How Can You Get More Customer Reviews Than Your Competitors? [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 160]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

00;00;00;03 - 00;00;07;18

Bob Ruffolo

Reviews; in the age of AI, we all know how incredibly important they are for our businesses, but they can be hard to get.

00;00;07;21 - 00;00;26;10

Stephanie Baiocchi

You're listening to the Endless Customers podcast, brought to you by the team at impact. Endless customers is the proven system to become the most known and trusted brand in your market. If you want to learn the principles of endless customers and how you can implement them in your business, pick up a copy of Endless Customers, a national bestseller wherever books are sold.

00;00;26;10 - 00;00;47;27

Stephanie Baiocchi

Ready to start implementing endless customers in your business? Talk to impact about how our coaching program can help you implement endless customers to success. And if you want to experience endless customers in person, don't miss our upcoming event! Endless Customers live in Hartford, Connecticut, October 5th through the seventh, 2026. Registration is now open. And now on to the show.

00;00;47;28 - 00;00;50;17

Stephanie Baiocchi

Here's your host, Bob Ruffolo.

00;00;50;20 - 00;01;07;08

Bob Ruffolo

All right. And welcome back to the Endless Customers podcast. Say we have Aaron Gaynor of Eco Plumbing, a long time client of ours. It's just an incredible entrepreneur. One of the best plumbers in the world has moved into hack and just doing incredible things. We're very proud of him as a client. Aaron, welcome to the show.

00;01;07;10 - 00;01;12;17

Aaron Gaynor

Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Appreciate everything you guys have done for us and excited to be here today.

00;01;12;19 - 00;01;37;21

Bob Ruffolo

Yeah. Well hey welcome on. And you know what I really want to talk about today is reviews. We have a lot of clients, have a lot of reviews, but no one has anywhere near as as many reviews as you do. You have almost 21,000 reviews on Google 4.9 rating. It looks like Facebook is also a big area focus for you, so I thought today it would be very beneficial to our entire audience to dive into reviews.

00;01;37;21 - 00;02;00;27

Bob Ruffolo

And as we all know, as AI platforms are taking a bigger stake in the ultimate decision making process for buyers recommending companies. Now it's, you know, someone's go in, who's the best plumber? HVAC company in my area in Columbus, Ohio is where Aaron is. If you need a plumber HVAC company in that area, definitely go with Aaron's company, eco.

00;02;01;00 - 00;02;16;05

Bob Ruffolo

It pulls in all this information. Reviews is always one of the most important things that it looks at. So let's just go into how did you get so many reviews in the first place? How would you start and to start building up such a base like that?

00;02;16;08 - 00;02;32;24

Aaron Gaynor

Well, I think it goes way back to when we first got going as a company was very important to us, and that was on on Angie's List back then, right. So as Andrews, this was kind of the area where we really leaned in, was kind of the leader in that review section. And then it obviously transferred over to Google over time.

00;02;33;00 - 00;02;58;03

Aaron Gaynor

And so technically, on all of our platforms, just to kind of set the pace here is like we have 195,000 reviews. Like that's all the reviews of all platforms. The central Ohio Columbus location on Google alone has 21,000. And then we have multiple other locations that have anywhere between 3000 and 15,000, you know, or 3000 and maybe 11 or 12,000 reviews.

00;02;58;03 - 00;03;03;02

Aaron Gaynor

So all that combined together really, really a giant amount of reviews.

00;03;03;04 - 00;03;06;07

Bob Ruffolo

Is the population in your market even that large?

00;03;06;10 - 00;03;07;23

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah. Well, I don't think people get.

00;03;07;23 - 00;03;08;21

Aaron Gaynor

Columbus a lot of credit.

00;03;08;21 - 00;03;09;15

Aaron Gaynor

So we're in Columbus.

00;03;09;17 - 00;03;26;21

Aaron Gaynor

We're in Dayton and we're in Cincinnati, right. So yeah, altogether very, very, you know, large market area across all of those areas. So I guess to go back to is like it really started when we started the business and I got on Angie's List and all I ever told her guys and myself was, let's focus on getting a review.

00;03;26;22 - 00;03;41;09

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah, right. That's number one thing. Like let's do the service and let's get a review. Let's do great service, get a review, and let's just let that tell the story for us as we go, because I got on those companies with lots of reviews on Angie's List and we built from there. And then from that evolution.

