The Home Service Expert Podcast - Managing Your Brand's Online Reputation the Right Way

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Mark Spencer is the Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of Consumer Fusion. He has been in the reputation management space for the past 10 years. His key mission is improving and protecting Consumer Fusion's clients' online reputation, and working with good companies that want to look great, not bad companies that want to look good. In this episode, we talked about branding, marketing, reputation monitoring, review removal and generation...

reputation is everything. It's your brand. It's word of mouth online. And if you don't hit it head on, whether you don't believe it or not, 98% of people do. So you might be that 2%, but you got to be where your customers are at. And when your customers are there, what's setting you aside from everyone else is your reputation. So taking the time to get more reviews, responding to both positive and negative reviews, giving a crap about it, and then addressing the negatives head on. That's what you, like you mentioned earlier, role playing and reaching out to them and rectifying the situation. Because once again, you want them not only to update that review, but you want to have them continue to utilize

your services in the future. So hitting it head on, don't be afraid of it, but it's not going away. Reviews aren't, digital footprint isn't, so you have to hit head on or like you said, your competitors will eat you for lunch. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Now, your host, the home service millionaire, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome to the Home Service Expert Podcast. Today's a really cool podcast. Mark's a buddy of mine. We've been hanging out at different events. He actually spoke a vertical track. Very fun having you there. And you were kind of the best kept secret out there. Then I met Kellen and he advised, and you came through the grapevine and you've been doing amazing things for a lot of companies. Mark Spencer, he's an expert in branding, marketing, reputation monitoring, review removal and generation, social media management. He's based out of San Diego,

California. The company is Consumer Fusion. He's a COO, and that's 2013 to present. And Mark Spencer is the chief marketing officer, co-founder of Consumer Fusion. He has been in the reputation management space for the past 10 years. He specialized in working with home services, franchisors, multi-location accounts, and PEVC firms deploying brand protection across their entire portfolio. His key mission is improving and protecting consumer fusion clients' online reputation, working with good companies that want to look great, not bad companies that want to look good. I like that. Bad review removal. Somebody just said, question mark. Talk to me a little bit about this because I think this is, it almost sounds like not fair.

I mean, how do you remove bad reviews? And just, you can kind of explain where you've come from and then we'll go deep into that subject. Yeah, well, I'll touch base. It's reviews that violate the terms and conditions of that review site. So it's not every review. It's the reviews, especially in home services. You guys are susceptible to competitors, ex-employees, cutting somebody off on the road. That's not a firsthand experience. So we are and specialize in reputation management, especially on the defensive side. So helping remove negative, illegitimate reviews that violate Google, Yelp, Facebook's terms and conditions. And I'll tell you what,

you get an employee that's not happy and they will destroy you. And this is something we're going to talk about, but not only on Google and Yelp, but they'll start going into Indeed and Glassdoor and they'll get on Nextdoor and they'll go everywhere. And you guys are kind of the, you continue to expand and be everywhere. Talk a little bit about your journey here because this has been around now for almost

a decade. Yes. Well, how we got it, Scratch, I was going to become a dentist. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. So I've started taking people's lawnmowers and making money door to door, mowing people's yards. I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. But fast forward, going through college, I was a personal trainer at 24 Hour Fitness.

And then I took those clients and had my own personal training business. And then I went through college by doing that, going to school to become a dentist. My stepdad is a dentist, now retired. And that's how this process started. Fast forward, 2010, he got hit with negative reviews from an ex-employee. He lost about 25% of his patient base because someone had written negative reviews about him online saying he doesn't pay his employees. I know the lady is a pill popper. So she was stealing prescription drugs. And so we fired her. And that's when she went online and told her friends to go online and pretty much bashed

him. And so my girlfriend at the time, Bren Gibbs, who's the founder and the CEO of Consumer Fusion, she went to Fresno State with a PR degree. And she looked into the terms and conditions of Google. And they went on Facebook and found out that ex-employees or current employees cannot write negative reviews about the business. So we were able to get those negatives down. He's part of the Rotary Club, part of the Rotary Club, plastic surgeons, plumbing, HVAC, lawyers. We started helping

businesses locally. And then that's when we started deploying our platform back in 2013. So we are definitely in the weeds in regards to helping brands protect their presence online. What are some of the bigger brands outside of home service? We work with one of the largest restaurant chains in the United States. We work with a lot of large medical facilities. So we do, you know, we're HIPAA compliant. So we work in the medical space and that's a big no-no if you're responding to reviews in the wrong way and admitting that you're patient. So we're really big in the dental space. That's how we started is we started in dental space, sold out that division back in 2018. Dentists are a different breed. Let's just say

that. And so DSOs, which are dental service organizations, they're PE backed. Dentists aren't the best business owners, just to be honest, but they definitely are very good artists. So these PE firms come in, they hire, they fire, they do all the marketing, they keep the dentists in the chair. They're familiar. All the patients are familiar with the dentist, but the dentists don't know how to market, fire, hire, and bring more patients into the facility. So that's where our platform was working with DSOs that have thousands of locations and then the providers themselves. So we do brand protection not only for the dentist, but also for the practices themselves. And that's when we fast forward into franchising back in 2018 and got into home services as well. You know what I did when I was younger?

I was pre-dental. And then I went and interned with a dentist before I got... The dentist said, listen, I'm 47 years old. I was getting ready to take my DAT. I took 65 credits, biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, organic chem. Went through all that. And then I interned and he said, Tommy, the best advice I can give you is I'm 47. I'm still in debt. We make great money, but we don't know how to run a business. Go back and get a master's degree in business. And I was doing garage doors, going through master's program.

Everybody's like, why are you here? And I'm like, oh, I was told to do so. And at that point, I was just trying to better myself. But I thought, what can I do for the least amount of time and make the most amount of money? And orthodontist was it. And he mentioned you need to specialize if you do anything. And it's interesting. We're along the same paths, but business is so much better. And I can't imagine working in somebody's mouth all day. So it's the highest suicide rate out of all professions because you're focusing on the mouth for eight hours a day.

