Getting reviews without begging

In this article

Reviews are the closest thing a small trade business has to a sales team. Somebody two streets away is deciding whether to let a stranger into their house, and your reviews are most of that decision.

Most operators know this and still barely ask, because asking feels like begging. It does not have to, and the fix is mostly about timing.

The rule that changed what you are allowed to ask

This is the part almost nobody in the trades has been told, and the advice it outlaws is everywhere.

The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule took effect on 21 October 2024. It is a proper trade regulation rule, which means it carries civil penalties — the maximum sits above $50,000 per violation and is adjusted annually. What it prohibits:

• Review gating. Screening customers first — “how did we do?” and then only sending the review link to the ones who answered well — is a suppression practice. “Only ask the happy ones” is the single most common piece of review advice in this market and it is the one to stop following.
• Incentives tied to sentiment. You may not offer anything — discount, entry into a draw, $20 off the next visit — conditioned on the review being positive.
• Fake reviews. Buying them, selling them, or writing them yourself.
• Insider reviews without disclosure. Your employees, your family, your business partner — the relationship has to be disclosed.
• Suppressing genuine negative reviews, including by threatening the customer who wrote one.

None of this stops you asking. Asking every customer is completely fine, and it is also what the platforms want. What is not fine is choosing who gets asked based on what you think they will say.

The practical version is simple and it is easier than what most people are doing: ask everybody, the same way, every time.

The moment is the whole technique

The reason most requests fail is not the wording. It is that they arrive two days late, by email, when the customer is at work and no longer thinking about their garden.

The moment is when the job is finished, you are both standing in it, and they are pleased. That feeling has a half‑life of about an hour.

• Ask in person, out loud, on the day. Nothing else comes close.
• Ask the person who was actually pleased — the one who came out to look, not the one who paid.
• Send the link while you are standing there. “I’ll text you the link now so it’s on your phone” converts many times better than promising to send it later.
• One follow‑up, the next day, and then stop.
• Ask after the small jobs too. A tidy $180 repair produces the same star as a $6,000 install.

What to say

Short, specific, and with a reason. The reason is what stops it feeling like begging — you are not asking for a favour, you are explaining how your business gets found.

Why it works: it says why, it says how long, and it hands over the link immediately. What to avoid: “if you were happy with everything” — that is the gating instinct creeping back in, and it also invites the answer “well, actually…” at the worst possible moment.

If they mention something that was not right, deal with that instead and forget the review. Fix it, and ask a week later. That is not gating — you asked, they raised a problem, you solved it.

The bad review

You will get one. A perfect five‑star record with forty reviews reads as fake to most people anyway; a 4.7 with a couple of imperfect ones reads as real.

• Reply within a day, in public. The reply is not for the reviewer. It is for the hundred people who read it afterwards, and they are judging your reply far more than the complaint.
• Be short, be specific, offer to sort it. Three sentences. No paragraph about how much you value quality.
• Never argue the facts in public, even when you are right — especially when you are right. It always reads badly.
• Never mention what they paid, where they live, or anything else about them. You know things about their house that they did not publish.
• Do not offer money to remove it. Trying to suppress a genuine review is the behaviour the rule targets.
• If it is fake or it is not your customer, report it through the platform and reply calmly saying you have no record of the job. Do not accuse anyone in the reply.

Where the reviews should go

• Google first, and by a distance. It is what appears when somebody searches your trade and their town, and it feeds the map results.
• Then wherever your customers already are — the local Facebook group, the platform you get work from, your own site.
• Do not split the ask. One link, one place, per customer. Two choices halves the number you get.
• Put the good ones where they do work: on the quote, on the van, on the page for that service. A review nobody reads is decoration.

A steady trickle beats a burst, too. Twenty reviews in one week looks bought; two a month for a year looks like a business.

What to stop doing

• Screening before you ask. It is now a prohibited practice, and it was always the thing that kept your rating from meaning anything.
• Offering a discount for a five‑star review. An incentive conditioned on sentiment is exactly what the rule names.
• Asking by email, days later. The moment has gone.
• Writing them yourself, or asking your brother to. Insider reviews without disclosure are covered by the rule, and readers spot them anyway.
• Ignoring the bad one. An unanswered complaint reads as agreement.
• Only asking after big jobs. Volume is the point.

Sources

Checked in August 2026. The penalty figure is adjusted for inflation each year, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise number.

• Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials — the rule itself in the Federal Register, including the review‑suppression and incentive provisions. Cited here rather than the FTC’s own summary pages, which block automated checks.
• A law firm’s analysis of the rule — plainer English on what is prohibited and what the penalties are.
• The timing advice and the scripts are ours. The claim that asking on the day beats asking later is drawn from how these conversations go on a driveway rather than from a study — test it against your own review rate, which is the only number that matters here.