Hey, everyone, welcome to the restoration success show. This episode is going to be a little different from our usual format. What you’re about to hear is actually a recording from a recent webinar we hosted on the importance of your online reputation. Keep in mind since this is from a live webinar, you might notice some references to visuals or interactions with the live attendees that wouldn’t normally be part of a podcast. A link to the webinar will be provided in the show notes. Enjoy. All right. Well, welcome to this month’s webinar. It’s been a minute. We’ve been busy. I know I do these once a month. But we another other thing we’ve been that’s taking priority, but we’re trying to get back in the saddle. So this month from crisis to confidence, a restoration company playbook for turning online reviews into revenue. Here we go. So what we’re gonna cover today, um You know how you can have all the tools in the world but still fail at getting more reviews, how to tap into a multichannel approach. Online reviews is a team sport. You know, everybody needs to be on the same page in order for this to work. Why you must acknowledge and respond to reviews both good and bad and indifferent and how to have all this taken care for you. If you’re trying to simplify life and business and, um, you know, continue to grow and scale your reputation, rep reputation online, it would be good if I could talk today too. Huh? Um, but yeah, look, this is, I’m gonna try to keep this. It’ll probably go anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. I tend to go on rants. I’ll try to keep them short and sweet today. Um But yeah, you’re here. You’re now. So I’d suggest just be here now and take notes. So you can, you know, the way I look at learning, I had a mentor teach me this. He’s like, look, you can read books, do webinars podcasts all day, every day. But if you don’t change your behavior from what you read or learned, you basically didn’t learn anything and I’ll never forget that that was gold. So hopefully you guys will get some good takeaways today that you can into your business. You start, uh you know, increasing your reputation, reputation online, which therefore help you grow and scale this thing, which is, I think what we’re all trying to do in this, this line of work. Um Some of you I may have met before. Some of you may not. And again, this is about me helping you, not me per se. But um I’m the founder and owner of restoration marketing group. I grew up in construction, worked in construction for a long time before I started this company. So it does give me a little bit of uh experience um on both sides of the coin, right from the online marketing world and the restoration world. I come from the rebuild recon side, commercial uh realm, you know, building office buildings, hotels, schools, which is a little bit different. But, you know, some of you might do commercial work and do the rebuild recon. So that’s the world I used to work in and it’s kind of a whole different animal. But, um, but yeah, it’s helpful for our clients, you know, helpful for this because I can, I’ve been on your side of the fence before. Um, and, you know, just us in general, you know, we didn’t just start dealing with restoration stuff yesterday and we, hundreds of clients all over the US and Canada. Um, you know, at this point generated 16,000 plus jobs for our clients over the years. We just, you know, water fire mold is our bread and butter. Yes. Some of our clients have multiple businesses. You know, some have carpet cleaning, remodel, plumbing divisions, construction GC divisions. Yes. The water fire mold is typically how they, um, you know, come, come into our world and, you know, we don’t pretend to be perfect. We’re straight shooters here and, but we do have, you know, we’re the number one rated restoration marketing company in the, in the country as it speaks because we care like we don’t, we don’t pretend to be perfect, but we actually care on taking care of our clients. Um, and I’m gonna try to, you know, add some value for you guys today. Um Look at it like I said, so you can walk away with some action items on, uh increasing your reputation and, and, and why this matters. Um So again, why, why are we here and what are we gonna talk about today? Online reviews and your reputation can make and break your company now. It’s, you know, just because you don’t have a Google business profile set up or your reviews are not where they should be. Can you still run successful restoration company? Yes, you can, right. But you know, you want to make your life easier and you want the more you build on this stuff, it helps both online and offline marketing which equates to more traffic leads and jobs over time. Ok. And, and a point I like to, this is honestly why I started this company, I used to work in this world. And we all know like, and again, if you’re, if you are older generation, there’s nothing, it’s not bad, but it was typically, I was around a lot of older people and I was like, hey, we might need to be paying into this internet thing like, oh, dang. You know, but you can’t get a flood job from the internet and I’m like, you can’t be serious. Um, and I’m like, that’s why that’s what led me to branch out and start this. I was like, y’all crazy, y’all think Google and the internet is going away. Um, I was like, you can be serious but again, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Right. It’s the, it’s the thing and I’ve been around some people with that mentality and that’s the opposite of how we operate. Like you’re not innovating and keeping up in this day and age, like you will get run over and now there’s a, I coming into the mix and I’m not gonna go down that rabbit hole. Now, I might do a webinar on that in the future. Like we’re working on some things. It’s on our road map, at least. I mean, it’s a lot harder to implement. Um, but, you know, a I is coming, I look at a, I, how people used to look at the internet. Oh, this is a fad. This is, I mean, I’m, I’m telling you, you, we will all get blindsided if we do not pay attention to it now. So, back to the, you know what this webinar is about. This is about online reviews and this really helps drive the point