And then with orthodontistry, you got to go another two years in dental school. So that goes more debt and just keep digging in debt. Yeah, that's what's tough that, you know, my mission, we focused on this last week. We sat down for two days, me, Jim and Dennis, you, and really the trades are cool. And we're teaching financial literacy, setting people free that might not want to go to college. And it's an underserved trade in general. And the average plumber is over 47 years old and we've got to make home service cool again. And I think I want to

be at the forefront of that. And you're right in the midst of it because there are this crap, not only ex-employees, but there's people that target you. And even a customer that tells 10 people to leave a review, it's kind of nonsense because I've always said, and I've subscribed to the notion that 1% of clients are going to be angry. I don't care what you do. It could be the good humor, man. It could be the ice cream truck. You're going to be like the ice cream was somewhat melted. Well, it was 120 degrees outside, whatever it is. A lot of times it's as long as you care. And it sounds like to me, you want to work with businesses that care. Yeah, we prefer clients that are over four stars.

The ones that are like two and a half, three stars, they don't give a crap about their reputation. It's the ones that are four, four and a half stars that want to get to 4.9 or the 4.5s that want to go to 4.9 or the 4.7s. And so that's where we want to work with executors in the business and focus on people that really care about their reputation. And we see a lot of the times in the home services, it is unfortunate that an ex-employee might have been doing drugs, caught on the job, and then they go and tell their friends

and they start flooding in. And that's what's great is that flood in, you only get one negative review review every once a month and all of a sudden you get 20 in a day. That's when we talk to Google support, pick out the idiosyncrasies and show why it violates. And that's where we take it to the next step. So I want to be very, very careful with a one garage door service. I want a system. And I think a lot about this since we spoke. I want to make sure, good or bad, that every review is real and that it's a real customer and service type. Correct. And I want to talk to you about that because I want real user-generated

content with real things happening because I don't want to be part of any good or bad. We service near 15,000 jobs a month. I don't need any help. But what I find is people are, they're rotten. If they wanted to take, get somebody in the Philippines to just blast, I've seen people do good reviews too. And if it says Philippines and France and India, I want to work on a system that's always real. One star, two star, three star, four star, five star. Yeah. And so I wanted to talk to you about that later, but talk to me a little bit about,

so you guys have a dashboard. Go into how the system and how you guys kind of, how it all comes together. So there's a lot of companies out there that just monitor the reviews. And there's a lot of companies that monitor the reviews and do review generation. So we have a platform that puts a pulse on your business. So we're like the LifeLock or the Credit Karma of your business online.

So we pull the reviews in from all the major review sites and industry-specific sites, such as HomeAdvisor, Angie, Howes, Porch. So you have a pulse. You always know what your business is doing. And so our platform will notify you of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the reviews across all the major review sites. Our platform also does review responses. So we automate our review responses within 12 to 24 hours after the review hits Google and Facebook. We also have review generation, and you mentioned real clients. We can tap into the

Service Titans, Housecall Pro. We use Zapier to integrate with the majority of all the apps that are outside and triggers a text message or an email after your client is done with the job. We also have an app if you don't feel, because work with restoration companies and if we integrate with their system and you ask somebody after their house just burnt down how their review is automation might not be the best so we do have an app that they can send after the they just clean up and it's not a fire it's maybe just a small little drywall damage before they turn the truck on it is in their job description to fill in the customer's first name, cell phone number, and email and send a text. So we can do it automatically and automated or first we can do it manually depending on the circumstance. And then on the flip side is also the platform of we have

AI technology that pulls in the reviews and anything three stars or below it will spit out the probability of a negative coming down. We've removed over 100,000 negative reviews across all the major review sites, including questions and photos. And so because of that, we have an engine that spits out showing them the probability of a negative coming down. So we play the offense, the defense, which is a negative review removal, and then the special team. So there's a lot of review generation companies out there, but when you go on the offense offense you're susceptible to negative reviews and that's where we come in as well so we play the defense side you know the first thing i do when i'm looking up a company is i go filter for one stars and it's so important to respond to those but half

the time i read them the one stars are lunatics. And I'm like, this company is spot on. Like, sorry, sir, we've tried to call you three times. We want to make this right. We realize your time is important. It's really in the way you respond. Responding in general is unheard of, but the great companies do it. And ultimately, I don't mind one stars. It's an opportunity to improve. You can't have as many clients as I have and not say I'm never going to get, I'm actually, I don't use a perfect five star if I can't find a one star. I'm like, something's up here. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like I see people with 200 five star reviews on Yelp. And I'm like, obviously what they're doing is they're probably like paying off customers to come back for free to their restaurant. Somehow you're not supposed to pay,

but you could definitely offer, listen, if you want to come back, I realized you had a bad experience. If you're a great manager, you would say, listen, we want to make sure the best restaurants have a manager stop off at every table. So I don't know what's kosher, what's not. I know you can't pay people and say, hey, I'll give you $200 to remove the one star. What is okay when you're calling back a one star that's actually considered okay? Yeah, and if it's a legitimate one star review,

you do have to be accountable for that review. So responding, well, I've seen it to where there's great responses like you just said, hey, I've tried to reach out to you three times. We're just trying to make it right. But then I also see some emotional responses that turn a negative into a double negative. And when you think about it and saying, hey, oh, you weren't there. Oh, this is a competitor. I know who you are. And once again, a consumer. And just so you know, 90% of consumers read business owners' responses. And like you said, you go to the one stars and see how they respond.

And you're like, wow, they really take pride in it. Or if you look and you're like, wow, this is a true prick of a business owner. And so it's really very important to respond to the reviews and devalue the review. But obviously in the negative response, always be in the wrong, even though you know it's not the right thing. But also, always put a contact name and phone number. So that way, a potential consumer that does come across the review clearly sees that, hey, you're trying to rectify the situation. You have a point of contact and a person to reach out to. So I've had people get attacked.

