Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast. The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over one million and annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA educational series, Learn, Do, Grow Marketing for Painters. In each episode, I’ll be sharing proven tips, strategies and processes from leading experts in the industry on how they found success in their painting business. We will be interviewing owners of the most successful painting companies in North America and learning from their experiences.

In this episode of the industry partner series of the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast titled Building a Killer Online Reputation. We host guest Oscar wins. Oscar is the head of partnerships of NiceJob. NiceJob handles the reputation management for painting companies so that company owners can focus on doing great work and building their companies. Listen to Oscar as he discusses how you can build a killer online reputation for your painting company. What’s going on Oscar? Hey, I never realized that you did those live. I always thought that that would be like a thing you recorded. You know, like a couple of days earlier and then you patch it on.

But hey, that was like 11 take as well. Crazy. Yeah, I just, uh I let her rip, man. It’s how I started the podcast, how I’ll keep the podcast. We just, no matter how big it gets, we, we keep it casual and we let her rip. Yeah, I can, I can, I can handle that. Yeah, it’s good, man. Thanks so much for having me on. I’ve been excited about this as a, as a uh as a, I wouldn’t say I’m like a, an avid every, every episode listener, but I’m, I’m a big uh listener when I’m at the driving range in golf balls.

And um and I’ve been excited to come on and, and chat to you. Yeah, super excited to have you on, man. So we are, are talking about reputation management. It’s your area of expertise. But prior to getting into that, I guess let’s kind of touch base on nice job, you know, the, the company, uh your role in the company and then we’ll go from there. Sure. Yeah. So nice job was founded, I think back in about 53, 2017. Um by a guy called Lars Christensen. He’s got quite an interesting background because he works in kind of kind of your area brand and kind of like marketing, but at an enterprise level.

So he’s working for big, big brands. Um and he kind of, I, I guess he kind of got a bit disillusioned with how tough it was for kind of smaller brands to, to kind of compete when they just didn’t have the same level of budget as, as some of these kind of bigger, more dominant players in a, in the space. Um So he kind of, he, he, he, he pivoted and had this idea of how, you know, focusing on your customers and doing a really great job.

And then having like a, an en an engine on the background that can power the reviews and reputation can be a way to kind of get a, a business off the ground and motoring without, you know, crazy big budgets. And he set up a, um, a window cleaning company based on that as kind of like a, uh you know, that like the guinea pig to kind of test out his theory. And that was up in, in kind of the Okanogan region in BC up here in Canada.

And he grew that window cleaning business, I think to something like 17 locations and obviously like tested the theory of, of, of nice job and what it was all about and then just kind of built out the software after that. And so that was kind of his background. And so it’s um it’s kind of cool that, that to, to know that the software really worked for him and it, it kind of it was the proving ground for what turned into nice job today. And then, and so as far as my role, you know, I handle partnerships here at nice job.

So we work with um partnerships can mean all the integrations with all our different big software companies. And it can also mean working with groups like the PC A and so, um you know, I’m, I’m not as active as some, but I’m, I enjoy being very active in the, in the PT A community wherever I can. So I sit on the marketing committee with you and kind of represent the kind of the voice of the, of the industry partner. Um And yeah, I also get to speak to painters whenever I come down to an expo there once a year, which is awesome and I really enjoy doing that.

I love it, man. Yeah, you and I get to see each other biweekly. So that’s a lot of fun on the marketing committee. But the uh on a structured basis on a structured basis, it is probably good for us to have some structure there. But the uh I wanna, I wanna circle back. So the founder of nice job, hm saying that he created a window cleaning company just to basically refine test and essentially build the software company. So the window company was not actually his main, that wasn’t his main focus as in, it wasn’t like his, it wasn’t his, you know, this is I’m gonna retire with this company thing.

It was, it was pretty much a way like his theory was, hey, look, I think you can grow a um I think you can grow a residential home services business by, by in the outset really focusing on like doing an incredible job and having a mechanism for capturing these those amazing experiences that you provide customers. And then having also in that mechanism a way to kind of get the word out and amplify this amazing experience that you were providing to people. Um I’m sure it like grew and developed and as he, as you know, as he added locations, it became a much more established and um intricate business with different marketing strategies.

But at the core, it was based on this idea that he talked about for a long time, which is, which is customer driven growth, which and that should be, you know, a key part of anyone’s of anyone’s marketing strategy. And so, yeah, it is, it is cool to know that it’s, you know, even before nice job was as a thing kind of the, the whole theory that it was based on was being, was being proven out in the wild. That’s neat man. Yeah, if it’s, if, if his main company, you know, if it’s not his main focus and it grows to 17 locations and the guy is obviously doing, doing something right?

Because that’s pretty impressive. I wanna, I know, we’re gonna unpack a lot and you and I talked about some things we’re gonna discuss but customer driven growth. What do you mean by that? Exactly. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s this concept of, um, customer driven growth. I would say, I, I, we think of it as a fly wheel and it kind of feeds itself and it all starts with you as the business owner and it all starts with your philosophy of, of being somebody or running a company that delivers an incredible experience to your customers.

