The Brian Wright Show Podcast

The Proactive Mindset: Turning your One-Star Anxiety into Five-Star Google Review Strategy

• Brian Wright • Season 8 • Episode 125

Share episode

Send us a text

Click here to Schedule a Free Consultation

Click here to Subscribe to The Brian Wright Show Podcast

Click here to Subscribe to The Brian Wright Show YouTube Station

Click here to Follow The Brian Wright Show on Instagram

The Brian Wright Show is dedicated to entrepreneurs, their team and family members and for anyone that wants to transform their life, career and/or business. Welcome to the dawn of a new era! After eight successful seasons as the New Patient Group podcast, we're evolving into The Brian Wright Show—same trusted expertise, broader mission. This isn't just a name change; it's an expansion of our commitment to helping you thrive in today's dynamic marketplace.

What if you approached each business day with the same urgent focus you feel when a one-star review appears? This transformative mindset shift could revolutionize your business's online reputation and eliminate the anxiety that comes with negative feedback.

Most business owners operate in reactive mode - they're completely engaged with daily clinical or operational tasks until something goes wrong. When that dreaded one-star review appears, suddenly there's panic, emergency meetings, and a desperate scramble to offset the damage. But this reactive approach misses the fundamental opportunity to build a proactive review strategy from day one.

The modern consumer researches more thoroughly than ever before, often contacting five or more businesses before making decisions. In this landscape, your review profile serves as your digital storefront, with authenticity being the key differentiator. Rather than obsessing over a perfect 5.0 score (which consumers increasingly view with skepticism), the goal should be a substantial collection of genuine reviews averaging around 4.8-4.9 - a range that communicates excellence while maintaining credibility.

Implementing this proactive approach requires structural commitment: weekly strategy sessions focusing specifically on review generation, incorporating review objectives into morning team meetings, training staff to recognize satisfaction cues, and creating effective asking techniques. The real power comes from consistency - collecting one positive review daily creates a powerful buffer against the occasional negative experience that every business inevitably encounters.

For employees, becoming a champion of the review-gathering process adds tremendous value both personally and professionally. In a job market where finding dedicated, growth-oriented talent remains challenging, being the team member who consistently contributes to building the business's online reputation can significantly enhance your career trajectory and earning potential.

Ready to transform your approach? Stop waiting for crises to care about your reputation. Build the systems, train your team, and create the consistency that turns review management from a source of anxiety into a cornerstone of your business strategy.


Speaker 1:

Hey, brian Wright Show Nation. Welcome inside the broadcast booth, brian Wright here, and welcome in to another edition of the Brian Wright Show podcast. Hope everybody is doing great out there. If you're a business owner that realizes how important five-star reviews are and hopefully you do they're more important than ever before. If you're an employee out there working for a business and you want to know how can I add value to what I do day in and day out in my activities, to add more value to me personally so I can get a pay raise, increase my skill sets If you're either or out there, today's episode is for you.

Speaker 1:

Look, we are very reactive animals. You hear me talk about this often on this podcast. We get overweight, we try to lose weight. Our marriage goes to hell. We seek counseling. We lose money. We try to make money Getting people to be proactive, to keep the problems from happening or, if they still happen, they're always going to be minimal problems compared to what it is. If you're reactive, today we're going to be talking about a mindset shift you must make in your business Employees you must make, walking in and out every single day to the business you work for to add more value and this mindset shift will instantly result in you getting more five-star reviews for your business. It's going to be a really good one. It's all about mindset shift today, and before we get started, let's fire up the music.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Brian Wright Show audio experience, a podcast dedicated to transforming lives, careers and businesses, and now your host. He's a husband, father of two, an international business and life coach, the founder and CEO of New Patient Group and Wright Chat, and a consultant and global speaker for some of the finest companies in the world, such as Invisalign and many others. Now here's your host, brian Wright.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that drives our digital marketing team absolutely bonkers is the reactiveness that I talked about on the front end of this podcast, where sometimes they'll be trying to get a hold of the business owner, the employee that is in charge of social media, to help us out internally carry out our program. For all of you out there, and sometimes as business owners and this is especially true in our niche and orthodontics, dentistry, other healthcare spaces sometimes you could be the worst at that, where you'll completely go dark and ignore the business that's going on every day inside your practice. But many of other business owners that we work with as well and oftentimes the case they're just as bad where they get into this state where you know whatever it is, you're a chef and whatever you're doing as a chef sucks you dry. You're a clinician Orthodontist is an example and you're so in the weeds. Clinically it's like your business becomes the redheaded stepchild and you go into these dark periods oftentimes where the team cares more about the business than you do, at least on the surface, because they can't get a hold of you. Nobody responds, team members don't respond, you get the point and then all of a sudden, out of the blue and all of you can appreciate this, because if you're actually doing, you're not paying for five-star reviews. Every business on the planet is going to screw up from time to time. It's how you handle those screw-ups. The real key podcast for another time for sure, but we've all had the one star reviews.