Paul was mentioning, you know, you were able to remove four one-star spam reviews. It really is a defense. And I think it's so important to have a company like you out there because you're doing the right thing. You're compliant. You're doing everything right. The fact that you go work in medical just shows that. And I just wish some of these reviews, now the Google and Yelp have two opposite problems. Google will allow anything as many as possible from anywhere. Yelp, and some people listening, and I promise you this, the listeners, they think you got to pay to play at Yelp. And I don't think that's necessarily true, but some people say I stopped paying and all of a sudden all my great reviews start getting back into the filter. What is your thoughts on that?

Because I know that I think Bing uses Yelp, but... Yeah, Bing hosts Yelp's reviews. So whatever your Yelp listing looks like, it's just a mirror image of onto Bing. And it also goes to Yahoo, MapQuest, Apple Maps. So there's a lot of reviews that Yahoo just gave up on reviews altogether, and then they started hosting Yelp. So there's a lot of reviews. Yahoo just gave up on reviews altogether, and then they started hosting Yelp. Yelp's a different animal.

You clearly cannot monetarily give some solicit for reviews, so you cannot do that. You could say, check me out. Check me out on Yelp. Yeah, check-ins and check me out on Yelp. Restaurants do this all the time to where you go in, and if you do want to get a free appetizer, you try to see if there's a check-in offer for a restaurant. Then you usually get a free appetizer if you check in. And if you get a free appetizer, you're more apt to write a review.

So check-in offers are crucial. And home services, you can do check-in offers all the time to help. What does that help do in the home service space? I want to talk through this. But what does checking in do? And I know how to become a Yelp elite. It means you're checking a lot, you're adding photos, and you're leaving very detailed reviews. And those elites seem to have a better bang when you get them. Correct. Yes. And a lot

of content. If it's just a one sentence, it's probably most not going to stick. One user, one review, no friends, those types of things. But with Yelp, they have their own algorithms. And if I knew Google and Yelp's algorithms, we'd all be on a yacht in the Caribbean. But we give suggestions around what to utilize and to try to get the Yelp reviews to stick out of the filter system, which is checking in that, hey, one garage is actually at my doorstep doing a service. That's a check-in offer. Also, a reviewer taking a picture of the garage door of the services that you provided. The technician, hey, it was great.

And when they write the review with a check-in and also pictures of an A1 technician, that review is more apt to stay out of the filter system. But once again, at the end of the day, it's truly up to Yelp if they do want to filter it into the non-recommended section. So there's other things. Let's talk outside of Yelp and Google for a minute. What does this whole thing encompass, the whole consumer feature? What else are you looking at? So we also look at the social. We see a lot of times if there's someone rogue, and then let's just say an ex-employee, you fire somebody,

they were on drugs and they ran your truck into a fire hydrant, cause a scene, or an employee goes off on somebody and it's recorded. Sometimes it filters over to the social side of things. And so we see a lot of spam attacks on the social side. So we do social listening. We pull in the content from, you know, you got Instagram, Facebook, Google business profile, you can post on their Twitter. We also do LinkedIn. So we do have to trickle that over in the comments within the responses, or if you do post something and it might offend somebody. As you know, cancel culture is really big right now. So it's a very sensitive time right now. So we're really big on listening and people dropping into messages around reviews. We see that all the time to where there's a lot of positive reviews and then you get a cyber bully that goes in and starts responding. So it does trickle over to the social side of things. So we have to listen to that. So if I'm a technician in the home service industry and I'm speaking to a client and they say, oh, my gosh, Mark, you are just the most amazing human being. You made our day.

What advice would you tell the client? Just write a real, make it five sentences, include your city and take a picture. I mean, what would be your coaching for when you're talking to clients? So in a perfect world, the technician shows up, that person's glowing. You did a wonderful job. You brought them a Gatorade because you called them before and said, hey, you like red Gatorade. I am going to show up. You get there. They're happy. Hey, John, within a few minutes, you're going to get a text message on how your experience was. Can you just give me some feedback on that? And by the way, with our social media app, hey, by the way, I'm going to take a picture and then I'm going to send it to you. And if you could post it on your social sites and then tag A1 Garage Door in it, that would be

wonderful as well. So we have local social tools that are branded. We have branded stickers that you can upload and tag it to the picture. So when Bobby's glowing about A1 Garage Doors, they get it, they can post it. And then now your business is watermarked on that image. So now you're really hyper local. So when people see Johnny's post on Facebook or Instagram, he has that image and he might've forgotten to tag A1. There's still that watermark image on there. So you're definitely helping A with the reviews, but then also getting on social as well. So let me clarify one thing for myself and the listeners. I'm taking a picture as the technician and I'm texting it, or is it going through your system? It's our social media

app that the technician would download. And then how then do they put their phone number? The customer would say, Hey, is it cool if I text this picture to you? I just took a view that way you can post it on your social sites. You usually have that content. It depends when you're onboarding. You have to ask for consent. Clearly, there's double opt-in measures that you might want to put in place or you have to put in place in order to communicate with your customers. I'm sure you already have that in place.

Now, if it's concerning a job, like I could text you, I'm on the way. This is why Service Titan doesn't do a lot of text with clients but they could text them about a job so if i'm texting you a picture of the job i finished now i can't text them a picture a year later and say i'm here to do a tune-up but in politics they could do whatever they want in my phone i could prove the 25 text messages i day yeah every single politician out there but this is all compliancy and we've got lawyers for all this stuff. So it goes through the app, you watermark it and you said you might put a wreath around our logo and then it goes back to the client via text, SMS or email?

Yeah, it could be both. You could put a text or an email and then now you have that image on the technician's phone, even though you just texted to them, and then they can post it on A1 Garage Door social. We do have parent-child roles. So that way, if you don't feel comfortable with technician posting on your behalf, it can go through that queue to where a manager or the owner of that home service can say, hey, I like it, I want to reject it, or I can edit of what's going to be posted, and then they can post it. So not only did you give it to the client for them to post on their social sites, but you have that image to be able to post on your social site. So Rivertown ProWash, Chris Johnson just said, I thought Google didn't like watermarks because that limits their ability to use the photo. Is that true? So there's two different things. One of them sharing for social media use,

how is that picture used if they want to add to Google? Well, that's different. We're talking like Facebook, Instagram, Instagram, you can customize the picture and post it. We do do GBP. It's Google business profile posting, which is a little bit different. It's moreP. It's Google Business Profile posting, which is a little bit different. It's more images. It's more offers. It's events, specials. They're going to post one in the review, though. They should just be the real picture.