And that can be, you know, just how you show up in terms of delivering on expectations that you’ve set how trustworthy you are. But it could also be things like, are you doing things to kind of to, to coin like a, a well used phrase to surprise and delight your customers? You know, are you doing those all plus ones they’re not expecting? Are you going above and beyond in the way that you treat them so that you’re, they’re gonna, you’re gonna turn them from being somebody that’s just, hey, a, a moderately pleased user of your service to somebody that’s like a raving and vocal fan that’s gonna go out there and tell their friends and, and be vocal in the community.

So that’s step one, step two is like, how do you capture that voice? And that’s where this kind of reviews section comes in. It’s like, it’s, it’s almost no good having customers that love your service. If they’re not being vocal about it, it’s, it’s, it’s nice to have and it’s a feel good thing, but what you really want them to do is to go out and spread the word and, and basically become like a sales guy for you. And so that’s kind of where our reviews kind of go into that flywheel.

And the third piece of it is how do you, how do you take the voice that you’ve captured and how do you amplify it? So, are there ways that you can review, use reviews in your marketing, in your, in your website design and your social media messaging that kind of that, that change the conversation from being one where, hey, I’m Oscar. I ran a painting company and I’m telling you, Brandon how great my painting company is or hey, I’m Oscar. I ran a painting company. I did an amazing job for Nick.

Nick’s gonna tell you what an amazing job he did. It’s just changing the focal point of that conversation to one that customers trust, which is other people like them. And then the idea being that, that just feeds, you know, that, that amplified voice just feeds into another opportunity for you to deliver an amazing experience. So it’s kind of where that fly wheel comes in and, and I’m waving my finger around expecting nobody’s watching. But in fact, it’s a, it’s a podcast but think of a circle of like, it’s the whole idea with customer driven growth is that each customer brings you one more customer?

Ok, I love that. So the nice job now does nice job help, I guess. Let’s get into exactly what nice job does because you talked about a couple things, the, the customer experience. I don’t know if nice job plays a part in that, um, the actual obtaining of the reviews, you know, getting customers actually be vocal about their, the satisfaction with the experience and then actually amplifying those reviews. I’d love to see how a nice job plugs into all that. Yeah, exactly. So, so very simply, like nicer is a software company straight.

Like the first thing for anybody that’s listening that that wasn’t aware. Um, and uh, the software really touches all the kind of the, all those pieces of the flywheel, like pre predominantly like our bread and butter is, is on the reputation management. So specifically on auto automating the review generation process of your happy customers. Um, but we like to kind of, it’s a slight tweak on it, but we always talk about ourselves being a reputation marketing company because we do a little bit more than just, you know, managing your reputation.

It’s, it’s a little bit more proactive and so there’s a couple of other things we do. So, one of our, one of our most recent product updates is actually a gifting feature, um, and that’s designed to kind of tie into that first piece of the fly fly wheel that we were talking about, like how are you going above and beyond for your clients? So we have a, an automated gifting feature, a nice job where you can send either physical gifts or you know, discounts or credits for future services.

Um Just to help our users create those amazing experiences, then we have the the kind of review generation piece of the software and then on the kind of the last piece of the fly w which was that amplifying that voice of the customer. Then we have a couple of tools that we have widgets for your website that showcase those your amazing reviews. You have automated social posting, we have kind of referral features as well. So really, we plug into that whole flywheel and just designed to kind of help people grow their business.

I love it, man. So we talked about a few different things we’re gonna touch on and I didn’t plan to getting, I didn’t plan on getting to this one for a little bit, but there’s an opportunity for a joke. So I have to take it. So uh yeah, let’s do it. So we talked about incentivizing people, you know, they want to know, hey, what do you think about incentivizing people for reviews, right? Like paying them, giving them a gift card, whatever. So it sounds like nice job has now built into their software and ability to bribe people for reviews because you just say, hey, I’ll send you $100 by a nice job.

You give me a review is, am I understanding the feature correctly? Hey, that would be a really cynical way to look at it. Um But, but, but I’ll allow it. Um Yeah, so people to answer that kind of point, people always do, they do regularly ask about whether or not we should be almost paying for review in a way, you know, if you do give us a review, then, hey, I’ll give you a gift card or whatever and, or knock off a percent of your project or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. And I, I think people have different opinions as to whether or not it’s necessary. I’m not gonna, I don’t think I’m in the position to sit here and say that there’s, there’s one right way, right way of doing things. And in my experience, I don’t think it makes a, makes a massive impact. I think there are things that if you’re, if you’re doing everything else properly. Like if you have a, um, if you have a systematic way of doing it and it’s a repeatable model that you’re asking everyone, you have the right ways of following it up.

It’s, it’s gonna be cheaper for you to do than just offering, than, than, than paying for them and, and often more suc more successful, one thing I will share that I have seen work really well is, is sharing. I mean, this is kind of, again, we’re running, we’re getting to this down the line. But um I’ve seen people have great success with sharing goals with their customers saying like, hey, I’m at 70 reviews. I really want to get to 100 before the end of the year. Um It make a massive difference, like almost that, you know, by that, at that stage of the process, people have, they’re on your side, you know, you’ve done an amazing job for them, they want to help you out and that can almost be a bit much more of an, of a motivation to help you than you saying, hey, I’ll, I’ll um I’ll give you a Starbucks gift card if you do us a review.