Speaker 1:

And have you ever been in the situation where you wake up one day, you come into the work, you come into work and all of a sudden, boom, you got a one star. And think how you feel when that happens. You know if you really truly care about your customer and your brand, reputation, reputation, everything. It makes you feel sick to your stomach and we've all had that feeling. And oftentimes what happens? You know we, we get the one star and we absolutely freak out. So, oh my God, you know we freak our teams out. It's like, okay, how do we get the five star? Do I respond? What do I say? If I respond, I want to say do I even? You know what do I say? Do I even respond? Is this some guy down the street that paid somebody to write a bit? You know this may not even be a customer. You know it's to be a paid one-star review, if you will, by another business down the street on the surface doing the same thing I do, and we get into this again reactive state where we freak out and it's a really bad feeling. It's an anxiety push, right. It just is another way to increase your anxiety. And then, all of a sudden, the mindset becomes focused, right, and that's when you know our team is an example, you know the doctor or business owner, the chef, business owner, whatever it may be all of a sudden, you know we're getting blown up with 90 emails, 27 Slack messages. You know I want to meet in five minutes on a Zoom session.

Speaker 1:

Right, it goes from them being totally dark and reactive and not having any time for their business to overly obsessed about something that just occurred, and many of you out there can relate to this situation and it's being reactive. It's being reactive to the things that are going on in your business and, as it relates today this is just relating back to Google reviews the question becomes what if you took that same obsession and that same mental focus that you have when you get a one-star review? And what if you could create a strategy around it where you're like that every single day, consistently, to where you can get more five-star reviews. You know, if you had the same obsession, the same focus, the same freak out, if you will, whenever you got the one, as you do whenever you want more fives, right, you wouldn't have to worry about the ones. I think the majority of consumers, who are smarter than ever before, that do homework unlike ever before, which is why you know.

Speaker 1:

If you look 10 years ago where five-star reviews important, of course they were and you should have been getting more of them. But if you look today, with people shopping around more than ever before, if you listen to the previous podcast all around consumer data trends and how to use that to transform your life, career and business, the consumer data trends people are looking for convenience and willing to pay more for it, unlike ever before. They're shopping around and calling more businesses unlike ever before. Our niche out there you've heard me say it in the previous podcast. There's plenty of studies that people are calling at least five practices usually now even more before deciding even who to schedule with. So as they're looking around getting all this information, the five-star reviews and what they say, so that's not exactly that's not the topic today, but what they say is as important arguably more important than getting the five star review to even begin with.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of things that go into that, which we will talk about on a future podcast. One star what the hell do we do? How do we go out and get more five stars If you just show up to work every single day and you've got a mindset of, okay, how do we get one today, right. And when we show up tomorrow, how do we get another one tomorrow? And the consistency and consistency guys you heard me talk about this on here all the time and it's so difficult the shorter the attention span of all of you out there, the shorter attention span to the consumer you want to become a customer, a patient, whatever, as well as those that you want to remain a customer, a patient, and refer and do video testimonials. You have to do things and speak differently because of these consumer data trends. And it is a real thing, everybody, that getting you all to focus on being proactive is a very difficult thing for us. It's a very difficult thing, obviously, for other companies trying to help you as well.

