Your happy customers finally leave the reviews.

Type your trade and your town the way a customer would. Plumber Mundelein. Roofer Gurnee. Look at the three businesses sitting on the map, and look at the little number next to the stars. Then look at yours.

That number isn't a measure of who does better work. You already know that. It's a measure of who asks. The one on top has something asking every customer, every time. You've got a phone full of thank-you texts that nobody outside your family will ever see.

Here's the part that costs you: 47 percent of people won't even consider a business with fewer than twenty reviews. They don't call you and decide against you — you were never in the running. If a stranger sizes you up on a screen before he ever sees your work, that's where the jobs are leaking.

Somebody on your crew marks the job done — however you already do that. A text, a tap, a note. That's the only thing anyone on your side ever has to do.

• The ask goes out on its own off that mark, while the basement's still dry and he's telling his wife you were great. Not three weeks later, when he's forgotten your name and you've forgotten to ask.
• New reviews get watched for across the sites people actually read, and you get the alert. You're not the last one to find out what somebody wrote about you.
• We write the reply in your voice and send it to you. You approve it, it goes up. Every review gets one, not just the angry ones.
• One report at the end of the month: how many came in, what your star average did, how many got answered.

Nothing for your crew to learn. The asks go out from our side. The only thing that lands on you is a reply to okay.

Do enough jobs and eventually somebody leaves you a one-star over something that was never yours to fix. Weather. A landlord. A price he agreed to in the driveway.

That review isn't what costs you the job. What costs you the job is that same review sitting there eleven months later with nothing under it, while the shop above you on the map has a short, calm reply under every complaint he's ever gotten. One page reads like a business. The other reads like a guy who stopped paying attention.

The bad ones come to you flagged, with the reply already drafted — short, calm, specific, no arguing, no legal threats, nothing that makes a stranger cringe. You read it, you approve it, it posts. Ten minutes of your evening instead of a week of stewing.

$199 a month. No setup fee, no minimum — thirty days' notice and you're out. The asks, the watching, the drafted replies and the monthly report are all in that, on one bill.

It's monthly because reviews go stale. Three out of four people want to see reviews from the last three months, so the ones you got two summers ago don't count to them — a customer reading that page assumes something changed.

The count on that report is the point. If it isn't climbing after a few months, you've got a number to fire us with instead of a feeling. Our map package asks for six months, because it takes about sixty days to move anything and another sixty to hold, and charging you for three would be selling you a coin flip. Reviews don't work like that, so we don't ask. And if you end up buying the reviews, the map, and the monthly search work together, that's $3,000 a month instead of $3,249 bought separately.