Yeah, man, that’s cool. So you’re basically aligning with them on this objective and, and people are gonna want to help you because of the actual, there’s an actual attainable goal and they want to help you out and I think they can see how they’re really helping your business succeed, which is ultimately what they want to do by, by leaving the review. Yeah, that’s great, man. So the for, for people listening, technically, technically, uh it is against schools in terms of service to a century bribe or, or try to pay people for review.

So the, the nice job doesn’t do that. That was a joke. But the, the actual um you know, offering of people for a gift card or something would technically go against school’s terms of service. That being said, you’re all entrepreneurs, you can accept, you know, choose your own risk profile. I will say that I had the fence, my exterior fence replaced at my house. Uh they had over 1205 star reviews. They seem legitimate reviews. I was like, how the heck is this company getting so many reviews while they fix the fence?

I mean, it was ok. I think the fence was fine. Subcontractors experience wasn’t anything to write home about. So I was still wasn’t sure how they were getting so many reviews and then they sent me a letter and the letter included a bribe and it was essentially if I, if I leave them a review here, I get a $25 I think it’s 15 or $103 Chick Fil a gift card. I could leave it on this platform. I get another one. So they have over 1205 star reviews and they are violating the terms of service.

So I would just leave that story there with everybody. Yeah, it’s one of those ones where you just, you don’t want to wake up on the wrong side of Google that they’re too big sometimes to mess around with. And you know, we’ve heard those horror stories of somebody that’s gone from 300 reviews down to 20 overnight and you’re like, that’s not the position you wanna be in, definitely do not buy reviews. So, in, in the sense that there’s, you know, I guess bribing is the cynical or rough word for this, but there’s incentivizing, which is basically what we’re talking about right now and then there’s straight up buying fraudulent or fake reviews.

People who are not fake Google profile, they’re not even a real person or they’re not a customer of your business. Never ever do that. Number one, it doesn’t actually help you in terms of ranking because it’s not tied to your location. So a lot of people don’t understand that it could technically help in terms of conversion. But number two, as Oscar just said, Google does have a very good way of finding those reviews and then one day you lose all of them. So and then all of a sudden maybe your whole Google business profile is flagged for, you know, fraudulent activity.

It’s just not a good idea, just use nice job or, or whatever you’re going to do, create a good, a great experience and actually just get good as a company at generating reviews. So Oscar now we can back up, we already kind of got into some of the good stuff, but let’s talk about why online reviews matter. Yeah. Um Wow, big big topic. But I mean, I, I like to think of it in terms of kind of short term immediate benefits and, and more longer term ones.

Um, I think the short term ones is, hey, how is this affecting the, the near term growth of my business? Um both in terms of revenue and, and and in terms of profit. Um And in the long term is like, how is this, how is this approach structurally putting my business in place that like in a, in a good place to succeed, like over others and um work successfully through different business cycles, through booms and through bus and through competitors and all this sort of stuff. Um But talking kind of going back to basics with some of the short term benefits.

Um some of this, you’ll be able to help me out on Brandon because it’s, you know, it’s, it’s right bang smack in your alley in terms of the the seo benefits, particularly around your kind of Google your local listings, your Google map profiles. But obviously, for any business owner, you wanna rank high highly in your local area. And there are a ton of things that go into us that, that are not um kind of my expertise, which is why people don’t need to go and speak to you.

But um what we do know is the big, big part of how you rank is how other people view your business and Google places a high value on how you are reviewed by people in that area. And so the Holy Grail really is to get either on the first page of Google, obviously in that, in that Google three pack, which gets talked about a lot and obviously a big thing that’s gonna affect your ability to get in there along with all the basic stuff if you’ve got it covered is how many reviews you got?

Are they recent reviews? Are they regular reviews? Uh, what’s your star rating? And all of that is, is something that can obviously be, um, be affected by having a gr a great reviews strategy. Now, the result of obviously getting in that Google three pack and the stats are crazy. I don’t know if you have them branded, but it’s like 80% of, of business in terms of people making that online search gets done in those like top three people that show up on the Google three pack. So um if you’re running a, a painting business and you’re not in it, it should be like your number one goal should be to how do I do whatever I can to get in that in that kind of Google map pack or three pack or whatever you call it.

Um because once you’re in there, once you are in there, your your sort of inbound lead generation um is gonna go through the roof. Um Do you back that up? Yep. Yeah. So the um being at the top of the search engine results page, you know, top of the C is critical, the Google business profile that three pack that Oscar’s talked about that is above the organic results. So ultimately, you’re trying to get in both of those. Um the the percent of people that go to the Google business profile as opposed to directly to your website is astronomical.

And when on mobile, on desktop, it’s more of an even split. Uh mobile is definitely very heavily rated toward uh leaning toward the Google business profile for the review. So II I wanna touch on a couple of things in terms of ranking. So there’s two, two ways to think about everything that you’re doing really marketing in general, but especially your online reputation, there’s lead generation. So actually getting people to see your, your website or your profile or your whatever and actually getting them to take the next step to call, you submit a web form, uh chat, you through Google business profile, whatever it is, that’s lead generation and then there’s lead conversion.