home. I’m like, look, have you heard of Amazon before? And they’re like, yes, I’m like, OK. What do you do on Amazon? You go to Amazon, you go to the search bar, you type in the product, you look at the top results, you look at the reviews you purchase said product. What do you think happens in the home service world? People go to Google, they do a search, they look at the top results, they look at reviews, they make a phone call and we, and again, that, that’s an example of how trying to bring this home for people that don’t think this stuff matters or it’s like, I mean, we generate 20253 millions of worth of work every year from the online world. And so like it’s, it’s like, you know, y’all can, well, everybody here probably, you know, you, you’re believers, I’m not trying to convince you, but it’s um so if you’re having any doubts about it, why this stuff, that’s an example I like to use to kind of drive it home. Um because that’s what’s happening all day, every day, home service world, which, you know, restoration is considered a home service, you know, niche, right? Um Now some of you on here because we come across this all the time. Like maybe some of you work with TPAS doing a couple of million a year or whatever, you haven’t really dabbled on the online world and you could still run and build a successful company with that. But when we look at their website and then we’re, and we’re like, you don’t even have a Google business profile. If you’re doing millions of work a year, you don’t have any reviews. Um, so that’s just something to keep in mind and you know, what companies like we, you know, we can help. And, I mean, you know, I’m not saying you have to work with us there, there’s plenty of companies out there, but I’m saying like that’s, we understand that that’s how that can happen. And like, so if you do good work and take care of your clients, you want to reflect that, right? So that’s why this slide is, I’m sure you do good work. You just wanna make sure your online presence matches the quality work you do right now. You know, some of you might already have some of these uh you know, reputation management or review acquisition Softwares out there. Um But just having that alone typically is not enough, right? And that kind of that could lead to a fail, right? And, and the reputation management piece of it kind of solidifies and help escalate all the other marketing things you’re doing. And again, both online and offline and I’ll explain how that and give you an example in a minute on how this can play out and how we see this play out in the real world, right? So let’s talk about the opportunity most of you. And again, we’re all of this is enough, we’re not trying to get onesie twos stuff here. Like we’re trying to load up to where lead flow and client acquisition is not a problem. There’s ebbs and flows in this industry. We all know that and you can either be dominating online. There’s still gonna be ebbs and flows on the amount of leads and jobs coming in. There’s only so many houses that catch on fire a day, only so many houses that flood a day, right? Um But you want to be the go to dominant force in your service area, I imagine, right? Um Well, this can kind of help escalate that. Now, you know, you do want to use tools but there, there’s, there’s a million Softwares for this, that and the other these days, but they’re not, they’re not implemented into the company culture, implemented into the sops and processes, not a whole lot gets done, right? But if you do this correctly, you can have your reputation, speak for itself and kind of put gasoline on the fire is all I could say. Um And then that’s where again, we’re trying to get you to be the dominant force in your area to take market share, right? You want to capture as much market share as you can. Some of you guys might be in larger cities, some of you might be in smaller, the competition will vary typically what we see. I mean, this is I I say this is a big boy, big Girl game restoration. You can make a fortune, but that also brings in a lot of, uh, competition into this world because people know that, um, it’s a great industry to be in, to be honest. I mean, it’s kind of recession proof in a way. Right. You know, a lot of our clients had record breaking years in 2020 because I mean COVID or not, houses are still gonna catch on fire. Mold is still going to be remediated and flood houses are still gonna flood, right? You can’t ignore that when your house is on fire about to burn down. So we are in a great industry um that can, you can do well in a good economy and a bad economy. So there’s some, some things to keep in mind now just to drive this point home a little bit more, you know, do online reviews matter. And I came across an interesting study here that 84% of people trust an online review as much as they do like a referral, a personal recommendation and 77% of consumers think that reviews more than three months old aren’t relevant. So that’s why, you know, we come across this all the time like, yeah, you might have like a 5.0 rating, you know, eight reviews. We’re like, you know, Bob that it’s been three years since you’ve got a new review. Like, what are you doing? Like we need to get this implemented in your call. And like, and if that was three years ago, think about the amount of jobs that he could have. Um I mean, this is an example but loaded up and captured over those years, right? So consistency um is is huge in this and they’re, yeah, they’re mission critical to say the least, right? So here’s an example I wanted to show you. So this is um a client of ours. He’s been with us a while and he, you know, he was, it was fine, right? When he got going, he was like a 4.24 0.1 which is not awful, but it’s not great. And just so everybody knows here, a good rule of thumb on this is uh we like to see our clients at a 4.7 or higher. We’ve tracked this again all across the country. We’re basically in all the markets across the country at this point. Um 4.7 is typically where the lead flow from the Google map pack or the local service ads will, you’ll get more love from Google on that. So keep that in mind if you’re below that, get on it and get above a four point, get at least to a 