00;03;41;12 - 00;03;45;11

Bob Ruffolo

I'm sorry. What year was that that you were starting? This isn't working.

00;03;45;13 - 00;03;54;03

Aaron Gaynor

Oh, man. It's probably like 2000. That's a great question. I don't know the exact year, but I'm going to go with probably around 2011, 2010, 2011.

00;03;54;04 - 00;03;58;03

Bob Ruffolo

Yeah. So we started the business run around the same time. So. Okay. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

00;03;58;06 - 00;04;12;29

Aaron Gaynor

So somewhere right now time maybe. Oh, nine roughly. But somewhere in that time, we started building some momentum. Yeah. And we started getting just a lot of reviews and we made it a priority. Hey, we want to take care of you. You know, we want to do all the right stuff. And we would bring it up to the customer.

00;04;12;29 - 00;04;25;26

Aaron Gaynor

And we also let the work speak for itself and say, hey, if you don't mind, we're small business. We're trying to grow. If you thought we did a good job, we'd love for you to write a review on Andrew's list and not just started growing and growing, and we started getting people asking us if we were a franchise, how many reviews.

00;04;25;26 - 00;04;43;00

Aaron Gaynor

We started surpassing very large companies at that time for us in Columbus on reviews. And really it was an idea of social validation, right? And that's what reviews really is. It's about social validation. So culturally wise, it became a very important thing for us. And now it's just sustaining that over time.

00;04;43;01 - 00;05;02;16

Bob Ruffolo

Let's zoom out on that. Zoom in on that because that's that's so important what you're saying right here. I'm a business owner. Everyone listening to this many business owners here, it sounds so easy to just say, hey guys, when you finish the job, go ask them for a review. But most people watching this and I know I've had this from my own experience, it's like, did you ask them for a review?

00;05;02;18 - 00;05;24;13

Bob Ruffolo

Oh yeah. Well, I it didn't come up or didn't feel like the right time or I forgot. And it doesn't actually become part of the culture. And you said you've made it part of the culture. And to get to 20,000 or I'm sorry, almost 200,000 total reviews when you factor everything in, it is part of your culture. How would you overcome the.

00;05;24;15 - 00;05;34;09

Bob Ruffolo

Oh, I forgot to ask or I didn't ask and actually got it operationalized in the business into the culture that you're actually getting all those reviews.

00;05;34;11 - 00;05;52;23

Aaron Gaynor

I think there's a couple of things to it. So one, I think you're asking operational wise, and then another one is mindset, right? So one of the things here was coach the mind. There's an operational mindset was this hey guys reviews give you more jobs right. Like you got to get people to understand you get a review. People read that they value the service.

00;05;52;27 - 00;06;18;13

Aaron Gaynor

They'll that'll be an opportunity for more jobs. Right. Very small starting point of that, right. The other thing was making sure that we acknowledge that our job was to give a five star customer service experience on the job, and if we do that, we would hope that you would acknowledge that by writing a review. And that's what we ask the technicians still to do this day is like, just say, hey, you know, John, if I if I provide you a five star customer, my job is to provide you a five star customer service today.

00;06;18;13 - 00;06;30;14

Aaron Gaynor

And if I happen to do that today, I would love for you to make write a review about that for us. Right. So that's the job. So we're just setting the standard that our job is to do that. And if we do that, we'd like for you to write a review. And even if I don't I still would like a review.

00;06;30;20 - 00;06;56;29

Aaron Gaynor

And then we have software. Obviously, as time evolved, we went into software that follows up, sends messages and do stuff. Another certain areas that you can't use that software to get a review or trigger review. So there's obviously software that has also helped build and keep that engagement in general. And I think culturally wise, because we know it's a big deal in orientation in our service system, training all the things we do that the technicians do take us serious and we monitor those reviews every single day.

00;06;57;05 - 00;07;22;01

Aaron Gaynor

So they also know it's not something that just goes into an abyss of nowhere and nobody talks about them. We also, culturally, you would read them. We gave we recognize people for it. We recognize for good reviews. We recognize them through either gifts or point programs. Today we have a bonus program called Bonus Lead. But every time you get in good reviews, you automatically get points that allow you to by gift cards and other gifts.

00;07;22;01 - 00;07;27;20

Aaron Gaynor

So there's other things that we do to incentivize the idea that getting a good review or recognize a good review.

