ad Rank Changes The Math

Let’s now look at Google’s Ad Rank, what it affects, and why it matters so much.

Ad Rank determines how much you pay to appear as a Sponsored result when running Google Ads, and also how likely you are to have big images, call buttons, and similar enhancements on your sponsored search listing. So by improving Ad Rank through reviews, and alignment I’ll talk about later, we directly affect how much it costs to show up on Google Ads, how our listing looks when we show up on Google Ads, and how much it costs to obtain customers through Google Ads.

That means with good Ad Rank, we might pay $1 to show up first on Google, with large images, a review bar, and a big call button, while a competitor pays $3 to show up second, with no pictures and no phone button, just a plain text listing. It’s pretty clear why that matters and what it can do for the bottom line.

Where Meta Fits

In an ideal system, Meta primarily comes in at the end as final kicker… the smiling face saying “hey, you already know we’re 10x better than the other guys.” …Very low budgets can work here.

With typical CPM (cost per thousand views) around $50, we can show 1,000 people who directly clicked the Google Ads, who we know are currently searching for our exact service, we can show all 1,000 the Meta ad for $50 total.

It is NOT spend to win!

but…

Without that type of retargeting, we are running “Meta-First” advertising… which shows the whole area our ads with limited ability to target. If we show the whole area a similar messaging style for months or years, it goes stale overall, not just the exact video, but that feeling of “I’ve seen this before.” Over time that turns into a quick swipe, because when someone sees something that wasn’t relevant before, it slowly starts to not feel relevant ever, and creates that automatic rapid swipe when viewed again. The growing lack of relevance also causes Meta to price the CPM even higher, because Meta’s main goal is to keep users happy and using IG and FB. And so it becomes incredibly easy to enter the negative efficency spiral with “Meta-First.”

That being said, “Meta-First” marteting can work fine in early investment periods to get more people seeing you, especially with a “local expert” angle and an ad that feels new. It feels like community. People are happy to see it and happy to support it… at first.

However, as it goes stale over months and years, the “local expert” you’re happy to see starts to fade into that irrelevant quick swipe, and this can create that experience I hear all the time: but last year it was great. I urge everyone to consider the broader view of what we’re doing with the ads and who we’re really talking to. There’s a lot at play, so not only is there the growing staleness, lack of clear relevance, not perfect alignment, and no way to truly target your clients based on interests and similar signals, but also:

Last year, fewer businesses were spending money to compete. On average, every year, about 20% increases in costs happen as more businesses flood in to get their gold, so to speak. And like any gold rush, when everyone shows up, margins thin, and businesses that don’t evolve get eaten up.

So “Meta-First” is not always wrong, and at low volumes it can absolutely be the right play early on to grow volume quickly, but it can quickly get expensive after months or years of similar advertising. It is possible to continue “Meta-First” effectively over time, but you need major change to media, making it extra funny, or extra crazy, or something with a big enough change and enough entertainment value to feel fully new & watchable as content. It’s possible, but much harder, much more entertainment and personality based, and it still carries growing inefficiencies leaving you fighting an uphill battle for attention… instead of positioning for long term dominant visibility.

The Framework

The highest ROI shift is to really consider Google Reviews as the cornerstone of the business. Grow it obsessively. Grow it as though it is the business, because it is the single most important factor in overall, long term growth and visibility.

So the primary goal: get more jobs and turn more of those jobs into reviews. The ad spend is worth it, even at break even, as long as we are efficiently cranking out 5 star reviews for each job and therefore turning every break-even job into long term visibility growth and scale.

The Margin Math

Obviously, we want to turn immediate profit still, but the ability to run thin margins and develop long term efficiency and revenue growth on the back end is the key to beating competitors. While they are trying to spend their $5,000 on ad spend to get back $8,000 today just for the sake of that $3k one time… we can bid more aggressively for jobs, knowing we are getting todays value, tomorrows efficency, and growing digital assets that will pay dividends for decades.

We win easily, with structural advantage.