4.7. Obviously, you want to pull it up to a 103 0.95 point if you can. But I wanted to show this example too because for this particular keyword, I looked at, he’s not number one in the map pack. I mean he is for several other terms like we go out for hundreds, right for these, for our client. But over time there will be ebbs and flows like people will be swapping in the rankings in the map pack. That’s why none of this stuff is said and forget it because it’s it. People are always battling for the top spots and if you stop doing any of this seo or whatever your position will be taken, that’s how we look at it. When clients come to us, hey, we represent you, it’s go time and then we’re not stopping because we’re trying to get above the competition. We will help you get market share. But see this particular client, he’s only number 24.8 like not too bad. And again, you know, United Water of Beaverton, you know, if you’re on this call, like I don’t mean anything bad by this, but a 4.4 like I don’t love it. And so, you know, people wonder like, well, is is he gonna get calls from being here? Um Yes, he absolutely will. And I’ll show you something here in a minute to prove this. Now, this is something that a lot of people don’t understand. I think um I almost forgot to mention this, but I want to mention it while I’m thinking about it. So you see right here where it says 4.28 and 42 reviews. And you see right here, 4.7 and 56. So, and this is a local service ad. Some of y’all might call it Google guaranteed. Like there’s a million different things, but it’s basically Google’s pay per lead service. Some of you might work with 33 miles service direct inquiry. There’s a million of them out there now, you know, pay per lead is a big lead channel in our industry, right? This is Google’s version and I’m gonna, I’ll do a separate webinar on that at some point. But if you’re not doing local service ads, you need to start setting this up today. And here’s why we see this. And again, we track this all across the country, not just one, a one off scenario, these leads are exclusive leads just like a 33 mile. You can and Google and Google just changed this. Like you should be able to like speed on and get a credit immediately. Now Google is like you, you mark them satisfied how satisfied you are to believe that you can still hey, review this lead and um they won’t charge you for it if it ends up being a spam call or whatever, which will happen from all these sources. That’s one bad part about getting your online presence better. Like you, you know, it’s easier for sales people and spammers to find it is what it is, right? That’s you know, we gotta deal with it. Um, but those leads are exclusive leads. Meaning you’re the only one that gets a call, like Angie’s and all that. A lot of times they’ll give you the lead and they’ll also sell it to five other companies. That’s why typically people hate Angie’s because they’re harder to close because there’s five people trying to call them at the same time as well. These people now, could they hang up from you and call their, you know, ABC restoration down the street? Yes, they could. Uh, but this is business. Anybody can do that. Like, that’s just the reality we all have to deal with. But they’re typically 3.13 to 75% cheaper cost per lead than what, 33 miles to 50 to 75% cheaper. That’s arbitrage. Business is all about this. Like, that’s why our clients were like, hey, we want to get it while the getting’s good. Just like everything in life and in business. The cost of all of this will only go up over time. It’s just like Google ads has gone up over time. There’s nothing any of us can do with it. Right. We just got to deal with it and learn how to make money on it. Local service ads, great opportunity, um, to grow and scale your restoration company. Now, the downside to it, typically our clients have pretty big goals. I mean, they’re trying to ramp up you, you can’t hit your growth goals with that service alone. Typically, that’s why our strategy is to layer in different lead channels to help dominate and to help with the ebbs and flows. Because you know, you can get 20 leads one month from your LS A the next month, you might only get 10, right. Well, ideally people want 2030 4050 you know, you want to scale up your lead volume over time. So that’s typically why we have a comprehensive approach. But reviews matter. So back to the, the, you know what the webinar is about, the more reviews and the higher the rating will absolutely increase the amount of leads you get. Period. Uh There’s no, like we’re not guessing at this. It’s, it’s proved like I said, we watched this with our clients. This is why we call it out like, hey, you’re sitting at a 4.2 rating like one of our clients, I’m thinking about, he’s in, um, Seattle area. Yeah, he was like a 2703 and I was like, Steve you that, that has to be, you gotta get it up. It’s killing, it’s, it’s hurting how many calls you get in your map pack. It’s killing your local service ad. He’s like, yeah, you’re right. Um He got up to 4.8 his lead volume went up. So those are a few points to remember. Don’t forget that. Now how these have different amounts. So when you set up a local service ad, it connects to your Google business profile. Now, your Google business profile reviews will push over to your local service avenue, your local service ad reviews, you can get reviews directly on this profile right here. Those reviews do not push back to the Google business profile. So remember that that’s why he has 56 here and, and 42 here. Um And so really, I should uh ping him and say, hey, like drop, drop a few more on your GVP because you don’t wanna like neglect this one altogether. Um I’d really put, you know, 245% of the focus here. No one needs pushed to here and then every now and then get some new reviews on the LS A because that is a signal to ranking better in LS A because these, these are verified reviews for the local service ad portion. Um So I just covered a lot there. Hopefully that made sense. But those are important things and hopefully that provided some clarity to you guys on like how these reviews play in each of these and then you know which direction they go back and forth. Remember