Speaker 1:

And if we don't freak out on the one star, instead let's have the same business obsession and let's turn this into a strategy. You know, one of the things is whatever company is helping you on the digital marketing side of things if they're any good at what they do they're going to want to meet with you regularly not over the top, but once a month, right and you're going to show up to that meeting as a business owner and you're going to learn the data. You're going to learn from the posts that worked. You're going to learn from the posts that didn't work. You're going to learn from mistakes. You're going to take their expert guidance and make sure you and the team are carrying it out.

Speaker 1:

And part of that consistency of meeting when we do it with customers we see this too is, all of a sudden, you know the doctor's not in the meeting, as an example, or the chef isn't on the meeting, right, it's like you guys do it and it's an instant sign of weak leadership and it's also an instant sign again, thinking that your team has to do all this stuff and you can be disengaged. But team members watching this is as much on your shoulders oftentimes as it is the business owner, because when you show up every day, the excuse oftentimes of why we're not asking for them. Why we're not actively pursuing more five-star reviews, with whatever method there is, is that I'm too busy. But whenever the one-star review comes in, all of a sudden, none of you are too busy, you're all freaking out and you've got to have a plan. So see, you've got to turn this one-star anxiety into a true five-star strategy, and one of the ways you do that is you can block time, like many of our new patient group customers out there and other businesses that bring me in personally outside of healthcare. The strategy is you need an hour blocked every single week to work on your playbook, to work on the strategy practice. Your strategy to make sure when you're in the game, when you're in your practice and patients are there, when you're in your restaurant and the audience is there at the tables, that you're really freaking good at what you do. And one of those strategies is asking, and asking consistently and asking people on a daily basis, and that could be coming up your weekly meeting role playing. How to ask it's it's making sure the mindset of yourself and your team sees extreme value in making sure people are being asked and that you're being proactive.

Speaker 1:

I was saying earlier on how the consumer is smarter than ever. One of the one of the ways I was going with I didn't finish the. The point of that was your. Your goals should not be let's have 500 five-star Google reviews. If you're that business, you need to understand that. Consumers understand that you're full of crap, right? A lot of those are your mommy and daddy, your brother and sister and your friends, as well as other paid-for ads, people going in there and writing fake reviews. The best ones are the genuine ones that are actually real, and you should be striving more for 500 reviews at a four eight, a four nine, right? I think four eight is that magic number. Four eight, four nine. I wouldn't want you to ever drop below that, and I think four eight, four nine is is authenticity. I think the consumer looks at. That is okay. These, these are real reviews and we dealt with this. I'll tell you a story in just a minute, but we've dealt with this in the past.

Speaker 1:

What I'm about to say is all of you sometimes you can't control the ones you could implement our full program of hospitality, customer service, customer experience, which are three very different things, by the way. Do not get those confused and lump them into one Sales verbiage presentation. You could do everything right and you're always going to run into the family or the person whatever that you can't make happy right, and it's like being a waiter out there. You guys can appreciate this is that a lot of times the tables are the biggest pain in the butt and they're constantly complaining and you can't make them happy, no matter what you do. Leave you the worst tips right and we all run into those people. In every business, in every industry. Everybody deals with that. How you deal with it is going to minimize the one-star reviews, but we're all going to get them. It's just going to happen.

Speaker 1:

So if you freak out and then all of a sudden you have this relentless focus on how to get more and you're reactive, it's just not creating a good environment. It's a bad mindset, because if you can get more and you can focus on it after you get a one, tell me why you can't do the same thing before you get the one. This is the bogus thing you're telling yourself is that you're too busy to focus on the business, because whatever you do is sucking you dry, but all of a sudden you have the energy and the effort whenever something bad happens and you're trying to overcome it. So, if we can go in every single day with a strategy of okay, we just had our weekly meeting as an example, now let's start our day on a Monday, following that one hour, and now let's go out and make sure that we get at least one today, right, and then another one.

Speaker 1:

A lot of you do morning meetings in our niche you certainly do. Now, a lot of them are not good. You call them a morning huddle, which just in itself devalues what that whole thing is. When we install into practices and the businesses as a communication and customer service meeting in the mornings, well, what that is is to enhance your team's communication in order to brighten and enhance the customer service experience to your perspective and existing customers. Well, in there, there is strategy breakouts. Right, there is divisions of the morning meeting that different people are in charge of. Well, one of those is to talk about your social media.

