Discover how I transformed the greatest challenge ever faced by my family business into a powerful reputation marketing program.
My entrepreneurial journey began with my father Wolfgang Schwantes, who emigrated from Germany in the late ’70s to start a jewellery shop in Brisbane’s iconic City Arcade in Adelaide Street. I have vivid memories of watching him in his workshop as a young boy. The smells of the oils, the crimson glow of a heated gold, the hiss of molten metal quenched in water created a magical experience for me.
Fast forward nearly 50 years, and I’m the Client Experience Officer (CEO) running the family business about to go through the crucible of the Covid crisis. Watching as lead flows evaporated and customers backed out of existing orders, I realised this trial by fire was a real threat to the future of my business and valued team.
We experienced a 97% downturn in revenue for a full 8 weeks, and were lucky to remain open and retain all of our people. But survive we did, and in the wake what I discovered was that our greatest business asset – the decisive factor that enabled us to bounce back faster than ever – was our excellent online reputation. The work we’d done in the 5 years in the leadup to Covid had made our business recession-proof, pandemic-proof, crisis-proof.
Taking an extra 4 weeks’ leave each year
Leaving work earlier to see your family
Creating a business that pays you what you’re worth
At Reputable, we believe that being in business is about more than just making money or delivering value for your clients. We believe in making the world a better place through our positive global impact.
That's why we've aligned with global business giving initiative B1G1 to create the 10,000 Smiles Campaign for turning your 5-star reviews into gifts of free education for people in need. Everytime a Reputable client's business creates a remarkable experience for their customer, who then leaves them a 5-star review, we'll gift a day of training to a young girl in the Philippines or another part of the world.
Imagine the positive impact your business can have on the world when you unlock the ability to create 5-star experiences and reviews that generate joy on a global scale. For every enrolment in our Reputation Builder program, we can give a full year of education that will transform the lives of people around the world.
Buoyed by the early success I’d achieved via Google reviews, I refined the approach, implementing strategies to garner more 5-star reviews and track the revenue they generated. I quickly realised I was onto a winner, and I felt a duty to share my knowledge with my community of fellow business owners. In late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I gave my first seminars under the banner of 5-star reviews. Since then, we rebranded Reputable, and while the name has changed the principles remain the same – the proven keys to unlocking your own 7-figure revenue generator without spending a cent on ads.
I’m proud to have helped 100s of businesses like yours tap into a zero-cost source of pre-qualified leads, year-round, unlocking the transformative power of online reputation marketing to enrich your business and personal life.
We do! Proving we ‘walk the talk’ with 200+ glowing Google recommendations. Check out some of our favourite feedback from business owners we’ve helped.
Before we started working with Karl we actually had no Google reviews, we had no strategy around building them... Quite often these days, we find that people have already done their research before they get in contact with us... they've already checked up out online, seen our Google reviews and so it makes a big difference when they already have that certain level of trust before they come to us.
What we've found is that before (Reputable) a lot of clients wanted to come in on our lowest level programs, get the trust, see that they're getting some results. Now we're finding that they're coming in on a much higher level of initial spend because they already have that trust factor.
I can say that prior to doing the program we had generated $6,000 in revenue from Google-led enquiries. Well, I've been proven wrong by following Karl's program because now our phone rings everyday with enquiries from Google. Since we did the program we made sure our profile was fantastic, did all the things, we've secured a whole bunch of Google reviews, and now in the last 2 years our income generated from Google leads is $240,000!
