The (Nearly) $0 Lever to Grow a Business Today

There’s a massively underrated growth lever hiding in plain sight.

It’s basically free, yet most owners never truly leverage it.

Below you’ll see exactly how we turn it into a machine across our businesses.

So, What’s the Growth Lever?

One word:

• 89% of consumers check reviews before buying

• 66% say they’re the #1 influence on purchasing decisions

Here’s the twisted part…

9/10 happy customers never leave a review.

Angry customers are more likely to leave reviews than happy ones.

So if you’re not engineering the ask, your haters are literally writing your story.

If you ever build a business, you need to fix that.

Here are 6 ways we make that happen.

1. We Built a Review Engine

Across Contrarian Thinking, ResiBrands, and Contrarian Thinking Capital, we’ve learned that most businesses wait for reviews. Smart ones engineer them.

What most people don’t understand is that you don’t need 10,000 customers to get 100 reviews.

You need 100 customers and a damn good system:

If you don’t capture the proof, you can’t share the proof, and your best marketing never leaves the room. So above all, build an engine to create and capture reviews.

Here are some ways to do that…

2. Find Your Incentive Stack

You need to make leaving a review a no-brainer, like this:

For a home services business, that means aligning these incentives:

• The customer who wants to feel good about themselves

• The worker who wants recognition (and $)

• The owner who wants the review

Our friend Nolan, a veteran-turned-landscaping operator with dozens of employees, nailed this.

The customer feels good. The worker feels rewarded. You get 5 stars.

Cheap. Fast. Win-win-win.

3. Know the Law of Reciprocity

This is very similar, but with a key difference: it involves a psychological transaction.

After a technician wraps a job, the customer gets an automated text like this:

It works because it flips the dynamic.

Bob already left YOU a 5-star review. Mind returning the favor?

A little surprising, but disarming and weirdly effective. A small ask with big returns.

4. Go Full Shakespeare

We call this creating a magic moment.

Let’s say you run a humble household plumbing business. One day, your plumber walks into a customer’s home to confront… a situation.

💣

🚽

🌊

🛠️

Most businesses would then send a bland follow-up:

“Please leave us a review!”

Not you. That’s when your can’t-help-but-smile drip sequence kicks in.

Day 1:

Send the customer a message like Nolan’s above.

Day 3:

Nudge with personality.

Day 7:

Go full Shakespeare (or anything else funny).

You’d be shocked how far a clever follow-up like this can go.

5. Make it Easy to Ask

Every customer has moments that matter:

• First purchase

• One-year anniversary

• Power user status

Most businesses ignore these. We don’t.

When a Contrarian Community member buys a business and becomes an owner, we send them a custom deal plaque.

After they hold that? It becomes easy to ask, “Would you mind leaving us a quick review about your experience?”

Honest. Authentic. High conversion.

Make the ask meaningful for them, and easy for you.

Last up…

6. Build Your Great Wall

Too many businesses put reviews in the worst places humanly possible.

Bottom of your site?

The last thing you need is to hide positive reviews. Instead, consider making them the first thing people see. Stack them up nice and tall. Show ‘em off.

In a world that trades on trust, you often need other people to speak for you before you can speak for yourself.

So if you do one thing this week…

Take a minute and drop your favorite small business a review.

You have no idea the impact.

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