Speaker 1:

You know the people coming in today to get their braces off as an example, right? What's our plan to if we haven't already get a five-star review? Right? What's the plan to get a video testimonial? Right, you're setting a strategy every single morning and identifying people that you know are happy, and it doesn't mean you should wait until the end of your journey with somebody to ask, but throughout the journey, anytime, they're giving you clues on how they're happy. Your team has to be trained to identify those clues and then ask.

Speaker 1:

And today's not about asking or how you ask. Today is understanding that you must have this relentless focus before you get the one-star reviews. You must be engaged with your business. You must meet with the digital marketing team. If it's us and you're using that division of new patient group as an example, you've got to make the meetings. You can't pass it off to other meetings. You can't pass it off to other people and call yourself a leader. You've got to be engaged with it. And you can't only be engaged when things are wrong. I mean, this is a podcast for another time, but I see so many leadership flaws out there in the sense of you become very engaged when something goes wrong.

Speaker 1:

Your employees make a mistake. You're all over them. You get a one-star review. You jump down whoever's to how could we do this? Blah, blah, blah. And employees make a mistake. You're all over them. You get a one-star review. You jump down whoever's to how could we do this? Blah, blah, blah and all of a sudden, there's this relentless focus, like I'm saying, and it's a bad way to lead your business. And this is why, whether it be your social media content, google reviews, youtube, how you greet people when they walk through the door, how you present how you present money, how you use your tech, people when they walk through the door, how you present how you present money, how you use your tech All of this stuff is trainable skill sets. Part of it, like today, is mindset shift. You can't wait to have the relentless focus once something bad happens. And you all can apply this to so many things beyond the five-star reviews as well. Right, you know, that is that this could apply to so many different things. Everybody, brian, right here, let's step away from the podcast. Hope you're enjoying it today, as the proactive mindset is invaluable for so many different things.

Speaker 1:

But I want to step away and announce registration has begun for our October iconic event. This event is a full team event and will be the ultimate in transformation of life, career and business. If you're a practice out there that wants to get better culturally, if you want to increase your numbers, if you want to be more efficient, whatever it may be. This event is for you. I want you to be thinking, tony Robbins, I need you to think outside your space, get your head outside your bubble and if you want to learn real life skills developing your hourly employees so they go back personally and professionally and do a better job for you, take the headaches off of you. If you want them to view their career differently, if you want them to learn real sales skill sets from experts in sales that are hired in businesses all across the world Hospitality, customer experience, consumer psychology so they know what to say, when to say, how to say, why to say communication, verbiage, presentation skill sets and how to apply that to every interaction they have before, sale and after this event is for you. This event is also going to teach you some amazing technology that you can bring back into your practice, into your business, to increase engagement and increase conversion in your numbers across the board. But and I want you to think this always the reason why we are so popular, the reason why people say the Iconic Event is unlike anything they've ever been to, is that our expertise comes from outside your bubble, but we know your bubble and how to apply that expertise to make you unique in the utmost of ways.

Speaker 1:

Bring your team and at minimum this is for the doctor office manager, your lead clinical assistant and lead front desk, lead admin position at minimum. Ideally, your whole team is there. You will be blown away and never want to attend another event in your space. All right, it is a popular event. It is growing like crazy and limited seats will be available. I am going to put the link to click to register for our October Iconic event in Nashville, tennessee. We have an awesome hotel rented out, awesome parties that we're going to have for you and we have changed Iconic from just being in Colorado Springs at our training center and we're going to go on the road now and the first one in October is going to be in Nashville, tennessee. It is going to be beautiful. Join us for Iconic. Do not miss out, because October, towards the end of the year, right, we will set you up for success for 2026 and beyond. Registration link is in the description of this podcast below. See everybody there.