The Effect

The effect? As more competition enters the digital marketing space year after year, and it inevitably becomes more expensive to compete, you have built yourself a wedge, a moat, that others cannot cross. You aren’t focused on having to get back $1,000 for every $500 on ads, competing in that short-term, tight-margin game that everyone else is in, racing to the bottom. Instead, you’re cruising on organic and using paid advertisements primarily for growth at will &/or call volume stabalization to support large teams through seasonal variation.

The Full System At A Glance

Step 1: Reviews As The Asset

Employee Bonus Google Review System, treating reviews as an invaluable asset to the business. Key metric to watch: conversion rate of calls turning into 5 star reviews.

Step 2: Aligned Google Ads

We run Google Ads with unmatched alignment, rendering over 1,000 landing pages that perfectly match the search query to the exact landing page for that exact service in their exact neighborhood. These pages are hosted on the fastest available hosted network and built on lightweight HTML, meaning load speeds under 0.5s compared to industry standard of 3s. The difference is bounce rates around 2% compared to industry standard of about 53%. We’re talking double efficiency of competitors day 1 with page speeds alone.

I’ll send more details on this soon. It’s truly insane and it’s private software, not publicly available. I have searched hard and found no company capable of, or offering, anything close to this type of alignment at scale, but its depth requires a whole separate message or videos.

Step 3: Meta Retargeting And Off-Season Deals

We use Meta for 2 things. It is for retargeting Google clicks, hyper-targeted, low ad spend, super high return, and then we also use it for off-season deals. During the off season we can run specials and maintenance packages that will not grow stale because they are not year-round, and because off-season has less people searching, Google inevitably slows down during off season, leaving us with less to re-target.

Why This System Works

First, we improve the efficiency of our current working systems to position us for optimal long-term benefits while adding very little cost.

Second, we improve the efficiency of advertising, so our ROI is stronger than competitors, allowing us to spend more per job and stay profitable when others can’t.

Third, we gain major leverage, as we have each system feeding the other. Visibility, job volume, trust, positioning, all set in a positive spiral, launching us to regional dominance.

This system is how national brands are running things. This is how it works when you go on Google and search something and it just seems to follow you for days or weeks.

And this is how, when there’s about 500 companies in each small area, you become one of the 3–5 choices that are consistently in primary view, and one of those 3–5 companies that gets 80% of the regional business.

Final Note

For Small Businesses

If your operation has a family and values-oriented style where scale is optional or maybe even undesirable, I’m not trying to scare you away here. If you prefer to keep the business smaller, more about family and community as a personal choice, this system will still be great for getting you exceptional margins, safety, and stability with nearly 0 ad spend, because it’s really designed for enough efficiency to compete at scale. Overkill, but still effective.

For Medium and Large Businesses

If you are already leading your area or areas in visibility, you might think you already have it on lock, because you kind of do. But here’s what to watch out for. If you’re far on top, you will likely find a point of diminishing returns, as 5,000 reviews at 5 stars might be roughly equivalent to 1,300 reviews at 5 stars in terms of trust in the eyes of the customer. Furthermore, there can even be a downturn effect that can pop up at some level of visible size of your company, when you stop feeling local, and many customers will actually go for smaller-feeling companies where the cultural impression is that the small guys care more or support local feels more wholesome.

I’d still urge you to consider the conversion rates of jobs to reviews rather than the raw review count, and turn your focus toward better displaying those reviews through new parallel branding. New companies for new locations. The reviews themselves don’t diminish in value. They just need to be better distributed through new branding, new website, and new GBP for new locations so you can show up appearing as multiple independent options in the area. You will almost certainly get much more benefit from being 4 of the top 5 companies that show up, each with 1,250 reviews, instead of showing up as 1 out of the top 5 companies that show up with 5,000 reviews.

The reviews are still extremely valuable, and at scale the system should not be discounted or discarded, just re-worked.

If you read this all the way through and found it interesting or useful, shoot me a quick text to let me know. I’m considering writing more of these article and newsletter-style info pieces in the future to help with keeping big-picture clarity, but only if useful.

P.S. This message is primarily for motivation and alignment on the path and purpose. Don’t stress remembering all the info. We’ll be running the all the ads & tracking the performance… so there’s only 1 thing for you to do, which is to…

GET. THOSE. REVIEWS.
🙏🫡🥇