Google business profile reviews, they also pump over to your local service ad. If you get a local service ad on a review on the actual local service ad, those do not translate back to the Google business profile, ok? Alright. So, and this is just an example people like, oh, this doesn’t matter. Nobody, nobody searches on Google for fun. And I’m like, you know, he, he’s got over 210 calls so far this year he’ll, he’ll hit 22024 plus as over 22025 calls from his, um, now this is from like, you know, his website Google Business local service. A we’re not even running paper clip for this particular client. So 210 phone calls. So everybody’s like, oh, I’m not doing online marketing. It’s like mine, like people like our clients, you don’t take market share from me. That’s fine, be fine like, but this stuff works. I’m telling you. Um That’s why this is important. That’s why I wanna put it there. Now, a couple other things, remember I, I touched on this a minute ago. It’s not the only ranking signal for ranking in the map pack or ranking in local service ads, but it Google sees this Google sees and knows everything about us at this point, whether we like it or not. That’s just reality, right? We gotta get over. Um But it is a ranking signal. 23.1% of consumers look at online reviews and as far as converting traffic to calls, it’s a major factor. Like I already went through the example of 4.93 versus 24.9 like it’s huge. OK? Um So that’s why I just want to drive home. And I mean, if there’s one big takeaway from this, I want y’all to walk away being like, hey, we need to take this more seriously. I mean, that alone will be helpful for you guys. OK. Um So how do we do this? And I mean, this is just something you guys can think about. Like, why is this important to you? You know, if you’re trying to grow and scale, it’s hopefully, all right, we can have a belief like you’re either growing or dying like it’s not very, you know, because sometimes every now and they’ll come, well, I kind of wanna maintain where I’m at. It’s like, well, you know, with inflation and cost of living, like your employees are gonna want raises every year. So how are you gonna compensate for that? Really? It’s, I mean, you need to be growing in some form or fashion. Yes, some are more aggressive than others. Fine. But, you know, it’s, it’s hard to be stagnant and keep everything afloat when you’re not uh trying to grow this thing. So let’s go over the five key principles on how we acquire and get and things to think about when we’re trying to get more five star. And this is, you know, I don’t, a double edged sword is the right metaphor to use for this. But I like this because here’s why if you know, it’s part of your company culture and you’re gonna start requiring your techs and project managers and whoever to get more reviews in order to ask for the review. What do you and you want a five star, what do you have to do? You have to provide a world class customer experience and take care of your client? Now, I know that seems obvious, but we all know that’s not always, you know, top of mind, people just want to get the job done and get paid. Um We were in a difficult line of work, you know, collecting, you know, from insurance companies and all that. And if you do rebuild recon, like, you know how those can go sometimes. Um but if the technician knows he’s gonna ask a ask for the review to end the job. Like he, he’s, he’s like, well, you know, I can’t get a one star review. So I better take care of this client and do good work, which I think all of us here hopefully want to take care of our clients and do good work, right? So that’s why I love it. It’s because like, not only does it help take care of your clients, but then you could get a five star review which will help your company. So it’s a win, win for all parties evolved. And ultimately, that’s what we want, right? This what’s um you want it to be a win, win for all, for all people um building it into your company culture. I’ve seen this a lot over the years. I mean, it’s one thing, you know, if you’re the, the marketing director or the owner, like, yeah, this is great. I understand it’s important and you could bring it up on one meeting. Hey, guys, let’s get some more reviews. All right, what’s, what’s next on the agenda like that ain’t gonna cut it. It has to be brought up consistently in company meetings or, you know, tool. We, you know, I used to call them toolbox talks. So, you know, you just have to meet the crews, you know, 2250 a.m. everybody round up in the trucks. All right. Where’s everybody going today with the plan? I mean, you could do it then however you do it right. Um But it has to be brought up consistently and built into the culture now. Well, I, I’ll go deeper on that in a minute, but again, everybody has to be on the same page and it has to be revisited consistently. It’s not like you can’t, you can’t just bring this up once all of a sudden that’s you’re good. Um And it doesn’t have to be you necessarily like if you have an operations manager or coo or whatever, like, you know, they could be in charge of it if somebody needs to track it, measure it and bring it up consistently. Um And reward people for doing this we’re talking into in a minute. Um But that those are a few ways and things to think about as far as building it into your um company culture and you know, this is a saying I like too like what you measure and respect and celebrate, you get more of, right? It’s kind of like where energy flows or, or focus goes energy flows, right? Not saying um but you want to celebrate the new reviews and celebrate the people that are taking this seriously and helping you put this into place and getting the reviews. OK? I mean, I know this stuff is higher level, but sometimes you got to start higher level where you go to, to the Wes on the technical stuff, which we’ll get into a little bit, but there has to be company buy in into the culture like, hey, this is the plan, this is what we’re doing. How’s everybody feel about this? You good and you kind of need commitment and buying from everybody in order for this to work long term um for your company and you, you do want to use when you can, there’s certain tools that can help