Speaker 1:

And now let's get back to today's episode. And it's funny in our niche. You all understand that if a patient waits and they're reactive, what happens A lot of times it's too late. You can still fix the problems, but now they're looking at multiple things to correct the problem. They're looking at a lot of lost time, they're looking at higher financial costs to fix it as opposed to just being proactive. And a lot of you out there get frustrated when patients don't accept treatment because you know it's better for them and they do wait. Well, in our world, we get frustrated because you're the same way. You just do that to your business is. You're extremely reactive and instead of being proactive to fix the solutions, you'll say things like ah, that solution is too expensive. Meanwhile, you have 50 new patient no-shows a year and your conversion could be 10% higher. That's expensive year and your conversion could be 10% higher. That's expensive.

Speaker 1:

I think this mindset applies throughout, but today, as far as Google reviews, you've got to walk into the business every day. You've got to use your weekly meetings, you've got to use your morning meetings. You just have to use your mindset to be proactive and whenever you get a one, like I was leading to, you shouldn't be in a situation where you freak out. You should be in a situation where you know what. We just got 10 five-star reviews in the last two weeks. We happen to get a one. But now we're at 150 five-star reviews and three one-stars. So now we're getting this mix of reality, of authenticity, and nobody wants a one-star review. Like I said, sometimes, no matter what you do, it's unavoidable. So, knowing that, why don't you go in with a proactive mindset and get one every day? Now you get one every day by creating a culture of your people are going to ask, they're going to learn how to ask, they're going to look to identify clues. That's how you're going to do it. Asking will destroy automation any day of the week. Now, if you have some automation, like a five-star Google review link that goes out that, in combination with asking, the human element with the automation element, best of both worlds, and we're not going to talk about the automation and kind of what.

Speaker 1:

I was getting in there A long time ago this was, I mean, year two of New Patient Group and we didn't have our you know what together. We were still on the coaching side. At the time, it was just me. The coaching was fine, but we're still building out the digital marketing. The team wasn't great and the team we have today is just phenomenal, and that's why. That's why they get so frustrated when some of you out there go dark or they can't get you to do stuff and carry out the marketing assignments and look at the content calendar and engage, because they know something bad's going to happen around the corner where you will engage and they want you to be proactive. But the team now is so amazing. Well, we did a website and digital, just social media for this doctor in Florida and now, to our credit, this doctor in Florida was a little nutso All right, when I say little, I'm being politically correct. So there's a lot of more accurate things I probably could. I could probably describe this lady as, but at the same time, our processes and our communication and things like that weren't as streamlined or even close to how they are now, and the people we had weren't as good to the people we have now. So it was also on us and I think the lesson for another time, podcast for another time, but I think a lot of times.

Speaker 1:

Many of you out there, you need to take and accept blame more than you do. You'll get the one-star review and instead of learning from it, you freak out about it and instead of taking the whatever situation caused the one-star review and oftentimes it's several I did a podcast a long time ago a few seasons ago, it wasn't that long ago and it talked about the real reasons behind your one-star review. It's a really good podcast to go check out because oftentimes if one thing happens, people will not hit the Internet. But typically they hit the Internet once one thing turns into seven things and a lot of times those seven things you as a business owner don't even know are happening. Right, they walk in the door and you don't have their appointment down. Right, they walk in the door and they have to sit for 30 minutes in your waiting room. They call your practice, leave a voicemail. Nobody calls them back. It's that kind of thing. It's this domino thing that finally somebody goes all right, I've had enough. And they hit the internet. Rarely, is it one thing? Now sometimes they'll talk about it just being one thing online.

Speaker 1:

But if you get the one star, I don't want to go in the weeds on this, but you've got to learn from it. You can't just poo-poo it and say, ah, bad patient, bad customer, whatever it is. You've got to look at it and you've got to actually learn from it. And if you have these meetings and this proactive mindset, you're going to be getting so many fives that the one star really doesn't move you back. But whenever you do get the one star, you can use it as training content to make your people better in those scenarios, to make sure the one star doesn't happen again. As it relates to those scenarios. But this lady was very unreasonable and, like I said, there were several things that we did that were our fault and that, like I just taught you, the reason I got into it is we did look at it. We're like, hey, look, this person's a crazy person. But there are several things that we did that we should have done better. So let's use that as a learning tool, as a training tool. You get the point. So she eventually hits the internet.

