Newsletter
Dated April 19, 2026. A long-form perspective piece on growth, visibility, and the operating decisions that compound over time.
I wrote this article to give some insight, and put things into perspective.
If you read it all the way through, you will come out with a new level of clarity.
Feeling certain, maybe for the first time, about the most important areas of investment for growth, and also seeing how achievable it really is, truly profound levels of success are within reach.
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.
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…
You’ll be unstoppable, fast.
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.
Because most of the best companies right now understand the importance of reviews, and are getting lots of reviews primarily by doing high appointment volumes and then sending out SMS automations after the jobs to collect reviews that way. The ones who have a lot of reviews right now are mostly doing just that, but if they are doing it with higher call volumes than you, the only way to catch up or surpass them is by steadily converting a higher percentage of appointments to 5 star reviews over time.
Consider this: if the competition does 2,000 appointments, and gets 500 jobs that they actually do some type of work for, then in a month they turn 10% of 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 number of our appointments into 5 star reviews. So for example, if we get to 200 appointments and 50 jobs, if we also converted 10% of worked calls into reviews, we’d get 5 reviews. 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.
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. 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 playing the game hard, doing stuff like giving them a straight face saying, so you’re not even gonna tip, then just wait for a reaction, wait for them to stand there awkwardly like wtf, then start laughing and tell them I’m just messing around, then lead into but hey man, there is one thing you could do for me type positioning, just lighthearted, joking, connecting, good vibes, shoot get your wife and kids to do one too if you could man lol. 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 likely wind up getting more reviews than even the number of appointments I went to each month with this type of incentive structure, and so we’re capable of actually crushing what the other guys are doing in terms of conversion of reviews per appointment.
In this example, with strong personalities and aligned incentives, we could potentially get one tenth the appointment volume and double, triple, or even quadruple the review volume of the larger company, meaning that over time, as our appointment volumes rise as well, it becomes an untouchable system.
If we get 50+ doing 200 calls, and they get 50+ on 2,000 calls, what happens when we start getting 400, 1,000, or 2,000 calls like them?
Untouchable.
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. I would go so far as to do free assessments for ridiculous things just to go collect reviews on every call. I’d treat the reviews as more valuable than cash, knowing that every 10 reviews causes an average 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.
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.
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.
In an ideal system, Meta comes in at the end just to introduce that final kicker, smiling face, hey, you already know you want us not the other guys. Very low budgets can work here.
With typical CPM, cost per thousand views, in tight audiences 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.
Without that type of retargeting, we can run Meta-first advertising, showing 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.
This Meta-first marketing can work fine in early investment periods to get more people seeing you. It can even work great at first, 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. It’s possible, but much harder, much more entertainment and personality based, and it still carries growing inefficiencies you’ll be fighting instead of growing efficiencies.
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.
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 to get back $8,000 today just for the sake of that $3k one time, we can spend $5,000 to get back $5,500 plus 20 reviews that just added long term 5.6% annual revenue increase, the actual industry average growth per 20 reviews, plus future ad spend efficiency. So yeah, we only made $500, but we also added future free jobs from the added visibility and also added to our future advertising efficiency.
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 can operate on thinner up-front margins because you’ve built a system for overall visibility that pulls in customers at scale for free. 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.
Advertising for you plays a different role. It is used to build baseline visibility and or to keep crews busy when needed, so you can handle seasonality at scale without fears or pressures.
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.
We run Google Ads with unmatched alignment. I render over 1,000 landing pages that perfectly match the search query to the exact landing page for that exact service in their exact neighborhood. The pages are also 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. There’s only 1 thing for you to do, which is to get those Google Reviews. I’ll be running the ads. Let’s win. 🙏🫡🥇