make this easier and it might require a little follow up. I mean, just like, again, we’re all in business at this point. There, none of this is just like, oh, I’ll make one phone phone call. I mean, you know, the odds of them answering it, it’s, you know, we all know that’s why having a comprehensive approach to this is, you know, using an app asking for the review in person doing an S MS doing email, doing phone call, leaving a voicemail. Sometimes it’ll take that and again, I know it’s annoying and a lot of work. But again, like, welcome to business. That’s what uh no, nothing about this is easy. It just takes consistency. Um And then you do want to acknowledge and respond reviews which I’ll get into in a minute on why that can be important. So, you know, just think of, you know, take a minute to pause. I mean, think about all those things and another thing too because I make this mistake sometimes, like, you know, whenever I do a training course, mastermind whatever, have a call with a mentor, you know, you might have 21000 things that you could do, but sometimes it’s best we just pick one highest and best, you know, use for the company and we get that implemented, then we move on to the next uh task at hand, right? So out of those things I covered, there might have been one thing that, you know, maybe it just starts out with you bringing this up on company meetings and bringing it up on every company meeting. How do we do on reviews? None. All right. Well, guys, are you asking for reviews? No, you’re not. All right. Well, let’s talk about right. I mean, that alone can help get this ship moving in the right direction. Ok. So, well, sorry about that. That was 100 that was some uh All right. Well, technical difficulties. I don’t know what just happened, but I guess all you guys are doing here looks like. So let’s, uh, we, um, all right, sorry. I don’t know if that kept recording, if it was still on for you guys, but I got kicked out for a minute. It’s always something, you know. I don’t know. So I’m based out of South Carolina. We got that Hurricane Helena or Helen. I don’t know what it is but it’s not hitting us, but it is a little windy here and raining. So I don’t know if that took down my internet or what happened, but all right, I’m back. Sorry about that. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again. That was annoying. I was sitting there talking to, to nobody for a minute. But all right, let’s continue. Um So what I was saying is on this point, deliver world class experience and if you guys want to know the most effective way out of everything we’re going to cover today at getting your text to ask in person is still the highest converting and best way to get more reviews because think about it if you do a good job and you’re like, you know, hey, Bob, you know, I’m sorry if your name is Bob and you’re on here, I just like you that example sometimes. But you know, hey, Bob, if you’re happy with uh the work we just did, if you don’t mind our business is built on a reputation if you don’t mind leaving us a five star review, I’d greatly appreciate it here. I can help you do that real quick. If they’re older demographic, they don’t know how to do it that here. I can, if you don’t mind, like, I could just pull it up from your phone for you. Yeah. Sure. No problem. But again, you have to do good work in order to do that, like they’re pissed off because you put in the wrong backslash on the rebuild. Like that might not be the best time to ask for a five star review, right? Obviously, common sense has to be taken into account when doing this. But this asking in person is still the best way to do it. Now the call after the service, the apps, the postcard, yes, like it’s not gonna be 100% close rate on this, right? So that’s where all of this other stuff comes into play on helping, you know, get the reviews where, you know, because maybe the job finished out. And so and so forgot to ask. I mean, that’ll happen, right? This is we’re all humans. Um And then we talked about rebuilding into your culture and then yes, doing follow up via email S MS phone call, voicemails, you kind of have, you know, capture some of those that you weren’t able to get um in person. Now, a couple of things too. And again, I’m not saying anybody do anything, anything unethical, illegal, whatever because I know this does vary by state how the, you know, structure is the insurance companies when it comes to deductibles and this, that and the other. So take this with a grain of salt, you figure this out before you actually do it, but let’s just say it’s not an insurance claim and it’s just a cash pay, little dinky mold removal job or something. Hey, if you leave us a five star review, I’ll give you $40 off your invoice or hey, I’ll send you a $10 Starbucks gift card or I’ll send you a $20 Amazon gift card. And again, you’re, I’m not telling you to do that. You’re in charge of figuring out what you can and can’t do when it comes to incentivizing the client. But giving them some sort of incentive to leave to leave you a five star review. Think about that. Ok. So that’s one huge point. I want everybody think about here. Now, another way some of our clients will do this. You can incentivize your technicians. Hey, for every five star review, I’ll give you $25 cash gift card gift certificate at your favorite restaurant. If $4.4 doesn’t cut it, you might have to bump it to 50. Those are your people. It’s your business. You got to figure out what gets them chicken. Maybe it’s a half day, once a month on a Friday be creative. You know, everybody wants different things and and is incentivized differently. You could incentivize the text, right? I mean, I would start with putting it as like part of their job description like, hey, like this is part of your job description like you do the work you have for review period but to help get the buy in to help get the reviews, hey, every pass RV, you get 20 bucks added to your end of the month. Uh you know your first paycheck at after the end of the month or whatever? Ok, good point. Remember it, it works. Now, were you overachievers on here? Another good idea. Some of our clients do as you can do monthly giveaways for your team. Whoever gets