Speaker 1:

And if you look at our history of five-star reviews with new patient group, we're at a five-star ranking right now, even though we have two one-stars. And we do that because on Google, once you're at like a 4.97 as an example, they're going to bump you up because there's no decimal points beyond the 4.9, right, it's not going to show you 4.9778. This is eventually going to bump you to five. 778. This is eventually going to bump you to five. So if you look at our reviews, they're all five-star reviews except for two, and this was this lady that wrote it and then her husband was the office manager and he went on and wrote one too. So it looks like we got two one-star reviews from two different practices, but we didn't. Those two one-stars are from the same but we had already had. Now that knocked us back because we were new, but we didn't. Those two one stars are from the same, but we had already had. Now that knocked us back because we were new, but we already had 10 five stars and the way the one stars were written you could tell these people were crazy, right? And we did go on and respond and we respond very politely and I think if you look at all of our five star reviews now, it kind of proves.

Speaker 1:

My point is that when you see how much people love us, how different we are than anything that exists out there, there's nobody else out there that teaches and implements what we do into businesses and into our niche in orthodontics and dentistry, et cetera. Nobody else exists. On the surface it may look like it, but nobody else exists that does what we do. And if you look at how much people love us and the great reviews. Then you see those two one stars. They look like crazy people but we didn't, oh God you know, freak out, how do we go get more wine? Because the culture even when I started this company was let's consistently ask, let's consistently go beyond for the customer and have a mindset of being proactive. So if we do have a situation where we didn't exceed expectations, combined with a person, that's a little bit crazy, if we do, all the five stars are going to offset it.

Speaker 1:

So, everybody, stop worrying about your ones. What you need to be worrying about is not getting enough fives on a consistent basis. Create a strategy. Meet with your digital marketing team. Block time on your calendar every single week. Use a morning meeting. That's actually a meeting. You know you can't have this podcast for another time, but you can't have make-believe-name Janice clocking in at 8.01 for your 8 o'clock morning meeting and Susie walking through the door putting on her makeup. And so many of you out there do it. And that is a culture problem that domino effects into other areas of your business.

Speaker 1:

In this case, your practice Be proactive. Everybody Go in every day, say let's get one. Right, you don't have to go in and get 50 in a week. You just need to be consistent and the only way that's ever going to happen is you have in the same focus, the same energy, the same effort before you get the one stars, as you often do whenever a one star creeps in and you freak out. All right, have the right mindset.

Speaker 1:

Everybody and employees out there, what I was hitting at earlier, we'll finish on this. Oftentimes, business owners, we get distracted. We got a lot on our plate, so you can absolutely take it upon yourself to tell yourself every person that I come in contact with I'm going to ask for a five-star review and I'm going to do everything in my power to get one every single day for the business, or two. You don't have to get one every day, just start with one a week, then get two a week, then get three a week, and you will be so invaluable as an employee you can't even believe it, because it is very difficult to find people that want to work hard. It is very difficult to find high level talent that's also coachable, that wants to improve their skill sets every day. And boy oh boy, if you're that team member, you're going to make more money than you can ever possibly imagine. So have that mindset, too, as a team member, and help out in this proactiveness pursuit, if you will, of having the right mindset to go out and get fives so you don't have to worry about whenever you get the ones.

Speaker 1:

All right, hope everybody enjoyed today. Have a proactive mindset. You know this applies to so many other things in your life, your career and your business as well. Hope everybody enjoyed today, as always. Thumb this video up for us on YouTube. Share with your friends, family and anybody that's wanting to transform life, career or business. We have a new YouTube station, remember everybody, so that's going to be linked below. Obviously, the name of the podcast now is Switched from the New Patient Group Podcast to the Brian Wright Show, as you've heard in previous episodes, a lot of reasons we did that. If you're listening on the audio experience channels out there, appreciate your support as well. Please write us a five-star review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and share with your friends, family, anybody that wants to transform life, career and business. Appreciate all of your support out there and following us and listening, and until next time we'll see you soon. Bye-bye.