Twenty-five years and eleven reviews: how that happens to good people

The maths are simple. If you've been working for twenty-five years, doing five to ten jobs a week, you've had somewhere between six thousand and thirteen thousand customers. You have eleven reviews.

This isn't a reflection on your work. Eleven reviews is the result of a completely normal career in which nobody told you that asking for the review was something you were supposed to do.

Here's how it happens, and what to do about it.

The customers who would give you five stars are not angry.

Angry people leave reviews automatically. Something went wrong, they feel wronged, and they want to tell somebody. The motivation to sit down and type is baked in.

Your satisfied customers have no such motivation. They're happy. You fixed the thing. Life went back to normal. The idea of leaving a review will occur to them approximately once — usually when they're doing something else and can't act on it — and then it will not occur to them again.

They're not avoiding you. They're not ungrateful. They're just busy, and the moment has passed.

Why the review window closes.

There's a window after a job when the customer still has the feeling. Relief, usually. Something that needed fixing got fixed. If you ask during that window — in the first ninety minutes or so, before they've moved on to the next thing — the chance of getting a review is high.

After the window closes, the chance drops sharply. Not to zero — some people will still do it — but the effort required to recall how the job went, find your Google profile, and sit down and type is enough to stop most people.

The problem is that most tradespeople don't ask during the window. They drive away, they get busy, and the ask either never happens or arrives three weeks later by email when the customer has already half-forgotten who you are.

What to say, and when to say it.

Before you leave the job:

"I'm going to send you a quick text — if you've got a moment to leave a review on Google, it makes a real difference for a small operation. Just a couple of sentences about what we did."

Then, from your phone on the way to the truck:

"Hi [Name] — it's [Your name], just packing up. Here's the Google link: [link]. Thanks for having me in."

That's it. No grovelling. No explaining why reviews matter. No multi-paragraph email two weeks later.

You are not asking for a favour. You are giving them the opportunity to do something kind, at a moment when they feel good about you, in a way that takes them ninety seconds.

The right response to "I'll do it later."

"Later" is a no. Not because they mean no — because "later" requires them to remember, find the link again, and do the thing in a moment when you're not there to make it easy.

When someone says they'll do it later, say: "Would it be easier if I sent the link to your phone right now, so you've got it?" They almost always say yes. Most of them do it before you've backed out of the driveway.

What to do this week.

This is the first action in a list of one.

Go through your last ten jobs. Text each customer the Google review link with the message above. Not email — text. Do not apologise for asking. Do not write more than three sentences.

You will get somewhere between two and six reviews from this in the next seventy-two hours. Some of them will be the best reviews you've ever gotten, because customers who've waited a while sometimes write the longer, more specific ones.

That's a start. Then make it the habit for every job that follows.

The one rule.

You cannot fake reviews, buy reviews, or ask a friend to leave one pretending to be a customer. Google catches this, and it gets worse from there. Every review in that count needs to be from a real person you actually worked for.

Which means the list you have is the list you earn, and you earn it one job at a time by asking.

Twenty-five years is enough time to have enough customers to reach a hundred reviews before next spring. The work is done. You just have to ask.