the most five star reviews this month gets a $250 gift card to Amazon, your favorite steakhouse, whatever, right? Come up with something that people want to compete for, put them in a pool every month, somebody gets rewarded and for your high cheaper people like, you know, there’s, there’s sayings out there, right? Like if you incentivize what you want more of from your people, right? It’s one thing to tell them to do it and I mean, hopefully they do it but to just make it a little easier on everybody, you could do a monthly giveaway. So those, those are three big things that work like a charm and again, make sure you know, the rules and regulations based on the job you’re doing the state, you’re in licensing, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But those three methods work like a charm. Um, and the, the competition giveaway thing kind of gamify it, which kind of helps with the culture piece and just have all this, you know, be a little more fun. All right. Do we have any questions about any of that? You can put it in the chat or the Q and A? I mean, I’ll, we’ll have some time for cuing anything too but just drop your question in there. None of that makes sense. And I’ll, I’ll help you out or tell you my two cents. Um A few of the more well known tools uh you know, podium bird eye review buzz, we do have our own software our clients use called the Cottage. Um And again, I’m not saying if you use our, you might even have one of these, just use it, right? I’m not telling you to come use our, but if you want to, yeah, that we can talk about that. But um but these can help with the follow up via email, texting, voicemail, drops phone calls, et cetera, right? Because you want something to help you in the back. Um because time is money right? In business. So anything you can do to buy back your time and make this easier, you would be wise to think about that and implement. Um And I will say, I mean, not that this isn’t a Lee Cottage plug, but I will say the downside to some of these is these are like they only help you with reputation like our League cottage. There’s all kind of other features in our software too to make help, you know, your life easier as far as, you know, scheduling automations, call tracking, call reporting, uh you know, marketing work flows. You know, this is a bigger lift than I anticipated. But at some point, we’re gonna integrate a I interleague cottage. And again, we don’t have that yet, but that’s where we’re taking our software because again, I don’t not, not to go on A I talk but it, it’s coming right? So we’re just gonna figure out a lever to make our clients more money, right? That’s what we all should be thinking about doing. Um All right. So there’s a few, there’s a Handfield tools you guys can look at shop around whatever. Um Now responding to reviews, you know, you wanna re respond to the reviews, just have somebody on your team. Um You know, hey, like, you know, they don’t have to do it as soon as it comes in, maybe once a week, once every two weeks they pop in and just reply back. Um And, you know, I feel like I came across a study too that, you know, sometimes having a bad review can almost help all of this because it makes it seem less spammy and less fake. I thought that was an interesting article I read on it and here’s the reality of it running a restoration company. You know, your slash construction company, it’s gonna be impossible to please any and every, but period there’s yahoos out there. We all know that we all have to deal with them every now and then. Well, ideally we don’t deal with them, but that’s just life, right? Humans are complicated and there’s some crazy out there whether we like it or not, sometimes you can do a perfect job and you know, there’s just people out there that get off on leaving bad reviews. Hopefully don’t if you get that vibe in the beginning, like try not to work with them because those are the people that no matter what you do, they’re just not gonna be happy. And in the construction world we all know jobs aren’t gonna go exactly to plan and go perfectly. Period. It’s construction, that’s the way it goes. So it’s not everyone that’s gonna be a five star, it’s fine. Like don’t sulk over it too long, but responding to it in a professional manner can be helpful and then you could like, politely call out like, because, you know, sometimes people get companies mixed up and they’re like, man, you weren’t even a client of ours. You left a review on the wrong serve pro, right? Like any of your serve pros. Like typically there’s a lot of y’all running around in the market. Um, you know, because y’all do it by zip code. So it’s kind of, you know, sometimes they’ll mix up the serve pros leave. So, hey, Tim, you’re not even a client of ours. You meant to leave this one on, you know, serve pro of blah, blah, blah. So that’ll happen and, and again, don’t lose sleep over it. You just gotta drown them out with more and more five star reviews over time. Um So that’s my two cents on that base. Now, here’s something that we teach our clients and again, we don’t have hard data on this yet, but this is something that, you know, all this stuff is connected, Google Crawl, all this stuff. So we like to teach our clients, hey, don’t be Spammy about it. But when you respond to the review, see, I pulled this from one of our clients like he helped do a mold remediation project. He put that in the response. This one was a water damage project. He just put water damage restoration in the response. And again, that helps build relevance. Google sees this, you know, it could be a help your ranking signal just a little bit. Um And again, we haven’t seen, I mean, Google knows all these games too. They, they don’t, they won’t let everybody’s coming through this. All of a sudden you’re ranking. Google is way smarter than that. Um and do not keyword stuff. These responses don’t be like, thanks for calling our water damage company. So we could help you with your water damage project. Like that water problem was so bad, you know, glad we could help you with your water medication issue. Like don’t say it 45 times in the response. Like that’ll hurt you more than it’ll help, right? Because that used to be a thing