Correct. Yes. Correct. So this is two different animals here. One, if you're going to have the client do a picture, prefer it be from their phone taking a picture of you working with the the new door or whatever it might be because it also is geo tagged and it's also from their device natively so there's a lot of advantages of saying listen if you wouldn't mind snap a picture i'm gonna have the biggest smile on my face in front of these beautiful new springs

yeah and then i'm gonna possibly if you don't mind, I'm going to send you another picture. What would be the commentary? Well, the commentary, well, here's the thing. It really depends. Some people just don't feel comfortable and they're not very tech savvy. So that's why you put it in. The technician would do it on their end. But if there's someone that is savvy, I would highly recommend, hey, take a picture of me. If you could post it on your social sites and then tag us in, that'd be great. It really depends. And once again, I know there's so much that you do for the technician for them to be an upselling and then putting this on their plate again.

That's why we try to make it as keep it simple, stupid, depending on the circumstances, how you would address it. You know, I'm using this company now called cues and what it tells me is there's certain kpis technicians best day it used to be called carrot and we're just beta testing some stuff but i think if i were you mark and i know you've got a lot on your plate with programming but i really think about having gamifying this for the technicians i guess how would you know if the client shared if they didn't tag you because i know you could keep track of tags we could get track of the text messaging on that technician based off of his logins on the app okay you would

know like hey he sent that image so at least it's how many images potentially gamifications like how many images did you text your clients and you're like okay you did five service calls today and you got a report on that yes we can report that okay i get it so when you get a bad review i've had some managers call me they're like the customers don't do anything and i just want to run through what i i say is'll say, hey, Mr. Spencer, my name's Tommy Mello. I'm actually the founder of A1 Garage Door Service. I've heard you had a not so good experience. And then you just shut up and you listen for 10 minutes. And then you say, I value your time. It's important to me that we make this right. Sometimes it's the manufacturer. Sometimes it could be a flat tire. It could be traffic. There's a lot of circumstances.

So you definitely want to do something to make it right. And what I usually say is, listen, I used to be the only tech. And this is my mom and stepdad worked for me. And we have a lot of amazing employees. But if we're in the wrong, I'm going to make sure that this is a learning lesson. Surely you could understand that our reputation means everything to us in business. I want to somehow figure out to give you a five-star service. So what can I do to rectify the situation? Now, I don't ever say, can I give you money so I could get the review taken down?

But when you're genuine with them, you say, listen, I saw that one star and I'm really embarrassed. Actually, three other people pointed it out to me. You're indirectly saying, I see you. I want to make it right. And they hear Google one star a couple of times in the conversation. And then you go there to rectify it. Usually there, I think that's the best approach, but also. Yes, it is. Do you just say, listen, Tommy wanted me to mention if we rectified it, just put your new experience online or what if? So, yeah, the follow up is you're going in for the ask after you've been over backwards for them.

Say, hey, we're trying to make it right. Is there any way you can update the review based off of your your updated experience? Right. You know, we're not perfect to review yeah but that's where if it's a legitimate review but then yeah i don't know it's gotta be everything's gotta be listen one thing i learned is you remember the like black boxes and cable yeah or the sticks the fire sticks yeah the fire sticks there's still actually gonna pay legally to like get certain things and then they pay for full access at an enterprise level. But I think what happened with BlackBox is Comcast knew they were doing it. They just wanted to learn enough to get in front of it.

And I think Google's the same way. Then they just come up with a – it used to be like Panda and Penguin or whatever. And I think they're collecting data you know me and jim were talking jim leslie my cto and and he said i just there's these lsas going around that the companies are actually paying they're paying google still because they're getting the verified reviews so they're actually not using they're paying and they're just like who cares it's 40 bucks and jim was like well google doesn't care as long as they're getting paid and i said said, I just feel like Google, they got to make a great experience for their clients. That's how people go to Google. So part of them must say, part of

Google must say, like, we've got to make sure that our algorithm is getting qualified W2 great employees that are trained, that are showing up clean cut, background checked. That has to be better for them. It does. I think the LSA verification process is slipping a little bit. I've seen it in forms. I've seen it with you. I've seen it in the home service to where these LSAs that are popping up and all of a sudden they haven't been around and now they have 800 reviews in a matter of a few weeks. Google needs it needs to be brought to their attention. And a lot of these LSAs, they're just a lead company that either A, they sell the leads or B, they get a percentage of the job.

So they're not actually physically there and it's hurting the industry. And so I think if we get enough people together and have enough context to it and talking to Google support, I think they need to up their game on the verifications. Now, what is your take if I was a one man crew and I did work out of two houses, two residential houses? I mean, it was real. I was real. I would go there. It was me. Should people use their residence? I just don't feel like now I'm like, if you're working out of your house, every time I've kind of got that cheap guy, which I was, that they can't come back, that when they take a vacation, no one is showing up. They don't necessarily always have the best insurance.

If something goes wrong, like what should Google standards be as far as working out of your home? And I'm not, I was a guy. You got to start somewhere. What I see, and we've seen it all the time because we do listing management as well, is this electrician creates his GBP page and does not do a service area. He has his physical address. So his first Google profile picture is his electrical truck right in front of his house, which is a security issue because there are crazies out there. So setting up your GBP page correctly and hiding your address and

having a service area is very important. But you've got to start somewhere. I mean, you have to have a physical address in order to do it. You can't just start creating false information around the net. They'll pick it up. Eventually it might work, but down the line it won't. So that's where the verifications come in. Google's trying to do it to where they send postcards to that address, but it's slipping to maybe view. And sometimes you have to overtake a listing to where you'd have to do a video conference or phone verifications, but they're really pushing for the physical address verifications.