So lead conversion is getting them to actually book an estimate. Uh that’s step one and then getting them to actually, you know, book the project, the step two. So lead generation lead conversion, obviously lead conversion is heavily dependent on social proof. So having a a ton of reviews, having those reviews be five stars, having pictures in the reviews is super key, actually helps your rankings, having detail, having uh you know, mentions of specific project manager or people at the company lends more trust to those reviews, all that stuff helps convert higher because you look like a very trusted company and people, people want that detail uh in terms of the ranking.

So the lead generation, your star rating, obviously a a 49485 is gonna be a lot better than a three. You don’t have a, a three star rating. I think everybody knows that your star rating matters, your total number of reviews matter. So you want to have a minimum of 10. If you’re below 10, you’re not even in the game yet. Minimum of 10 then set your benchmark at 50. And once you get above 1003 you start having a substantial number. Uh and then the cadence, this is what a lot of people don’t realize the cadence actually has a big impact on your rankings if you were to, let’s say, do a uh a uh review generation campaign to, to pass customers for the past two years.

And somehow you, you felt confident that you could magically reach out to customers over the past two years and get 100 reviews. It would be much better for you to spread out those 100 reviews over, let’s say 20 weeks and do just a set number per week than it would be to dump them all at once because Google’s ultimately got to discount them if you don’t have the cadence. So that means that this needs to be built into your culture. It should be something that’s being done all the time.

Uh We encourage a minimum of one out of three of your projects should have a five star uh review. So star rating your starter, uh your number of reviews and then the cadence of your reviews are all really important. Perfect. Wow, you, you just sit here and just do a monologue for her. I’ll see you, you know, just circle back with me in the end. But no. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no, I mean, it’s you, you’re exactly right. And so that in terms of those short term benefits, you touched on them both, then, you know, reviews help you get found, they, they, they, they ensure that you show up in the right places when people are searching for your services and they make sure that and they make sure that you get chosen um versus other people you think about the other way.

And this is something that Nick Slavic talked about before you think about the other way that people find your business is they might jump on to a, um, a Facebook group and say, hey, has anyone got a painter for me in Vancouver? And you get, you get 24.7 suggestions. The first thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna search that you’re gonna search that business name on Google or go to their website. And probably the first thing, the next thing you’re gonna do after that is read a few reviews because it’s something crazy.

Like nine out of 24.9 people will trust what other people say about a business, more than what that business says about themselves. And I think that plays out certainly my experience when I’m looking at products and probably, I imagine a lot of people listening can probably relate to that as well. Um, so that’s on the revenue side, right? You’re gonna get more leads, you’re gonna convert them, you’re gonna, and you’re gonna convert more of those leads into, into opportunities. And if you got a decent sales process, then ultimately more more customers, the other kind of short term benefit should be on your, on your, on your profit margins.

Um And there’s, there’s two ways to kind of think about it. This one is, um, one is on a per job basis and then another is kind of overall as a company, um on a per job basis by having a really strong reputation. You don’t have to, you don’t have to like quibble with people on price. Um This is a big thing I hear from kind of either customers or people that I bump into at trade shows is, you know, when you’ve got 2100 well, like 210 reviews at a 25 star rating, you’ve got, you’ve got somebody saying, oh, this person down the road can do it for 210% less.

You, you can so much more confidently stand behind and just say, hey, well, my price is, is my price, you can read my reviews. Um you know, price is what, what you pay, what value is what you get, that sort of thing and, and you can take that position with your customers and, and stand by those, those those profit margins and not have to discount in order to win business. Um and then on a kind of on a, on a business level, just thinking about your different um your different marketing channels and, and thinking about ones that have high return and depending on how you get your reviews, you there are, there are lots of cost efficient ways whether it’s a nice job or doing it yourself for you to increase your review generation.

And it’s something that it, it can have amazing returns for your business in terms of some of the stuff we talked about without chucking a load of money into it. So, um so just two ways in which I think it affects the profit of your business. Yeah, I mean, that’s such a great point making people less price sensitive because you are clearly the market leader in your area in terms of reviews. And this idea that that nine out of 5 people, I think the the official stat I saw is either 225 240 or 210%.

So it’s nine out of 10, but that number of people will read and trust online reviews and their purchase decision will be swayed by them when deciding to make a major, major purchase, which a painting project is a major purchase uh by and large for most homeworks. So it’s interesting. One more point I did want to bring up in terms of the, the ranking and really the the conversion stuff. So when people are reading reviews, they tend to um heavily discount those that are older than three months old.

So some people say, oh, we have a fair amount of reviews. But when you go and you sort by newest, you know, maybe they have one or two within the last three months, people, people start to heavily discount those because you don’t, you don’t really know if the same teams running it, you know, the same PM is still on staff, you know, was there an ownership transition? So as, as reviews get older and older people feel less confident in them because they don’t know if it’s truly the same company that’s gonna come out and produce the work.

