Reviews are the highest-leverage asset in local contracting — they rank you, pre-sell you, and defend your pricing. Most contractors get reviews from 1 in 10 customers because they ask by email, days later, vaguely. Here's the system that gets us closer to 2 in 3, with the exact words.

The one principle: ask at the emotional peak. The peak is the final walkthrough — the homeowner is standing at their brand-new fence, often literally taking photos of it. Their satisfaction will never be higher than this moment, and every day after, the favor-energy decays. Email three days later catches them back in normal life; the walkthrough catches them delighted.

The walkthrough script

"Glad you love it — that's the part of the job we work for. One favor, and it genuinely helps a small company like ours more than anything: a Google review. Here's a card — that QR code goes straight to the review box, takes about a minute. Even two sentences about the experience helps the next homeowner find us."

Then hand the card and stop talking. The card matters: a QR straight to the review form (your GBP short link), your logo, a thank-you line. Printing a hundred costs almost nothing.

The same-evening text (the conversion doubler)

"Thanks again for trusting us with your fence, [name] — it turned out great. If you have a minute tonight, here's that review link: [link]. Means a lot. — [you]"

Phones are where reviews get written; the link in their thumb that evening converts people who fully intended to scan the card and never did.

What to gently coach (legitimately): you can't script reviews, but you can shape recall with your ask: "even two sentences about the experience" nudges people toward writing about speed, communication, and cleanliness — the things future customers search for — instead of just "good fence."

What not to do, ever: pay for reviews, run "discount for a review" promotions (against Google policy and increasingly enforced), review-gate (asking only happy customers via a filtering tool — also against policy), or have family pad the count. One removal sweep can wipe years of fakes; build the real asset.

Handling the inevitable bad one: respond within 24 hours, publicly, with specifics and without defensiveness: acknowledge, state what you did or will do, invite the offline conversation. Prospects read your response as a preview of how you'd treat them when something goes wrong — a well-handled 1-star can sell harder than a 5-star.

The math that makes this non-optional: 40 jobs a year at a 60% review conversion is 24 fresh reviews — likely more recent-review velocity than every incumbent in your county combined. That's map-pack rank, which is leads, which is the whole flywheel, purchased with a card and a text.

Make it un-skippable: the review ask is a checklist item in our job close-out, same as the final photos. Systems beat memory, especially in August.

Job close-out checklists — photos, review ask, follow-up text — built into the Fenceworks workflow: See it →

Written by Rob Diederich, founder of Fenceworks.ai and Kodiak Fence Co.

Make the ask automatic