Yeah, these spammers are in a lot of industries right now. Service. It's like, look, the small guys pay them part of the ticket and there's this stuff going on. And it's like some of the small guys complain that they don't have a chance. And the bigger guys are like, well, I do everything right. And I'm compliant. It's a tough road out there anyway, which you put it.

It is. It's just like, it's a long play, right? You want the quick fix for a long-term problem, go that route. If you're looking for a long-term solution, play the long game, which is doing it right. But if you do the wrong thing, even if you are a business owner and you're taking a shortcut and trying to pay the Philippines to write positive reviews, that's going to blackball you off of Google and you don't want that. So making it organic, making it realistic, doing it the right way with the right customers that have legitimate Gmail accounts to write a review. That's the most important thing. Hey there, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Mark.

I just wanted to let you know that Mark has put together a special offer to build your online reputation through reviews. So stick with us to the end, and I'll reveal how you can take advantage of it. But if you're in a rush, just go to consumerfusion.com forward slash pro. Consumerfusion.com forward slash pro. And check out this exclusive offer that we put together for our listeners okay now let's go back and continue our chat with mark now if you had to order a chronological order and i could go through any citation site there's

thousands google and yelp and nextdoor and yp and I can go on and on, Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, all these things are citation sites. BirdEye has become a citation site in a couple of ways. Correct. Which ones are the most important in order of importance? Well, Google's number one. And you got to put it in context, like Yelp is not that big in the Midwest, right? In Iowa, I'm not going to Yelp to look first, you're going to Google. So it's really regional specific, but the Google, Yelp, Facebook are the top three. And then whatever ranks is very important.

Whenever you're typing in your business name, whatever ranks on the first page. And a lot of times you buy leads from Angie or HomeAdvisor. Those are the review sites that you need to focus on because once again, you're getting a lead from them, you're building a reputation around it. So whatever ranks mostly on the first page, but Google, Yelp, and Facebook are the top three that we could focus on. But with Facebook, sometimes there's not a reputation there because sometimes you get spammed, you can hide the reviews, that kind of thing. But with that, Google, Yelp, and Facebook, and then you've got your Angie, HomeAdvisor,

Porch, Houzz, and all those other industry-specific sites. I've heard some things that I've read in articles about HomeAdvisor and Angie and eLocal, Thumbtack. This is just factual that I've read. These guys have gotten into some trouble for not real leads. Now I know what they do is they go out and get affiliate partners, like guys that know how to generate leads. And sometimes you might not even know you're buying from a fake LSA or GMB or some type of crap listing. I don't know. This is pretty interesting because I'm not trying to disparage any company. I'm reading facts from articles. What are your thoughts on that? Because they know they don't generate, they do real TV ads and people, those are real. Listen, you win when people shop, but I know for a fact they go to third parties and get reviews. So

what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, well, with me, we don't specialize too much in the lead side of things. We really hone in on the reputation and the reviews and getting more reviews in those review sites minus Yelp. And we're really focused on the review side of things with the lead side. I have heard of what you mentioned, some of those stories around not only if they're fake, but overselling them and not giving them an opportunity. It's just all about timing, right? How quick can you get to the leads?

Speedily. Yeah, speedily. Yep. So I don't know too much about that. That's not my wheelhouse as much. But once again, it ranks high on Google. So Angie, HomeAdvisor, they're the same company. If people that are listening, they are the same company.

Same thing with Glassdoor and Indeed. They are the same company. They own each other. So we just hit the reviews head on and focus on a review tool to push reviews. If you're buying leads from them, you definitely want to have a solid reputation. You know, it's interesting because anybody listening to this podcast, I read a lot. We discussed that earlier. I've been on a lot of other podcasts and I make a lot of phone calls. I had Ken Haynes on the last live who does over a billion of revenues goals to do three here in short order. But they got an ultimate advantage because the things I'm learning about, I've got so many takeaways already that I need to talk to you about. And the things I'm learning, it's just a huge advantage. And I'm not saying you need to listen to the home service expert. I mean,

do what's best for your company. There's a lot of great podcasts out there, but this information is just, it's very good for the business. And I hope readers are leaders. And if they're listening and helping their business and actually implementing some of these things. You've talked to me about some companies that you're sure won't use you because they're only getting three or four reviews a week. I mean, at what point does it make sense to work with your company?

It makes sense to work with our company immediately just because you do have to build a word of mouth online. You have to build that reputation. People look at those reviews and they feel that that's that word of mouth online. So it can be a one technician all the way up to hundreds of locations. So where are we really big and specialize in the reputation space around onesies and twosies, multi locations all the way up to the large franchise brands so i'll put you on the spot here because the listeners love when i do this is what should i expect to spend with the software i know there's different levels and it depends on if you're going to respond to the reviews and it

also depends on there's different packages but just in general if i've got 10 technicians and i'm in one market just give me a roundabout number. Our average is roughly between $300 and $400 a month. Okay. So it's fairly affordable. And I think it's 17 five stars you need to make up for a one star. That's a pretty good equation there. Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit about paid advertising. So you've got really the biggest one is pay-per-click, and then you've got local service ads, and LSAs are on your cell phone.

They come across the top three, and then you've got two PPC, and then you've got a sponsored GMB sometimes, and then you've got the three GMB, and then you've also got two more paid ads. How important is it? Do you think paid ads are absolutely a necessity? I think LSA is probably better than PPC, but what are your thoughts?

I think everything is important, right? I think you need to be involved in everything. LSA, PPC, getting in that local three map pack. It used to be seven, if you remember back in the day. Yeah, seven pack. Yeah, seven pack. Now it's three pack because people you remember back in the day, seven pack. Yeah. Seven pack. Now it's three pack because people want to see, you know,

cause on the, sometimes the PPC doesn't display the reviews. So the LSA is due. The PPCs don't the local listings do, which is that map pack three. So I think hitting all of the angles are very important. I was on the podcast with Ken and a guy said, listen, how am I supposed to compete against you guys? You guys could outbid me on everything.