00;07;27;24 - 00;07;31;01

Bob Ruffolo

That's great. Aaron.

00;07;31;04 - 00;07;52;22

Bob Ruffolo

Now, you said if you if we get more good reviews, we'll get more jobs. Is there anything that's tied to the staff's compensation, if you don't mind me asking? Like, I mean, I guess if they get you, your staff get paid per job or they get just an hourly rate, or if they're not working, they're not getting paid, is that is there some kind of other incentive for them to do it from that standpoint?

00;07;52;28 - 00;08;12;08

Aaron Gaynor

So I don't pay that technicians for reviews. I've never believed in that. I believe in just delivering good service. So I know there's companies do that or have done that or do that or pay or give bonuses for reviews. We give, we recognize you and we give bonus points under points that you can build up over time if you have, if you're getting good reviews.

00;08;12;10 - 00;08;32;24

Aaron Gaynor

So I think that's one thing I want to be clear on is like, we don't actually pay our technicians to get when they get a good review, right? So we're not doing that. We don't incentivize customers to write them. We don't pay them or do anything for a customer. So the idea is just deliver. Yeah, right. So when I say another job, it just means like, hey, if you don't have a great reputation, it's hard to get more work.

00;08;32;25 - 00;08;49;01

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah, right. As a technician, as a, as a business. And that's really where we lean in. And everybody kind of understands that in this day and age. And even when we were coming up, people started understanding that that, you know, that you're going to you're going to be rated on what the reputation says when people go online, like all of us do.

00;08;49;02 - 00;09;05;18

Aaron Gaynor

Right. So I think I think if that's what you're asking, I want to make sure that that's clear, that we don't do that. Yeah. We don't pay. We don't pay for reviews. We don't motivate customers to write my views by gifting them anything, any of those things. We genuinely, culturally just say we want to do a good job for you today.

00;09;05;18 - 00;09;23;13

Aaron Gaynor

And if we happen to do that the way that you want it, we want we like a review, right? Yeah. And we want to review either because we also look at them all is not good. We get a bad review I actually on this and I know we'll get into some more questions here, but I'm actually get a message from my team every time we get a one star review.

00;09;23;14 - 00;09;38;21

Aaron Gaynor

I'm I actually get that email with that one star review to review it and then talk to my. Then I'm on the email chain of everything we did to talk to that customer, to try to to solve that problem. So even on our side today, like even at our that's how important it is.

00;09;38;22 - 00;09;59;06

Bob Ruffolo

So 20,000 reviews across all platforms. You started focusing on Angie. It seems like your big focus now is on Google AI. You know, if we look at your industry or any industries in the trades, they tend to look at multiple platforms. They only tend to just look at one platform. So what other platforms are you hyper focused on right now?

00;09;59;06 - 00;10;02;05

Bob Ruffolo

Are you still doing work on engines or is your staff not?

00;10;02;07 - 00;10;10;02

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah, we're still on Angie's. We're on thumbtack or on, you know, all the league websites, Frank. We're on all of them. Right. So we're doing.

00;10;10;04 - 00;10;12;06

Bob Ruffolo

Better.

00;10;12;09 - 00;10;31;00

Aaron Gaynor

You know, Yelp even though that yelps Yelp at times but actually had a good conversation the other day. Did a podcast with the CEO of Yelp around stuff in Yelp reviews, which I know is always an interesting one for home service people. Yeah. So I think there's some opportunity there to to try to understand what you're maybe doing moving forward and how they play a part in this.

00;10;31;00 - 00;10;49;29

Aaron Gaynor

But I guess to your question is, yeah, Google still the number one because no way Gemini works the way does stuff. The LMS are working in that area. They're going to lean on their own sources, but they are pulling other sources. And I think all of them matter now more than ever, because it's looking across and reading the sediment customer sediment across all the platforms.

00;10;50;06 - 00;11;10;26

Aaron Gaynor

And also Google actually is being a little more hyper focused on what they actually categorize as a review lately. If anybody's noticed that, or if you guys have noticed that they're not pushing as many through as easy as they used to, maybe for, say, easy, if that's the right word, they're definitely looking for longer typed out reviews, more content, more things like that because of AI, right?

