Most local businesses have a fraction of the reviews they've earned — not because customers were unhappy, but because nobody asked. I install one system that asks every customer, every time, and answers every review that comes in.
Same city. Same trade. The one on the right isn't better — they just get asked more often.
The owner means to ask. The crew means to ask. The customer fully intends to leave a review and then gets in the car and forgets. Meanwhile the work was excellent and Google saw none of it.
That gap compounds quietly. Every month it goes unfixed, a competitor with worse work and better follow-up moves further ahead of you in search — and the customer choosing between you has no way to know the difference.
Not thirty automations. Not a funnel. Three texts that go out on their own after every job you finish.
After the job wraps, a text asks if everything looks good. No link, no ask. If something's wrong you hear about it privately — while you can still fix it.
A short, personal thank-you with a direct link to your Google listing. It uses their name and yours, so it reads like you sent it — because effectively, you did.
One gentle nudge to anyone who hasn't gotten to it. The system checks first, so nobody who already left a review gets bothered twice.
Three moving parts. All of it runs in the background, all month, without you touching it.
Every completed job turns into a review request, automatically.
The reviews you already earned but were never asked for.
Every review gets answered — good or bad — within minutes.
Every past customer in your invoicing system is someone who already paid you and already had a good experience — and was never asked. We work through that list slowly over several weeks, at a natural pace, asking for the reviews you earned years ago.
It's also why I ask for three months rather than month-to-month: done properly, a reactivation runs on a slow drip, because a sudden burst of reviews looks manufactured to Google and to anyone reading them.
Some services send happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form. It's called review gating, Google prohibits it, and there's now an FTC rule with real penalties attached — it can get a business's entire review history removed. Everyone who buys from you gets the same message and the same link.
No purchased reviews, no incentives, no staff quotas, nothing written by anyone who didn't hire you. Those tactics are the fastest way to lose a profile, and they're the reason a lot of businesses are nervous about this category in the first place. Part of what you're paying for is staying clean.
If your average job is worth a few thousand dollars, this pays for itself several times over the first time it brings you one customer who'd otherwise have called someone else. I'm not going to promise you a number — nobody honest can promise you Google's algorithm. What I can promise is that the system runs, every time, without you thinking about it.
I'm Spencer. The Phipps Collective is me — not an agency floor, and not an account manager you get handed to after you sign.
I picked this one service deliberately. I could hand you a menu of nine things and watch your eyes glaze over, and you'd tell me you'd think about it, and we'd both know what that meant. Instead: one problem, one system, one price. If it works and you want more later, we can talk then.
On the call I'm not running a presentation at you. I'll pull up your Google listing and your closest competitor's, and we'll look at the actual gap together. Fifteen minutes. If it's not a fit, I'll say so.
Yes, honestly. Most owners could. The question is whether following up on every finished job is a better use of your week than closing the next one — and whether it would still be happening in March. The product here isn't the messages. It's that it doesn't stop.
You'll get a few, and that's genuinely fine. A business with 200 reviews and a 4.7 reads as real. A flawless 5.0 reads as suspicious. The check-in message also gives an unhappy customer a private place to tell you first, which often means you fix it before it ever becomes public.
No, and I'd be careful with anyone who does. Review volume and profile activity are two of the inputs Google weighs for local results. I can control the inputs. I can't control the algorithm, and I won't pretend otherwise.
Good — who's handling it? Usually the answer is a person rather than a system, and what breaks is that it depends on someone remembering during a busy week. Worth a conversation either way; if what you've got is working, I'll tell you to keep it.
About an hour total. Access to your Google Business Profile, your customer list from wherever you keep it, and a short conversation about how you'd want the messages to sound. I build the rest.
Because the reactivation campaign runs on a deliberate slow drip over several weeks — bursts look manufactured — and because the compounding part happens after the initial catch-up. Month one is setup. Months two and three are where you see it. After that it's month-to-month, cancel whenever.
Fifteen minutes, and we'll look at your listing together.
Calendar not loading, or you'd rather just reach out?