So it’s something to be aware. And like, you know, you have, I know there are people out there that say, hey, right. If I can just get to 150 reviews on Google in my area, I’m gonna be sweet. You know, that’s, that’s way more than other people. I just need to really focus on that and then I can, you know, I can stop investing in it. I can stop incentivizing. Just don’t worry about it. Exactly. I can switch my software off but then, you know, if I’m going on and I see that you just stop and then you start. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nice job. Nice job is a wonderful software. Uh, I’ll do a little, little plug here but it is because we actually partner with nice job with quite a few, quite a few of our partners and we have an account, uh, and use nice job. So I’m quite, quite familiar with the software and it does what it’s supposed to do and it does it well, um, appreciate you. Hopefully not too much more plug in. Yeah. No, if you can just send me that check, I think we need $500 was what we said.

Um, short term versus long term benefits of reputation management. Is there a way to think about this differently or, or not really a difference? So, I kind of think everything that we’ve talked about up until now has been on the short term side. Um, it’s this kind of like if you’re not doing these things, you should, you can turn them on and realistically you should, you should see kind of improvements within, I would say within like a few months. Um If you’re kind of doing things properly in terms of like your improvement in rankings, your ability to convert, leads your ability, your ability to kind of um keep your margins, your margins.

But over time, the, the the long term benefits or these structural impact, like the more of the structural impact of having like a um a customer driven growth to go back to that phrase approach on your business. Um because really it, it impacts so many different things. Like, first of all, like reputation is one of these things, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to build, easy to break sort of thing where, but the long term impact if you, if you’re known throughout the community as, as being, you know, by far the, the the leading painting company in, in your, in your city or in your town, then that’s an amazingly powerful position to be in.

It’s gonna have amazing long term, long term benefits. Um And those are pretty far reaching, you know, usually we see that the, the there’s a correlation between the businesses that have the best reputation in area and their ability to hire staff and their ability to keep staff um in generally the kind of um the motivation and the, the, the level of, um I guess enjoyment of the staff when they’re going to work because they’re getting that recognition, appreciation for the work they’re doing. And they’re seeing that in public places.

If you have an internal culture of, of incentivizing, rewarding, rewarding reviews with your staff, it’s again like a, a way of keeping them in the game, giving them skin in the game, incentivizing the right behaviors that, that improve your business over time, um concentrating reviews and looking at your customers reviews and as assessing them, gives you opportunities to build a better business. Like you’ll be able to surface things that maybe you weren’t doing properly or you’ll be able to see trends of things that people really value.

If you, if almost all of your reviews are like, hey, these guys are really on time. That’s, that should be something that you feature in your marketing. It’s like this is something that people really care about in my area. So there are so many different benefits of, of having a really good review strategy that don’t necessarily tie into your near term financials, but will help you build a winning business in the long run Oscar. Have you talked about this before? Just uh just a couple of times.

Yeah, this is, this is neat. I’m I’m learning stuff here and not only learn things every single time, but I’m learning quite a bit here. So the because this is a pretty holistic approach you have here, you know, you’re some of these benefits are not immediately obvious, right? So the the ability to recruit top talent and then keep them, the ability to recruit top talent is already not something most people think about you think, ok, if you get the reviews and you’ll get more business and that’s where it ends.

But people want to work for a winning company in an ethical company, a company that does things right, that they can be proud of. But then, then they, the pride that they have from seeing those reviews and the, the reviews go up just being associated, being a team member at that, at that company. I think it is even less obvious, you know, and then that goes into 10 and, and morale and if a happy, a happy employer or a happy team member is going to ultimately produce a, a happy client.

You know, that, I mean, I’ve heard some really great examples of, of how this is done really well and you know, nice job. We, we work across, you know, like the um the residential kind of contractor spectrum and I had such a great conversation at a trade show last year with a, with a plumber that uses nice job. He’s got a big plumbing company down in San Diego and, and some of the stuff that he was doing was so great. You know, they had a, they have a specific whatsapp group for all their texts.

Every time a review comes in where they’re mentioned, you know, they’re sending out a boys and, and, and props around that group, they’re getting, they’re getting kind of financial bonuses. Um Each paycheck that corresponds to those reviews. People actively talk about like, hey, I haven’t been in that group recently. I really want to get in there. And so, you know, those people are gonna be the ones that are going over and above on those job sites to really create an amazing experience for those clients. And then he’s also talked about how, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of companies out there that need, that need techs and they need, they need, they need talent.

And there’s a, there’s a, well, the narrative is there’s a lack of talent. So there’s a, you’re kind of on the wrong side of that supply and demand curve. Um But, you know, II I personally think that people should be, they should be using their reviews in their hiring process. You know, if you hire a guy and you like them and they, and, and, you know, they’re kind of, um they’re out there assessing their opportunities, you should point them to the, to the, to your Google Business page, just show the amazing job you do and what people, what people think about your business and how, how strongly it ranks in the area and how it’s the best business out there.