00;11;11;03 - 00;11;20;10

Aaron Gaynor

To be able to break this customer sediment. So I think it's really important. Reviews have always been important, but I'll be candid, I think they actually might become more important than they ever have.

00;11;20;11 - 00;11;37;01

Bob Ruffolo

Oh, I think so too. I think so too. And so across all these different platforms. Yelp. So when I do a lot of research on companies, I'm saying, okay, well let me do an audit on them, let me see where they could be improving. It almost always pulls in Yelp reviews, and it always focused on the bad reviews.

00;11;37;01 - 00;11;53;28

Bob Ruffolo

And not only that, they focus on the bad reviews, but it's also what did you do about the bad reviews? So you just brought up, you know, bad reviews. And listen, anyone that's been in business for a long time, you're going to have bad reviews. No company is perfect. And if you have all perfect scores and that's probably a red flag.

00;11;54;05 - 00;12;17;25

Bob Ruffolo

Everyone messes up. Everyone has a bad day. Now, your average on Google is a 4.9, so that should tell you something about the quality of what eco does. But I went through, I saw a few bad reviews. I saw you respond to them and and how you, you know, so you get the email on that. But talk about how what else happens behind the scenes besides you get notified, you talk to the managers.

00;12;17;25 - 00;12;25;02

Bob Ruffolo

Have you made any operational changes? Have you responded to these these folks, do you do makeup work? How do you handle that?

00;12;25;03 - 00;12;39;24

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah. So we have a team. We have actual people on our team. We call their called our care team. They just all their job is, is to take care of our customer. You know, when I first started this role in this kind of like, let's call it, that's not one call it like a whole department because it's not like that many going on.

00;12;39;24 - 00;12;56;14

Aaron Gaynor

But there's a few people that support anything that comes in from a client concern, customer problem with the job, a review, any of those things I we want that to be moved to the top. And when I started this with the lady, Amanda, who's worked with me, work for us now for eight years now, maybe she used to be a call center wrap.

00;12;56;14 - 00;13;11;29

Aaron Gaynor

And I said, look, I want you to be a biased third party person in the business. Like, that's that's how I need you to think about this role. Right. And your focus is to take care of the customers. That's what I'm going to call the care team, because your team is just a care, right? Care about it, care about it, solve it.

00;13;11;29 - 00;13;28;26

Aaron Gaynor

So I guess that's the kind of setting that is that we all know every business has makes mistakes. Is this like, how do you set that up to respond to them? Make sure people get responded fast. They sure people are sitting for long periods of time. Yeah. How do you acknowledge that? And then we always we always comment back on the review.

00;13;28;27 - 00;13;49;06

Aaron Gaynor

We ask them to reach out if they just left a review and no content or we or we dig in if we can't figure out who they are and service Titan or any other platform we might have, we ask them to reach out to us so we can solve it. If we do know who they are because of the name, or we can dig that up, we'll immediately calm that back and reach out to them immediately.

00;13;49;08 - 00;14;08;06

Aaron Gaynor

Either, you know, normally 100% time via phone call, email or text message letting them know, hey, we want to understand what we can do to solve this and give us a better understanding of what happened. So that always happens on every view. And then they follow up and constantly follow up. And if we can't get a response, we can't verify it.

00;14;08;08 - 00;14;28;11

Aaron Gaynor

At some point we do shoot them over to Google sometimes and say, hey, we can't verify this. We can't find them in our customer base. We can't do this because there has been times that we we did run into a time where we were being targeted by some third party person in Europe that was literally writing bad reviews every single day about us in under new names.

00;14;28;11 - 00;14;32;14

Aaron Gaynor

That was being paid by somebody else to do that to us.

00;14;32;14 - 00;14;53;20

Bob Ruffolo

And, you know, there's so many business owners don't even see that happening, especially if you're not checking your Yelp profile regularly. No customers are because they're before they hire you. They are googling, you know, eco plumbing reviews. And these all these sites are coming up. And if you have a series of bad reviews, could be killing your business silently and you don't even know.

00;14;53;23 - 00;15;11;16

Bob Ruffolo

So you know that that is a tip that Aaron, you're exactly right. We had a whole bunch of bad reviews too. I saw a few on Yelp and they were fake. There was completely fake. We couldn't validate the person they're naming people that never even worked here. That is a real thing that happens. But it could be holding the business back.

00;15;11;17 - 00;15;13;06

Bob Ruffolo

If you're not getting ahead of that.