back in the, you know, years ago in the Seo world, like again, Google knows all these games. That’s why Seo is tricky because you have to the keyword density and all this is important. Google knows it. That’s why this stuff is easier said than done. So don’t go crazy with it. Just mention it once kind of like he did here and just move on and if you’re gonna respond, you might as well drop something like this in there. It takes an extra 10 seconds to think about what something to say, right? Um So keep that in mind. Now, I touched on this a little bit. I mean, you know, I’ll probably do another webinar on a higher level on all these at some point. But you know, to just something to keep in mind, you know, our, our most successful clients, they have multiple lead channels in place, both online and offline, online, online and offline. And honestly that, you know, I I’ve been involved and am involved in many different things at this point like that, that’s just business in general. You can’t rely on one lead source because what if something happens at lead source? You’re sol, right. So that’s why having a comprehensive approach both online and offline helps with the ebbs and flows in this industry, helps with the consistency and predictability of leads and jobs every month that we all want. Ok. So from an online perspective, getting a Google business profile, verified set up. And again, we have a lot of our guys, you know, a lot of our, it’s, it’s we always think like not onesie two stuff. A lot of our guys, some of them are scaling national, some of them are opening new states, multiple offices in the same cities. You can have GB Google business profiles and LS A set up for all of them. So keep that in mind, you don’t just want one. And again, if you don’t have ambitions to have multiple locations, F I’m not telling you to do that. Um Just a lot of our clients are go getters by chance, I guess like, so they wanna grow out, expand out. So you just wanna layer all this stuff on with each, you know, lo new location. Again, why do we do that? It’s more virtual real estate as like to call it to the more spots you take up on the first page of Google, more traffic more leads, more jobs you’re gonna get period. OK. So verify GDP profile and then, you know, get somebody helping you rank in the map pack just because you have a, a profile set up, doesn’t mean somebody’s gonna find it and call them could they potentially, but typically not a whole lot of magic happens until you’re into the least the top three. And that’s where you really see the lead volume start to, to tick up. Obviously, you have a website built to convert optimize. I mean, it’s 2024 almost 2025 at this point, if I have to convince you that matters. Like, you know, just, I don’t know, just think about that, you know, when you’re meditating tomorrow morning. But, um, and then Seo is obviously just because you build a website doesn’t mean it’s gonna show up on paypal and google. That’s where Seo comes in searches optimization. There’s a lot of work that has to go into getting that thing to crawl up in Google and Google does not make it easy these days, especially in restoration. Like a lot of you guys probably have people that have been doing this 10 plus years at this point. Um, I mean, can you get the job done? Yes, but sometimes it’s gonna take a little time, uh, to get you where you wanna go paid ads, couple great, uh, strategies, local service ads. That’s Google’s paper call. Like I mentioned earlier. Paper click. Um, it works, you know, I guarantee some of you on here probably tried it and it didn’t work in the past. We hear it all day, every day. I mean, I’ll just say it works but you better work for somebody that knows the industry and knows what they’re doing. Or Google will eat your lunch when it comes to pay per click, period. Um, but it works. It. Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. They make multiple billions from Google ads. Like if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t be the size they are. So I’m not, but you know, let’s teach them. Now, we do advise depending on how big your company is. Like, you know, you gotta be strategic about this. Well, what your marketing budget is on the paper clip route because it is a pay to play game period. That’s the hand we’ve been deal, right? There’s nothing we, we can complain about it all day, but that’s not gonna grow and scale our company, right? So you got to figure it out the game work or somebody knows what they’re doing and then also layer in other lead channels as well if you want to be successful um long term and then to help solidify and help all of this is the reputation management review piece because remember it’s a ranking signal for LS A and Google maps. The conversion aspect for once you get ranking, getting people to actually call you, not your competition on both local service ads and Google Maps. And here’s another point I bring up too, a lot of them, you know, I’m sure a lot of you, you know, work with TPAS property managers, plumbers adjusters, insurance agency on and on. Right. So let’s say you’re trying to build those relationships or you have a business development rep, you know, they’re out there beating the streets trying to get more of these uh, relationships built. But think about this, you walk in there and I’m like, hey, I’m Jane with ABC restoration. You know, I want to talk about, uh, you know, set up a referral partnership. And first of all, it’s gonna take more than just one meeting too. That’s another thing we see like that, that’s like real work. That’s, that’s actually what I used to do for a first company. I was in construction sales and so I speak from experience. It’s, I mean, my boss told me he’s like, do you have to eat shit for a year period? And I’m like, well, you know, I got to put food on the table so fine. But if you do it consistently for a year, never had to worry about relationships or, or bringing work in ever again. But again, it took a whole year of walking in them. Tell me what, like it got to the point that, hey, you’re not gonna stop coming by until we give you work. Are you? No, I’m not, and that’s what it took. But again, I didn’t have a choice because that was at