Um He told a story about how there was this um apprentice that I think um had a, a whole bunch of different uh companies to choose from and they went with his business with the guy plumbing, um, almost predominantly on the fact that based on their reputation, their reviews and he wanted to work for the best company out there. Uh That’s a good, it’s a good case study right there. It’s a good example. For reviews. And I think the idea of using reviews to leverage feedback so often companies in general, not just painting companies but will operate and just be assuming, you know, assuming a customer is happy and not actually really knowing or assuming they’re happy because because of XY or Z, but the reality is they were happy, like you said, because actually the crew was on time, the pressure manager was like, you know, maybe the communication is what they value the most, not the actual finished project, you know, so the actual seeing what they write about is is huge.

And then using that in your marketing collateral and material in your messaging and you can train up your estimator and, and hey, you know, these are some of the, the things that are most important. So make sure you bring them up like, hey, we’re gonna be on time every day, punctuality is very important to our culture. You know, things like that will then ultimately help you have a higher conversion rate. And again, loop back into that uh reduction in price sensitivity that you talked about. That’s huge.

It definitely feeds itself. I had an awesome story um a few weeks ago about um this company, I think it was pressure washing business. But they were, they, they had a thing going whereby they were um um they were reading a book, I think it was how to win friends and influence people in like team meetings once a week as a, as a team. And one of those things was about um about remembering people’s names. And um and then a review came in like two weeks later where, where um where a customer had written on this Google review been like, hey, yeah, the tech remembered my daughter’s name and it was just like such a nice touch.

And so they, they then just the, they knew that they had tapped into something that, that made a real difference with their community, you know, and as you think about trying different things in your business, like reviews is that way of getting that real time feedback? Like is this working, do people care about it? Should this be something that we do more of less of? Um But I thought that was a really a really neat story of how reviews kind of help that process. Yeah, it’s a super neat story, Dale Carnegie, the a a person’s name is the sweetest, sweetest word in the world to them.

There you go. So how do you this idea of incentivizing your staff, building it into your team culture to generate reviews? Do you have specific examples of good ways to incentivize staff? Yeah, I mean, I think that the again, you don’t need to get super kind of complex about this, but really it’s just about, it’s about knowing which, which team members on which jobs and you can, you can set different rules different parameters, like I know different, different Cr MS and Fs MS out there allow you to kind of tag different texts to different jobs.

So you know, who is there? So you can either do it if you know, if a review came in for a particular job and you know, the people that worked on it, you can incentivize them or you can do it, which a lot of people do on if they’re named in a review. And I, I kinda like the, I like that second approach because of what you talked about before, which is the additional trust factor that having other staff members in the company named in reviews gives people like if I go and see that, I if I go and read a review and it mentions, hey Brandon did an awesome job for me and so did the XY and Z person.

Um that review just has a little bit more, you know, oomph to it. So, you know, I love seeing it. I love, you know, like a classic example would be, hey, my tech gets named in a review, they get a $20 bonus or whatever paid at the end of the month or something like that. It’s a pretty, pretty easy way of doing it. And then you start seeing these reviews come in where they’re like, oh no, sorry, you start seeing people calling your business and saying, hey, I would really love to get Oscar on this job, I’ve heard some, I’ve heard some, I’ve read some really good reviews about him and, you know, imagine the feeling that that tech would have to be say, hey, this customer has specifically asked for you on that job.

It’s like it just feeds that cycle of, of them feeling fulfillment and enjoyment in their role. Yeah, absolutely. So, one thing that’s come up with, with some conversations I’ve had that I think is interesting because I think it can cannibalize review generation in terms of Google reviews or, or Facebook or, you know, those kinds of online platforms is internal surveys. So, trying to get a net promoter score, you know, having, hey, we, we have a, a five question survey about our service and ultimately, that’s returned to the, to the company.

It’s great feedback. It’s a great feedback loop. I even heard of one company. I was very proud of how many they had and they, I think they, they would like tape them to the wall and they’re like hundreds or thousands on the wall. And in my mind it’s, it’s great feedback, but I’m also kind of screaming internally like those could be hundreds or thousands of Google reviews because I feel like people are less likely to want to do you two supposed, you know, let’s call a favor, two favors.

It’s you’re asking now for two things versus just the one thing. What’s your thought on that? Yeah, I think there is, it’s a great topic and I think there’s, there’s kind of two things that you can kind of, kind of talk about here. One is, one is the, the, and it’s maybe a, maybe a rabbit hole. I don’t really want to get too far into because I don’t see myself as an expert but like the, the, the argument over what’s better MP S or, or Google Reviews, I think my, my take on it is that it kind of depends on the stage of your business.

I think for, for most people running um running kind of painting contracting businesses. Google Reviews are always gonna be more valuable. I think once you get into much larger businesses doing, you know, multimillions in turn over a year, I think then MP S starts becoming a good way to kind of indicate your value for potential suitors or other people. One looking to invest to get into your business because it’s kind of like the language that they all speak. There’s a good way also of, of monitoring your, your customer service internally for, for kind of training and, and kind of employee kind of a feedback and assessment and evaluation purposes.

But I would say the majority of the time Google reviews are gonna are gonna be way more valuable to the growth of your business. Um And so that point that you mentioned there about, you know, um asking customers to do two things that’s massive. You know, if I get, if I get a survey and then I get a follow up to ask review, I mean, the, the odds that I’m gonna do that second favor are, are, are way lower than if I just get asked for one thing at the start.