You guys got better systems. They answer at night. They got better conversion rate. They've got better CRMs, better training, really. It's almost becoming the unfair advantage. But then Ken said, hey, listen, if you're smaller, you could take more time to walk people through reviews. You could take pictures. You can make sure there's a yard sign. You could go knock on doors around there. You've got more time. What would you say if you're a small company to just get that visibility? How do you do that? You definitely want to take it to the next level in regards to customer service. And as you know, sometimes the larger the company gets, the customer service goes out the window. And so by, like you said, taking it to the next level in regards to response, calling

them, spending the time, educating them while you're walking through them before you even book the appointment, taking that extra step because that word of mouth, when you do go do the job, they're going to tell 10 people about how good of a great experience it was. Very professional. And that's where you start. You got to start somewhere. Of course, you got all the big boys, but getting out there at the local communities,

being involved, being in front, like you said, what you did earlier today, the community involvement is really crucial if you're a small business and hustling, you got to hustle. You got to work. You got to get out there and create relationships because relationships are the gift that keeps giving.

Here's the easiest simple thing i could tell companies find 10 people that you know whether it's a real estate agent it could be a design architect it could be a painter but they're called referral partners and you go take them to lunch get top of mind awareness and it's the gift that keeps giving you build a foundation just stuff i know a guy that't, I know a lot of companies that don't advertise at all. They don't care about reviews because they just got five, 10 clients that just refer them to everybody and their influencers. But I do know this, if somebody refers somebody to me, I'm still going online to check them out.

Every time. And that's the same thing with even marketing. If you get a direct mail or you do a ValPak or whatever it may be, or you see the billboard, you're still going to Google A1 garage doors. Okay. You're 4.9 with 5,000 million reviews. Then that's just building more credibility. So you do, you still check them out, but it's all about relationships because like you were saying, with your technicians going and building that personality and, oh, they have a dog, they have a family. They understand that it's a personability that's going to continue that relationship because you started with a relationship.

Your technicians are building the relationship with the client. And then you continue that relationship. That person's, it's building a brand long-term in that community. You know, I think when people listen to my podcast, sometimes they're like, dude, there's so much to do as a business owner.

What you guys do, you do a lot of automations. You take a lot of it out of our hands. And I like that. My question is, when do you see an ROI? Because like you and I talked about earlier, some people charge like an asinine amount of money to try to remove a negative review. People are wondering, ROI is a tough question because you don't know until you get in there if there's a bunch of employee reviews or just customers and their friends sandbagging you. Is there a correct answer to say the ROI? Well, you can backtrack it in regards to the negative. The problem with the negative review is with the ROI,

someone's not going to look at the negative review. It's like carbon monoxide. You can't smell it and then all of a sudden it kills you. They're not going to pick up the phone and say, hey, Tommy, I was going to go to A1 garage doors, but I'm going to go to ABC garage doors. They just don't pick up the phone. So how our ROI looks is we also, just not with negative review removal, the review responses play a vital role in responding to reviews and putting keywords in those owners' responses of the services you provide,

which therefore will continue to rank you higher. And then the review generation. So all three of them combined, you would see a definite increase on your market spend because if you are only a four-star and you only have 25 reviews and you're doing PPC or verified LSA ads, but your competitors are 4.8 with 2000 reviews, you're losing business. But if you continue to grow that foundation of reviews and ratings to

where you're up there playing with the big boys in regards to the reputation, you will see an increase in your ROI and lead conversions because of the reputation increase. So Phil was asking, how do you get a thousand reviews? My answer to that is the best advice I could ever give is I'm never going to leave a company review. I'll leave a person to review because I care about the people. The business is not even real. It's a C Corp or an LLC. And it might be a cool owner, but if it's a business and a corporation, I'm leaving it for the service I got from that person. And so you got to coach, you got to monitor, you got to inspect what you expect. So if you got metrics, it's on our scorecard. And like I said, I'm going to call you later to make sure that every review,

we're making sure we tie back into a real client. I think that's so important. And anytime there's one, good or bad or indifferent, that doesn't come up, I want to report that. I want to make sure that we're getting in front of that because all I know is that a couple industries, locksmiths and garage doors they just they get spammed they get attacked they get taken down and we just i'd rather be on the defense i just make sure that everything's kosher but what would you say if someone wants to get reviews put a system in

place like you guys a system in place yeah whether you're using a service titan or house call pro or you're just starting off it's going to take some time to get to a thousand because they are organic and legitimate from your customers or your clients and your technicians. And you are right. It's like your company is a shell corp, but your technicians are actually the lifeline of, of your business. They are the front lines and that's where they will write a review because of their experience with that technician, not necessarily a one garage. So having your team buy in to this because, and also maybe saying, Hey, if you give me feedback,

spiffing out the technicians, if the name is mentioned in the review themselves so that they were, you know, they're behind it and you can do internal spiffs to get reviews, but you cannot give the customer. You can't pay the customer, but you could pay to motivate your guys. Yes. Your technicians.

Yes. This has always been attribution models per technician. I've always been, there's a manual process and service Titan with reputation pro. Do you guys do anything to monitor the tech in any shape or form or is that just a manual process our api can technically see where it came from if it's the manual process absolutely we have a leaderboard with their what employee sent out the how many requests and then we do review matching based off of that as well. You guys do that service?

Yeah, we have review matching, yes. Okay, that's interesting. So a question that Phil said is, out of 100 customers, how many will leave a review? Well, listen, I guarantee if you're asking for it and making it simple for the customer, you're going to get way more. But you got to ask. My favorite secret sauce is if you want to go on a date with a woman, you got to ask her. If you're waiting for her to ask you, can I leave you a review? You'll get one out of a hundred. Now, if you're setting it up easy and asking for it and

you're smiling and saying, I hope one of the things you always want to mention, Mark, is today, Mr. Spencer, I want to give you five out of five service. I want to make sure that you receive five out of five. And if any time during any interaction in our time here to visit that I'm not giving you five out of five service, I want you to let me know. And if you mentioned the five out of five a few times, I'm setting you up to make sure, because five stars on Yelp, five stars on all these things, right? You're subliminally putting that five stars on y'all five stars on all these things right you're subliminally putting that five stars in yes and sometimes because it is automatic telling them hey am i giving you this five out of five star experience by the way within the next hour

you're going to receive a feedback form if you can give us some great feedback that would be greatly appreciated letting them know that something's coming as well. And if you could mention my name in it, that would be greatly appreciated. Sometimes it's not even about paying your guys. Sometimes it's about, hey, listen, I'm going to take out the top three guys bowling and you're going to get to spend time with me, or I'm going to recognize you with the trophy. It goes back to the five love languages to the workplace of finding out what motivates people. And I don't think money is always the answer. Sometimes it's recognition.