00;15;13;11 - 00;15;36;23

Aaron Gaynor

For sure. And then it gets harder and harder to remove later the further they get away. Right? So you got to get on top of them because these negative things, the people that are doing this, for whatever reason, they're hired through another firm to get to try to bring your reputation down, whatever it is. You know, I don't I'm not going to try to point fingers at people or stuff, but we all know it kind of happens and you have to be ready and prepare and then and tackle and fast.

00;15;36;25 - 00;15;47;29

Bob Ruffolo

That's great. Now you mentioned software. So talk about the software that you've implemented and how is that now operationalized in the business to make sure that you're you're optimizing reviews.

00;15;48;01 - 00;16;07;20

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah. So we use a software called pulse. And we've had it for a very long time very fundamentally basic software. And that's all it needs to be. It's pretty basic. Just sends a message with the text picture, profile who they are. And then afterwards it says, hey, you remember Aaron was out. If you, you know, we'd love for you to write a review about him.

00;16;07;20 - 00;16;28;06

Aaron Gaynor

Go to our bad. We just love to get the feedback right. Yeah. And that's all it does. It triggers that they fill it out. They can select which platform they want to write the review on okay. And then it writes review. We get all the reviews so we can review them, look at them if anything comes back, whether it hits a site or before it hits the site, we're able to, you know, take a look at it.

00;16;28;07 - 00;16;34;09

Aaron Gaynor

When I say before it hits the sides, we can't stop it from hitting a site. We just are able to see what's going on, right? So we can't stop it.

00;16;34;09 - 00;16;40;00

Bob Ruffolo

They can write one review and post it on multiple sites, or they can write. They have to pick a site that they want to post it on.

00;16;40;02 - 00;16;56;15

Aaron Gaynor

That pick one that they want to write, write it for. So they want to write it for Google or wherever. The one place that you can't lead out of date through is you can't have Yelp. Yelp will not allow anything to direct in. Yeah. So that's always interesting, you know, with Yelp, because you don't really have good ways to get people from service to write reviews.

00;16;56;15 - 00;17;11;21

Aaron Gaynor

That's a whole nother topic we can get into another day. But but that's what we use. We use that just to trigger that often. You know, a lot of people write reviews for that, and some people just go right to their own Gmail or Chrome accounts and just write a review.

00;17;11;23 - 00;17;29;14

Bob Ruffolo

So that's great. And, you know, if we're going to put like an order of operations here for everyone based on what I'm hearing here, if I say if someone's going to say, hey, Bob, how do we get more reviews? And I'm like, oh, I had this great conversation with Aaron Eco. One have a good business start there. You know, do great work.

00;17;29;14 - 00;17;53;11

Bob Ruffolo

That's if you're if you're having service issues, fix that before you even worry about your reviews. Yeah. Two I'm hearing get your culture right. Make sure everyone's rowing the same direction, understand their purpose in the company, and and make sure everyone the organization cares about the growth of the business. Because then step three, when you ask them to do things like help us get reviews they're championing, that they're not pushing back on you.

00;17;53;14 - 00;18;00;23

Bob Ruffolo

And then step four is more sounds like getting some software and tools in place to to do that. Does that sound like the right four steps in order?

00;18;00;24 - 00;18;15;20

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah, I would agree. I think first thing is, you know, get the quality right, then get the quantity and then make sure the whole spirit of it all works right. Like simple model. Right. But yeah, I would say so. That's definitely it. If you're not doing the work first, then you're not going to get more reviews and you're not going to improve it.

00;18;15;21 - 00;18;18;07

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah. So I would say I would go down that path for sure.

00;18;18;08 - 00;18;33;27

Bob Ruffolo

That's great. Now I'm looking behind you. I see guiding principles. And I am a big culture guy. And obviously clearly you have a great culture. So before we wrap up and we just talked about how important culture is to reviews. So what's what's on that wall, what are those guiding principles next to you.

00;18;34;04 - 00;18;48;08

Aaron Gaynor

So if the guiding principles then I have our mission statement. I actually just went around to all of our locations this week. We have our quarterly and I talk about our mission statement. So first I'll just talk to you about a mission statement, which is build great tradespeople, advance their life and win big. That is our mission. It's very simple.