Um, we always talk about, you need to make leaving a review as easy as possible for your customers. You don’t want you, they don’t need to create an account for anything. They don’t wanna have to um fill in like a multi question survey. They don’t want to have to do multiple things. Um It just needs to be like a link. Click Google, write something you need to reduce as many barriers as possible. The, the second thing to talk about is this idea of, of what’s kind of called review gating in the industry, which is this concept of if I send out that initial message saying, hey, what did you think about this service?

Maybe it’s connected to MP S, maybe it isn’t. And if they gave me a eight out of 10 or higher, then I’ll ask them to leave a review. But if they, they were lower, then I won’t ask them to leave a review. Um Again, that opens up a whole can of worms, but again, it’s something that is technically against Google’s terms of service. It shouldn’t be, yeah, you shouldn’t be um you shouldn’t be kind of gating reviews because the whole thing is designed to be a trust exercise, right?

It’s for Google wants to get a realistic picture of your business and what people think about it, not a curated one. Um And then on the on the kind of flip side again, it also just i it impedes your ability to actually get the maximum number of reviews which is gonna make, I would say probably the biggest difference. So um yeah, I would say in, in, in kind of both aspects, I think just get straight to get straight to asking for the review. Don’t worry about filtering or doing MP S or anything like that. Yeah.

So you, you said several million in turnover? Is that your weird, like British, that’s the British word for revenue? Ah, yeah, it must be, I never really thought about that. That’s, that’s, I know, I know it. Yeah, that’s funny. Um, so, ok, so you just segued into a really good point, which is, hey, gating reviews, maybe you don’t want to give it to everybody because maybe somebody is not going to leave you a five star, right? Um, I, I have kind of two questions so I’ll just lay them out for you.

Number one, if you have a bunch of reviews, do you think it’s better if you don’t have all five stars if maybe you, you have a 403 or 48 versus a five? And then number two, how do you deal with bad reviews. Yeah. Um So answer to question one, like undoubtedly it’s better to have, um, once you, once you get into scale, undoubtedly it’s better to have, you know, a 4.8 or a 4.9 versus a versus a perfect five star. Um And that, that makes sense to me just theoretically as I think about it, but also it plays out in the data.

I think the numbers support it that the uh the optimal rating is somewhere in that kind of 4.7 to 4.9 kind of spectrum. Um And really, it just shows that you have an authentic business, you know, you, I’m sure everybody’s looked at companies in their area where they have 100 reviews and it’s all perfect five star and you think like what’s going on there, like that’s sort of a fish, you know. Yeah, it, it seems a bit fishy because everybody runs a business and they know that, you know, you’re always gonna encounter those people that are just upset and there’s nothing you can do to make the situation better and that those people exist so to kind of not see them up there is, is very odd.

Um And the other thing is that potential kind of customers for you, they, they care about your approach and how you, how you look after um people that you’ve interacted with in your company and often looking at how a business owner has approached a negative review can tell you more about that business than you know, the 10 5 star reviews above it. And so I always, I would always urge kind of people to, you know, nobody’s, nobody’s gonna get excited about a one star review coming coming in, but always gonna see there as an opportunity to demonstrate your customer service and not think about some about it as something that’s gonna kind of damage your business ability to kind of to compete in your area.

Um What was your second question? Yeah. Second question is, how do you deal with bad reviews, right? How so when they come, come in? Yeah, I think we’re pretty clear on how to, how to approach this. The first thing is that you want to keep it, you wanna keep it short. Um The last thing that people want to do is is, is read the response and for it to be a two paragraph thing explaining, well, like actually you’re wrong because this isn’t what actually happened. Uh We tried everything we could, you still weren’t happy, we did this, you still weren’t happy, we did this, but you still weren’t happy.

So by the time you’ve got down there, you’re thinking like, man, this is um this isn’t what you wanna see. Like an argumentative business owner. It can be difficult to kind of stop yourself at the moment because it’s a very emotional thing that happens and it can be the easiest thing to do is just to type out a response in the moment. But I would kind of, I would encourage everybody to have an sop that they don’t respond for like two hours. Um just to kind of give them the chance to, to take a couple of deep breaths.

But as a general rule, I would say, hey, keep the response like one or two sentences and do whatever you can to take the conversation offline. So give them a, give the that customer an ability to either reach out to you directly, a phone number to call an email to get in touch with. Um and and make sure that they feel heard so that the ideal response would be like, hey, so sorry that um that you feel this way, your feedback means a lot to us. Um Please reach out to me directly and we’ll do whatever we can to, to, to fix this for you.

That would be like the ideal um the ideal bad review response. And then the, the best thing that you can see you can do is that if you resolve that issue, which nine times out of 10 you can do because it’s a misunderstanding or, or something like that is ask that customer to go back and edit that review. Just to say, hey, quick note, I spoke to, to Brandon, he fixed this for me. I feel really great about their business. Um They treated me really well. Cos that is exactly what that perspective lead is gonna want to see.

