As every service business operator knows, reviews are critical.


Here's a little case study I did on reviews with my commercial cleaning company, Big League Clean (Denver, Colorado).

For every web form my commercial cleaning company receives, we ask the prospect why they decided to reach out to us for a meeting when there are hundreds of other options. (Keep in mind, we rank on the first page of Google in Denver for several keywords, which is important to get prospects to find your business on Google**).

Of the 10 most recent prospects from our housed web form, 90% said essentially the same thing:

"Because you have a really good Google rating." (We have a 5.0)

It can be inferred from our case study that the individuals searching on behalf of their company for a specific service held Google ratings/reviews highly when choosing which service providers to contact for a first-time meeting (Seemingly obvious)

One of these prospects we closed represents over 30% of our revenue. If we had just one negative review, that individual could have decided we were not of their echelon and skipped us entirely because we didn’t have 5 stars.

It is scary to think that one single negative review can have such a significant impact on your business. One person having a terrible day, mistaking your company for another, or getting a misrepresentation of your company could cost you strongly.

What I took away from this experience is that my business needed to get more reviews so that our average rating could not be heavily skewed by a single bad review. That way, we can continue to have the best chance of attracting new prospects.


To tackle this, I developed a campaign for our account managers and had them send it to every single contact at every client account of ours that they work with. The message looked like this:


Feel free to copy this. Just edit Big League Clean out of the template.


Subject: No subject (Kept it mysterious)

"Hi [NAME]!

I have a big ask for you.

I was wondering if you could help me, the cleaners who clean [ACCOUNT], and Big League Clean.

We were looking for a way to give back to our cleaners while also gathering reviews, so we thought it would be a great idea to reach out to you and see if you’d be open to providing us with a review here: (Leave a Review).

On our behalf, we will tip [ACCOUNT]’s cleaners $25 each.

On top of that, if you leave a review, we’ll enter your name into our client review raffle—one of our clients who leaves a review will win a $150 Amazon gift card! (You could have a great chance if only five clients leave reviews! Lol).

I know this is asking for a lot, but if you decide to do this for us, please let me know as soon as you complete the review so I can log your information into the raffle and inform our team so we can pay your cleaners!

Have an amazing day! :)"


We received two reviews from this outreach (sent to 20 clients).


Then, two days later (this morning), we ran a follow-up email that looked like this:


Subject: Re:

"[NAME]!

Did you see my last email?

To make this even more exciting, Big League Clean is offering to match your property's Google reviews for any reviews you or your team leave within one hour of posting yours. We can even mention your name if you’d like!

It’s a great way to boost both of our profiles quickly.

We’d love to get your feedback!"

This follow-up resulted in another two reviews; we’re still waiting for more to come from this.

While we only have 27 reviews now, we had 23 reviews not long ago. After receiving only one 1-star review alongside our previous 23 other 5-star reviews, our new Google rating would have dropped to 4.8 stars###-###-#### overall). Now, with 27 reviews, our score would only fall to 4.9 stars###-###-#### overall) on Google after a 1 star rating. Some service businesses do well without an excellent Google review profile. However, imagine the results they could have had with a 5-star rating. Imagine the millions of dollars they may have missed out on. Moral of the story: Reviews matter! (For service-based businesses)

Hopefully, this will inspire you to get more reviews for your service business. Please let me know if you have feedback about what we could have done better in our review outreach process and how we can improve our reviews and/or Google profiles!

PS - If anyone wants to trade reviews for our service-based companies, please DM me! Let’s help each other out

If you're feeling generous or just want to help a young entrepreneur out:


Leave Big League Clean A Review (My company)


As you know, it would mean a ton to me ;)