Sometimes it's just saying you did a great job. Sometimes it's being at the top of the list. But like I said, what gets measured, it's managed. And I think that's so important to remember. Or an experience, you know, hey, by the way, I'll take, you know, you and your wife need to go out to date night. I'll cover a babysitter for you. It's that company culture. It doesn't necessarily always have to be, or just knowing that you're number one and you're getting the

most reviews out of all of the technicians. So how's San Diego? It's chilly. It's like 65 right now. I bet you a lot of people are angry right now listening to you. But I know it was cold out. It was 43 this morning. And I'm like, this is why I don't get up at 4 to 30. But it's not very often you get to go see kids and I've served them hot chocolate. There's a lot to be said about planning. And I've been really kind of obsessed the last year of a PR, you know, doing things for people, just getting involved in the community, BNI, Twitter, I'm learning all about that's a powerhouse. And it's like, but there is a little bit here, Mark, that I'm like, okay, wait a minute.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. And then I need to have a blog on my website with new content. And then I need to do video. And then, wait a minute, you're talking next door. Wait, Yelp, Angie? They're like, oh my gosh. How does one really, I guess, start somewhere and master it? What do you- Yeah, there's monitoring tools such as us that handle the majority of it one thing i do and i think it's a great idea this is more for

like real small mom and pop is go on instagram and search influencers around your community and reach out to them and offer free services like garage door service, plumbing, heating, electricity, whatever, air conditioning. They might have 70,000, 80,000 influencers at the local level. You providing that service, they share that with their community at the local level. Now you are branding yourself at a very inexpensive route. So going back to choosing few channels, don't get overwhelmed by doing too much, but for next to no dollars and just maybe a little bit of time and some tools and potentially some parts, getting in front of influencers at the local level, AKA being the digital community, that's another good way of getting out there without breaking the bank. But to answer your question, monitoring tools to pull everything in,

don't try to do everything, try to be good at a few things. And one of the secret sauces is between Upwork and Fiverr, I could find a pro at any much anything. And if anything else, you could have them build an LMS and help you find the right person. I don't believe in bringing everything in house. I believe there's some masters at certain things such as you guys. And it's crazy how much software we've used to make it simple. The biggest pet peeve I have is people, they're like, how do I get more jobs? And I'm like, well, what are you getting today? Well, I don't really know, but I'm not getting enough. Then you look at that and their booking rates, garbage,

they're wasting opportunities. They've got no time for follow-up. I've always say build rapport, educate and follow up. And I'm like, why do you need more leads? You've got a hole and you're leaking so bad that if we could just fix this leak, you'd be good. And I think that a lot of people miss that. Yeah. The processes are huge. You are right. Some people try to take on everything and you just have to bite the bullet and lead on professionals. Like for me, there was, I could try to go fix the garage door. It'll probably be half-assed and it probably won't work. And it might come down on my kid when he's riding a bike out of the garage. So I am going to spend a little bit extra to bring on a reputation management solution that will not only help defend my reputation,

but move it forward. Because people can try to remove a negative. It's a process you go through. But the time, I mean, our records disputing the Google review 27 times, and then nine months later, 28 times it finally came down. Now, does that business owner have that time to do that? No. So that's why sometimes it does help to outsource some things. Sometimes it's important to look at yourself in the mirror and say, hey, I need to change some things internally before I put more leads on top of crap processes. So pick and choose your battles on what you want to take on and what you feel should be outsourced. Well, you got software. Correct. And you're not developing it yourself. I mean, you're not doing the code, are you?

No. I didn't think so. I mean, obviously, you hire professionals to handle the things in your company. I keep thinking back to just the number one is project manager. I mean, I think about project manager, but I'm not a professional project manager. So as I'm thinking about all these project managers, I got project management for the unofficial project manager. And I got to tell you, you said, have you read all these books? And unfortunately, I podcast way too much and I get 10 recommendations. So I have not read all these books.

Now, a lot of them I have read and a lot of them have, you can still see a pen in the book at the end. They're all wrinkled up or whatever. What other services do you offer? I think being on this topic, especially in home services right now, Glassdoor and Indeed is a big issue. Employee pull, not having enough technicians to service the calls. I like your method of not posting, but poaching. And that's a little bit different from Glassdoor and Indeed. But that's another service we do provide is helping illegitimate reviews on

Glassdoor Indeed and then helping provide tools for the business to reach out to their employees to write reviews around Glassdoor Indeed and be meticulous. But the solutions we provide is an offense defense special teams for review generation, negative review removal, and then we have review responses. And next week, we're launching smart responses, which is customized responses based off of what's being said within the review itself and having baked in keywords. The word best and most honest have jumped 200% over the last two years. So most honest garage door service, most honest electrician, those are the keywords that you want to put in your owner's responses.

So we're launching that smart response next week, which we're pretty excited about. We also do listing management. Like I mentioned to you in the home service industry, there's a lot of duplicates out there sometimes merging listings, enhanced listing management, and then the social media that we talked about a little bit earlier today. But we don't do any paid social. We don't do any PPC. We don't do any SEO websites. We stay in our lane. We're really hyper-focused on our three major services that we do provide. So how many employees do you guys have? We have 25 and then we have eight developers and then about 10 other independent contractors. So roughly just under 45. And I met Bren last time.

She's amazing. She's the coolest chick ever. We had a few cocktails. It was so great. And what's the difference between you and her role? She's the face. She's the owner. She's actually the brains behind it.