00;18;48;08 - 00;19;04;22

Aaron Gaynor

It's clear we're going to build great tradespeople, as you said, do the work right. They all know it. They know what they need to do to do everything right. Second is advance their lives by making sure that they have opportunity to earn more money, educate them better, give them all the tools just to be, you know, better in life.

00;19;04;22 - 00;19;15;14

Aaron Gaynor

And then last but not least is if we do those things and we should win big in our community, we should win big our financials. We should win big as an organization. So we try to keep it real simple. That's the short version of kind of articulating that.

00;19;15;15 - 00;19;23;29

Bob Ruffolo

I love that it actually goes right with ours, which is creating heroes, growing businesses, changing lives. So yeah, this is why we like each other. Aaron. Yeah.

00;19;24;05 - 00;19;36;25

Aaron Gaynor

For sure. There's alignment on that. Right? But the thing is, I think people don't understand. It's like successful businesses typically have something very clear and they live into it. And they talk about a lot of times people come up with this statement. They write it on a wall. We haven't here for sure because you want it up, but they don't use it.

00;19;36;25 - 00;19;55;19

Aaron Gaynor

I use it every, every week and every leadership meeting I have. We start with it, we talk about it, we talk about it. I go do the orientations. Personally, I go through the in person with all the people, new hires. I go through our mission and I go through our guiding principles and, you know, guiding principles. I can hit quickly if you want me to please its first.

00;19;55;21 - 00;19;56;13

Bob Ruffolo

Please. Yeah.

00;19;56;14 - 00;20;11;14

Aaron Gaynor

Let's do it. Yeah. First things first. You know, first things first. Take care of the customer. Right. Do the right things. Get the review. Do the work. Right. Right. Just always do. Because there's always these shiny things. All this other stuff that happens a lot of times, right? So we get sometimes people get unfocused on what really matters.

00;20;11;14 - 00;20;28;12

Aaron Gaynor

First things first. Next thing is honor people by caring more. Just care more about people. Care more about your customer. Care more about your peers. Care more about people in general. I think it's kind of a I'll call it a lost art. Just people seem to not care, honor people as much as they used to. Right. So we want just honor, honor, customer honor.

00;20;28;12 - 00;20;45;13

Aaron Gaynor

What's going on? You don't know what's happening in their life. Just honor them in the Situation Room today. Be consistently great. This is one for me. It's like it's just hard to be consistently great. But you can't be consistent to build. Great, right? And that's where we start. So hey be consistent. First start. Come to work on time.

00;20;45;14 - 00;20;54;09

Aaron Gaynor

Do the things, the fundamental things right. Get your truck organized. Make sure all the tools are right. Do your paperwork. You start doing that, then you will be great because that fundamentally you'll follow behind.

00;20;54;10 - 00;21;04;13

Bob Ruffolo

That's like John Wooden saying, I'm going to teach you how to tie your shoes before you know the first thing he taught all of his basketball players. We're going to learn how to tie your shoes, do that consistently. Then we're going to build upon that. That's that's awesome.

00;21;04;15 - 00;21;23;03

Aaron Gaynor

That's that's it. Right. Simple. And then accept challenges. Opportunities. Probably one of my my favorite ones because, you know, life is hard. My life has always been easy. First business went bankrupt, you know, 20, almost 20 years ago started this business and and built it from ground up. Right. So some challenges opportunity because it's going to happen every day in business a challenge is going to come.

00;21;23;03 - 00;21;39;23

Aaron Gaynor

What's the opportunity? How can you build on it. What can you do. How can you learn from this today and move forward? And then another great one is healthy conversations, healthy relationships. I think this is important in general because we want to be able to be in the spirit. If I come up to you, John, and say, hey, in the spirit of a healthy conversation, healthy relationship, I want to talk to you.

00;21;39;24 - 00;21;57;12

Aaron Gaynor

And now this opens up the door that, hey, we know we're about to have a conversation about something that we need to solve or talk about. And we all know without it, without a healthy conversation, there's no relationship, right? So once once the conversation dies, the relationship dies. So we lean on on that. And then last but not least is bring more energy than you take.

00;21;57;12 - 00;22;13;09

Aaron Gaynor

Because we all know the negative people that you work with every day are exhausting, right? So bring more energy than you take to your customer, to your peers every single day. And that's that's hard because we're not all positive every day. But you can figure out, you can recognize if you're stuck in the energy out of people. Right.

