Roofer MBA — 128 plays for the business side of a roofing company. Free to read, no account, nothing for sale. What this is →
The Review You Earned
Module 9 · Sales & Leads · Play 9 of 14
The problem in one breath
Every dollar you spend to make the phone ring sends a stranger to look you up first — and what they find is a profile with nine reviews, the newest one from two summers ago.
Why it happens
Asking feels like begging for a favor after you already got paid. So the ask happens when somebody remembers, which is to say on the jobs that went unusually well and almost never otherwise. Meanwhile the reviews you do have age. One shop got past two hundred and fifty of them in about six years with almost no deliberate asking at all — which sounds like a win until you work out what six years of asking on purpose would have looked like.
The play
Treat the profile as the thing your advertising lands on. You are not buying phone calls, you are buying looks at your reviews. A thin or stale profile quietly taxes every lead you pay for (Play 1, "Count Where Last Year's Jobs Actually Came From"), and no amount of ad money fixes it.
Only ask when the job went well. The ask is earned, and a shop that asks on every job including the rough ones is paying to publish its own worst week. If it did not go well, that customer belongs in the callback process instead (Module 13, Play 1, "When She Says It's Leaking, the Clock Starts") — fix it first, ask later or never.
Ask in person, first, at the final walkthrough. Your project manager, standing on the property, in plain words: we are a small business trying to grow, it genuinely helps us, would you leave an honest review. Honest is the word that makes it easy to say yes to.
Then make it one tap: a text with a link and two sentences. This is the one that works. An email gets opened at a desk they are not sitting at; a link in a text gets tapped on the couch that night. Everything else is backup — the ask on the final invoice, a note when you pick up final payment, an email or two over the month after.
Never pay for one, and never trade anything for one. No gift card, no discount, no drawing. The platforms set their own rules on incentives and enforce them against the profile you have spent years building — read your platform's current policy before anyone in your shop gets creative.
Expect most people to say yes and not do it. One shop's ask converts at roughly one in ten and they think a real effort would move it — that is their rate, not a target for yours. The math still works, because you are asking on every good job, forever, and nobody else in your market is.
Do this this week
Write the two-sentence text, put your review link in it, and give it to whoever does your final walkthroughs. Then send it on every job that closed clean this month.
The tool
The review ask — four moments, one text.
THE REVIEW ASK
RULE ONE: only if the job went well. No exceptions.
1. FINAL WALKTHROUGH — say it out loud
"We're a small business trying to grow our reputation.
It really helps us if you'd leave an honest review."
2. SAME DAY — send the text (this is the one that works)
"Hi [name] — thanks again for letting us take care of
your roof. If you've got 30 seconds, an honest review
helps us a lot: [link]"
3. FINAL INVOICE — the ask printed on the page
4. THE MONTH AFTER — one or two emails, then stop
NEVER: pay, gift, discount, or enter anybody in a drawing
for a review. Check your platform's rules — it's their
profile to take away.
Who sends the text: ____________
Review link: ____________________
If your crew is 1099
Your reviews are written about work a sub crew performed, which means the profile you are building is partly theirs to protect or wreck. Two things follow: the crews who do your best work should get your best jobs (Module 12, Play 3, "Look at the Roof, Not at His Men"), and nobody asks for a review before the punch list is closed. A review request that lands while a customer is still waiting on a fix is how a five-star job becomes a public two.
One more thing: this play is how we run a shop — it's not legal advice. Rules change by state and by contract, so before you act on the legal-sounding parts, run them past your own attorney or accountant. It's your business, and what you do with any of this is your call and your responsibility.
M9-09 · The Review You Earned — Roofer MBA, https://roofermba.com/plays/sales-leads/the-review-you-earned
Take it with you
One email unlocks this and every other sheet and card on the site. The plays stay free.
Same fire
You can't say where your work actually comes from
- M9-01count last year's sources
- M9-08the roofs you already won
- M9-09the review you earned — you’re here
Fixed this?
Counting last year tells you which faucets are real. The weekly number tells you whether they are still running.
The fire right behind it is usually Cash is fine this week and you can't see next month.