I just like to go out and party at all the shows and have cocktails with Tommy. And she's said the same thing with your better half, Bree. She's wonderful. I know working together, it's not perfect at all times, but understanding how hard and how long we work in these shows, it's a lot easier to explain. It's not just going to shows and having fun there's a lot of work that gets involved so takes a special couple to work together right it does you know she's going to go into event planning for the company because when she has to work for me and then the roles change when we get home it's just a tough environment.

What are some of the books? I was talking about books. And is there any books that really helped you in business? My favorite one is How to Win Friends and Influence People. And it's other focused, not self-focused. And that's if I'm focusing on helping other, including employees, focusing on my employees and focusing on our business and our customers, it's a game changer.

It's not all about you. It's about everybody else. And when you start helping other people get to where they want to go, it's definitely going to get you to where you want to go. Yep. That's my new book coming out, Elevate. It's book.elevateandwin.com. If people want to pre-order it. I guess I got a plug there.

I guess you can. It's your podcast. People want to get a hold of you. I know they go to consumerfusion.com forward slash pro or just search for Consumer Fusion. If they want to reach out to you, what's the best way? Yeah, Mike, it's a simple mark, M-A-R-K at Consumer Fusion.com. And then once again, Tommy mentioned the URL, it's Consumer Fusion.com forward slash pro P-R-O. And then we talked about a lot of good stuff here. I think it's so important because you're a specialist. I mean, you really focus on reputation and we hit a lot of topics that has to do with reputation. I think I stayed pretty focused through the podcast, which is weird. I got to most of the questions here. So maybe there's something I left out. Maybe there's something you wanted to leave the audience behind. And I just want to add one more thing before I ask that is just,

if you're not focused, it's something like alarming, like 87% of people go to online reviews before choosing a company. Like if you think you're just going to skate by and not start having a defense mechanism, not only Mark, but caring and making changes in your business when you see a bad review and making those learning opportunities. And you got another thing coming because I'm going to eat your lunch. Listen, I'm just getting started. I'm in the first two minutes of the first inning. So if people are out there going, I want to get bigger, but they don't give a crap.

Good luck is all I want to say. You need to start caring and you need to start creating processes, standard operating procedures, checklists, manuals. The systems dictate the output. And if they don't, you've been skating by and getting lucky this whole time. But I'll let you close us out, Mark. No, reputation's everything. It's your brand. It's word of mouth online. And if you don't hit it head on, whether you don't believe it or not, 98% of people do. So you might be that 2%, but you got to be where your customers are at. And when your customers are there, what's setting you aside from everyone else is your reputation. So taking the time to get more reviews, responding to both positive and negative reviews, giving a crap about it, and then addressing the negatives head on. That's what you, like you mentioned earlier, role playing and reaching out to them and rectifying the situation.

Because once again, you want them not only to update that review, but you want to have them continue to utilize your services in the future. So hitting it head on, don't be afraid of it, but it's not going away. Reviews aren't. Digital footprint isn't. So you have to hit head on or like you said, your competitors will eat you for lunch. One book that I'd recommend everybody reading is Raving Fans. And the reason I mentioned Raving Fans is when you create a raving fan,

and this has to go to a net promoter score. There's places I go to that I'm like, it's just hands down like, wow, I want to leave a review. I don't even need to get asked. And when you create a raving fan and you go above and beyond with red carpet, white glove service, it makes life a lot easier. Someone on the podcast here asked, what do I got to do to get 100? How many should I expect? Well, if you create raving fans, exceptional service, exceptional CRM experience with visuals, you leave them the old parts, you give them visual, all these things, there's so many more calling on the way, showing up on time. But when you create a raving fan, you create a promoter.

And when you get a promoter out there, business starts to come easy. Yeah. It's the same thing. I just had Chick-fil-A and the drive-through, I was going through the drive-through and it took a few more minutes than they expected. And every 20 seconds, she would come up to the window and say, Mark, because they got my order. Thank you so much for your time. We apologize for the wait. It's a little bit busy. We're working on it, but it's coming out fresh. And they were just very explanatory. And I felt like I'm going to be writing a review. It's just their customer service is hands down the best in that industry. And they do care. Their employees care. They're innovative. And I would say they hire the right people. I think that's, you got to hire the right people with the right

attitude that like to smile. Like one of the things I talked about is we make, you know, sometimes in an interview, we'll start singing happy birthday. And if the person's laughing and just like excited, then it's like, okay, cool. It's almost like, I didn't have my coffee today. Don't make me sick. And it's like, okay, maybe you're not the right person. And it's the workforce is actually getting a little bit looser that you could pick better people. But one of the other things is don't go to the unemployment line

to hire great people. You got to steal them from other people. You got to always be recruiting when you're out. But Mark, I really appreciate what you're doing. I think you're really cleaning up the industry. You're creating a chance for us because that's not fair when an employee does stuff. It's not fair when an angry customer calls every person they know.

And all you're doing is even in the playing field, you're not doing anything that's not kosher and complete, legitimate. And I think that that's important because I wouldn't want to associate with you if you were and you're not. So that's important. I know firsthand because I've worked with you. Yeah, we work with all the directory sites directly to pick out the idiosyncrasies of why the reviews violate.

And it's up to them to remove it or not. It's not us or hacking in. It's going through the review sites themselves. So well done, sir. Wild, wild west. So we're holding them accountable to the reviews. Well, you did great today. I appreciate your time.

All right. Take it easy. Well, you did great today. I appreciate your time. All right. Take it easy. Thanks, brother. Hey, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast with Mark Spencer. Now, the great news is that we put together a special offer for our listeners. I love Consumer Fusion because it helps build my online reputation with its automated smart review responses and by protecting my brand against illegitimate reviews. If you want to grow your reputation online to get more reviews, Consumer Fusion can take care of the whole process for you. All you need to do is go to consumerfusion.com forward slash pro.

Fill out the form and schedule a demo with them today. Tell them that Tommy Mello sent you and they're going to waive the $100 setup fee if you decide to sign up. Again, consumerfusion.com forward slash pro. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Make it a great day.