00;22;13;09 - 00;22;27;03

Aaron Gaynor

Because that's exhausting. So those are some of the guiding principles in the mission statement. And we talk about them all the time, and we use them all the time. We use them every meeting. Today, our leadership talked about them in our quarterly. I was down in Cincinnati, just drove back up here. I was in Dayton the other day.

00;22;27;03 - 00;22;39;25

Aaron Gaynor

I was in Columbus Chill Coffee. And then we did our management meetings. So we talk about them. I think that's important. You talk about culture and driving that if you don't lean into them and you don't acknowledge when you've done them or not done them, there's no value in them.

00;22;40;00 - 00;23;07;22

Bob Ruffolo

That's great. And, you know, again, we just spent some time talking about your mission, your guiding principles. Again, the right people in the organization that does great work. Then you can expect that great review. And you know, when you get the and that's how the whole system works. So, Aaron, what what didn't I ask you that I should be asking about your, the way you guys are doing reviews and just just crushing it and crushing it as a business to in every aspect from as far as what you can tell.

00;23;07;24 - 00;23;29;06

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah, I mean, I, we are very fortunate. We're growing, I think in a, in a time when things still seem to be struggling a little bit across some of our industry we've seen. So growth is good. I think there's just people understanding what you guys have been talking about through, through in this customer model. Some of the stuff that I've thought about started reading the book and the customer when it came out, whenever that was.

00;23;29;14 - 00;23;55;12

Aaron Gaynor

Remember now the date. So don't hope he gets that, but is realizing that this whole evolution between reviews and now customer sediment is a real thing, and customer sediment is unmeasurable at this moment. And I think that's something that we need to really understand is like, I don't know how I measure customer sediment as a status quo yet because it doesn't have a benchmark measurement and neither does any of the LMS telling you exactly.

00;23;55;12 - 00;24;09;11

Aaron Gaynor

Besides just get good reviews. Right? So that's going to be an impact. So I think just understanding that more reviews is not technically the answer anymore. It's just better quality reviews is probably the better answer moving forward. That's all I want to mention.

00;24;09;13 - 00;24;17;21

Bob Ruffolo

Now, Aaron, another question I have for you. Do you guys have a promise or a warranty or a guarantee in your business that you stand behind? I'm sure you probably haven't.

00;24;17;27 - 00;24;31;07

Aaron Gaynor

Yeah, we have guarantees for sure, and we follow up with them and we try to make it clear because I think it's important when you have a guarantee, people understand what the penalty is to you as a company. So like if we don't leave your house clean as it is, we'll pay you 250 bucks or pay for a cleaning person.

00;24;31;08 - 00;24;45;00

Aaron Gaynor

Oh, wow. Right. Like it's very clear. Yeah. So if you don't have a guarantee people like to use these broad guarantees, but nobody the consumer has no idea what the actual penalty is to you. To you. I mean, you and me, you as the business owner, right? What is the actual penalty?

00;24;45;03 - 00;25;01;22

Bob Ruffolo

Well, you know, again, you're doing everything right. You've built a really nice moat around your business, especially with the reviews. It's really hard for people to catch up. And then since you are just consistently building and building and building on top of that, that creates a moat. You've got a promise you can make to the audience that other people can't make.

00;25;01;23 - 00;25;18;19

Bob Ruffolo

You've got a great culture. I mean, you're doing everything incredible. So, so honored to have you on the show and have you as part of this endless customers community, because we can learn a lot from you. So, so thank you for everything that you're doing as a business because you're inspiring so many of the people all around the world.

00;25;18;22 - 00;25;28;20

Aaron Gaynor

I appreciate it. It's been great to be part of. We've learned a lot and we're excited to keep growing the business for sure and learning more about this, you know, evolution that is changing in this space, right.

00;25;28;21 - 00;25;31;18

Bob Ruffolo

So awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much, Aaron.

00;25;31;19 - 00;25;33;00

Aaron Gaynor

Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Bob.

00;25;33;01 - 00;25;39;14

Bob Ruffolo

Appreciate it. It's been another episode. The end of the customers podcast. Until next time. We'll see you on the next episode.

00;25;39;16 - 00;25;45;23

Stephanie Baiocchi

If you liked this episode, please take a minute to leave us a review. Thanks for checking out the Endless Customers podcast.