the time I was, that was my job. I’ll do another webinar on that. Probably at some point. I mean, that’s offline marketing, building relationships. But here’s the point I’m trying to make when I walk out of that office though, man, I’ve never heard of Jamie with ABC restoration before. What do you think they’re gonna do when you walk out of the office? Go to Google, let me look up ABC restoration and when you show up with a 3.1 rating on the map pack, the, what, what, what first impression do you think they have about you and your company at that point? They’re not calm. I mean, they would be, would some maybe not do that. Yes, this is all like I’m not giving you that like this is, they’re different, this plays out different ways. But think about that property managers, plumbers. These people might do a Google. Hey, let me see, like, you know what, what they look like. And then when you have a uh awesome website, you’ve got 270 reviews, 4.9 rating. But, oh man, these guys are players. Um, they see you do good work. It, it’s just, it’s kind of your first impression online. So you want that to match. You want your, uh, you know, that’ll help you get your foot in the door with some of these offline relationships. So keep that in mind because a lot of people don’t think about that. And again, that’s just like an ancillary benefit of getting uh getting more le uh leads from the internet and the online piece. But that’s just an example of why it can help you with your offline stuff. So there’s my rant on that. Um And again, you know, y’all might be oh dams full of crap. You know, we talking about like I’m telling you like this is, this is our website. Again, I’m not saying like, if you don’t want to like potentially work with us fine if you don’t find I’m not here, you know, I want to add value. But these, we got video after video after video and video and review and review and review. Th this stuff works like, and again, this isn’t strictly off views. Like, obviously we help these, most of these guys with multiple things. But again, if there are, if anybody doesn’t think this stuff works, I’m trying to just show this and again, whether it’s us or somebody else, I don’t care like we’re gonna be finding a way but like it’s, I mean, like, like read that like bottom line, they produce results. Our Google calls are off the charts and again, I’m not gonna go through all these reviews but like, again, I’m just trying to drive home that what I’m talking about today works in the real world and that’s why we’re all here. We’re not here just for some, you know, online class. Like again, I want, I’m just trying to drive home. I want your mindset, right? That you need this, take this seriously and it needs to be implemented in your company culture. Yesterday. That’s the point. I’m really trying to drive home. Now, I am getting close in. It’s 250 so I’m doing pretty good on time. That’s good. Um Now, if any of you did want to like hop on a call with us, like we do a free consultation, you can just tell us about what you have going on, you know what you’re thinking about doing. We Yeah, if you’d like to potentially work with us, cool, if not cool. Um And I mean, I did put this on here. We have a waiting list, a lot of markets to be honest. So we don’t even know if we’d be able to work together. Um And we only take so many new clients on because we do offer one on one support to make sure all of this has to be done, right? Because one complaint we hear is like, yeah, I signed up for this company. I heard from them and you know, six months, we’re like, man, we’re the opposite. We’re gonna be all over you in a good way because speed of execution is helpful in business. And so if we’re, if we do work together like we like to move quickly and get going. Um, because that’s, you know, the best time to plant trees 1000 years ago, right. The second best time is today, you know, delaying any of this doesn’t help anybody. Um So I’ll drop this link in the chat if any of y’all do want to schedule a call. Um, we do have a few more minutes. So any questions, you know, I’ll be happy to answer questions or if you wanna tell me about your scenario or whatever you got me for a few minutes. So yeah, if not, that’s fine too. Um But yeah, I’ll put the link in the chat if y’all did want to book a call to speak with us and like I said, hopefully you got value from this. Um uh Yeah, and I’m telling you even the, the incentive stuff I’ve, I’ve brought up to y’all like if y’all ran with that for a year, you look up a year from now your, the amount of reviews and your rating you have night and day. Um So yeah. Um let’s see. Some of y’all sent me a you can just chat people. Um Yeah, just, yeah, book a call on that link and we can, we can chat for sure. All right. Well, y’all got me for a few minutes. Any questions about anything around this topic I’m here. Was this good? Was this awful? So I never do another webinar again? Yeah. I’m a big boy. You’re not gonna hurt my feeling fine. But hopefully this was um, yeah, it was a little higher level but I really just wanna shift people’s mindset around like, man, you know, it’s sometimes people still um cool. Yeah, I appreciate that chance. Make sure you uh run with it something, right. Maybe not everything I brought up, but that’s a mistake, man. I, I make, you know, entrepreneurs who are a little different, like the amount of ideas I have on is overwhelming. But typically it’s best whenever you pick one or two things, take it to your company. Hey, let’s do this, let’s not do any other projects until this game has been done. So that’s what I’d recommend based on all these things I covered. You know, maybe you get a tool to start with or maybe you just start bringing this up in company meetings, maybe you come up with an incentive base, you know, I can’t say that word apparently, but incentivize your, you know, if you got business partners, whatever, sit down with them, hey, let’s come up with in, in, just go stop in that word. But um you know, some way to reward your people for getting more five stars, but I can’t say incentivized for some reason. Um But cool. All right. Anything, any questions, anything. Um

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