Hey, there was an issue they dealt with it. The person walked away in, in, in the long run, feeling good about things. Yeah. A lot of times a, a negative experience, a disgruntled customer can turn into your biggest, uh, case, biggest piece of marketing collateral. Yeah, definitely. We all know that, that nobody’s perfect. No company is perfect. So if you think that you need to be perfect or pretend to be perfect, then you’re not thinking about it the right way. And it’s like Oscar said, if you have 100 reviews and they’re all five stars, then it, it looks shady.

Looks like those reviews aren’t real. But if you have a couple of negative experiences, well, that tells the homeowner everything they need to know because they know that you’re not perfect. You know, you’re not like God walking in there or something. So it, there’s a chance you’re gonna mess up. Not, that’s just a fact. We’re all human beings. We might make a mistake. The question is when you come and you and you work on their home or their business or whatever you’re doing, if you do make a mistake, what’s gonna happen next and that’s when you can really put people’s minds at ease because they know if you make a mistake, they don’t have to worry about it because you’re the kind of company that’s gonna fix it.

Hm. Yeah. Love it. Oscar. You have anything else you wanna, you wanna share about online reputation in general? Nice job ways that people could potentially reach out and contact you, uh, prior to wrapping this up. I want to say one thing that we have just haven’t touched on which is, and to give, just to give listeners if they were because a lot of people, they, they think about reviews like, hey, I, I try it. I asked my customers they say they’re gonna do it and they just don’t do it and people have never heard something and people can get pretty easily kinda like disenfranchised the whole process.

But like, I’m not gonna bother. It’s just, it’s, it’s hard to do. It’s awkward to ask. People just don’t do it even when they say, yeah, I’m definitely going to and, and um I’d say if there’s one thing people can do is to have a follow up process and that will dramatically increase your odds of getting reviews. Um at night shop, we automate the whole process. So we have, you know, once the job is done, we automatically send a text out to the customer and then we know that most people will get that text.

Even if it’s like, even if you’re still at the property, they’ll look at it and be like, yeah, I’m definitely gonna do that. They’ll put the phone in their pocket and they’ll go inside and all of a sudden the kids are shouting, the dog’s jumping on the sofa or something and, and it’s gone out of their head. So the follow up is is key. And with nice job, we have these campaigns that follow up three more times over the next two weeks only if they haven’t left the review by the way.

Um And the data shows us is that fourth step. So the third email follow up is actually the second most, the second highest performing step. So the highest performing is that initial text because you’re getting the customer in the most excited, you know, like you’ve just done the job. But after that, it’s actually the fourth step. So the third follow up and I kind of say this for two reasons. Firstly, it’s just to kind of tell people like, hey, follow up is key. If you, if you’re not following up, you’re leaving reviews on the table.

Um Because people just need to be reminded, you’re not gonna bug them, you know, they’re happy, they like your company, they want to help you out, they’re just forgetting and the data shows us that, you know, the the fourth step is the, is the, is the most successful. And so, you know, people might think about them and be like, wow, four touch points, that’s quite a lot that’s gonna piss people off, but it’s just not true. The data just doesn’t support that opinion. And then the second thing is is that if you don’t feel like you have enough time as a business owner to follow up with each customer four times, speak to a nice job and we can, we can automate the whole process for you. Ok?

So nice job. You guys will, you guys will include that fourth, third, follow up, I guess fourth touch point. Yeah, it’s the fourth touch point, third, follow up, I guess. Are these, are these all text messages or are they? So we do one text and then we follow up with three emails after that. Um It’s fully customizable so people, people can and do fix like um switch it up if they want to try different things. But that’s our kind of out of the box campaign and, and we find it really works, you know, like uh we find a customer that’s, that’s doing things well and you know, um they are offering a great service, have have the automation set up.

Um They should be getting anything from like anything from 25% to 40% conversion rate. So um right in that kind of sweet spot of three out of every, every 10 customers leaving your review. Yeah. How can people learn more about? Nice job. Yeah, so I’m I’m hoping Brandon if I if I do my job properly, I can give you a link that you can you can put in the in the show notes. So they can check that out. But um if you go to get dot Nice job dot com where we’re there, you know, if you, if you’re a PC A member, you’ll find us on the Industry Partners section.

Um You get a discount by going through the PC A. Um If you’re a client of Brandon, you get a discount of going through Brandon. So there’s loads of different options um for reaching us if you want to speak to me directly. I’m Oscar at nice job dot com. Um If it’s something that pertains to your specific business and whether or not you wanna get set up, just be prepared. I may reroute you to, to speak to one of our sales team. But I’m more than happy to kind of to, to triage the request uh in the first instance, Oscar, I appreciate your time, man.

It’s good to connect uh again. And uh thanks for all your knowledge bonds here, man. That was excellent. You’re so welcome. It’s been a, it’s been a um a a year long goal to, to be featured on the podcast. I was about to say lifelong, but that would be, that would be Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But uh but it’s been great, Brandon. Thanks so much for having me on. I’m super pumped to have you, man. We’ve known each other for quite a while and I like you a lot.

So, thanks for coming to our podcast. Thanks for sharing everything. Uh look forward to, to the reach out that you’re gonna get from this. Thank you, Oscar. No worries

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