I’m extremely excited to announce that I’ve started a new adventure in my professional life as the Chief Marketing Officer for an online customer feedback platform called GetFiveStars as of July 13th, 2015. For the first time in over 15 years, I’m out of the digital agency world of building websites, mobile apps, SEO and social campaigns and now building, growing and selling a technology product.
What is GetFiveStars?
GetFiveStars is a automated platform that helps businesses of all sizes gather feedback, evaluate customer satisfaction, generate testimonials and help them grow online reviews. The platform works for a single location small business and also scales to handle Fortune 500 companies with thousands of locations.
At the core of the platform is helping businesses understand their Net Promoter Score (NPS). This score is based off of the 0-10 numeric rating on how likely a customer is to refer your business to someone else. This score when compiled ranges from -100 to 100 and helps a company bring a data point to their brand strength, customer service and reputation.
Companies like Apple, Southwest Airlines, Amazon and Netflix are just a few that already use NPS as a valuable business data point.
One feature that makes GetFiveStars unique is that the platform helps encourage satisfied customers to review the business on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor and many other online review websites. The platform helps segment happy and unhappy customers with distinct paths based on their feedback score and comments. The platform helps monitor and build a brand’s online reputation, something that is greatly important in today’s marketplace.
It’s a perfect fit for any size business in professional services, retail, home services, real estate, construction, hospitality, dining and many more industries.
The platform launched over a year ago and has already grown to serving over 15,000 business locations thanks to how feature rich it is while being incredibly easy to use. Started by Don Campbell, Mike Blumenthal and Thomas Hasch, GetFiveStars is positioned to grow in both it’s offering and it’s size. Enter Aaron. 🙂
What I’m Doing
If you know me, then it’s no secret I love to create and build. While the title of CMO helps fill the line on LinkedIn and my business card, I’ll be leveraging the things I’m good at for the growth of GetFiveStars. I have a stake in the company so it’s more than a job to make things happen and as always, I’m all in.
Helping build the brand, landing new customers, improving the product, evangelizing reviews and customer experiences and so much more are all on my plate. I’m super excited to get the opportunity to take all of this to the next level, something I’ve done multiple times in my career and have excelled at.
How I Got Here
For the last 4 ½ years I had the amazing opportunity to help build and grow Spyder Trap, a digital marketing firm. Founder and CEO Mike Rynchek and I met on Twitter of all places 6 years ago. Before I knew it I was joining Spyder Trap when it was just 7 employees and under $1M in revenue. Fast forward and this awesome company is roughly 40 employees, 4X the revenue, a 4-time “100 Best Companies to Work For”, HITRUST certified and has a giant list of accomplishments and awards.
I have left Spyder Trap in a great place with a solid layer of management and so many outstanding creative and marketing professionals. I’m excited to see where they continue to go. There is no doubt the incredible people there are all destined to accomplish big things, especially without me weighing them down. I will miss my COO role, daily problem solving and working with talented people immensely.
I’m beyond thankful to Mike, CFO Barb Vanags and Creative Director Jeff Wagner for all of the collaboration and teamwork to shape what Spyder Trap is today. I’m also grateful for the team at ST and all they taught me via their talents, knowledge and experiences.
Things That Stay The Same
While this change is pretty big, there is much with me that will stay the same. Speaking and traveling for industry events, speaking with Local University, being active with MnSearch Association and many other online marketing industry events and groups.
Something that I have always known as well is the support I get at home that enables major changes like these to take place. My wife Marci is a huge blessing and backbone in my world and trading in my 2 hour daily commute for a home office (the company is virtual, with others in California, Hawaii and New York) should be of benefit to my family. She has always championed my passion and where I channel it. My daughters are bummed as they loved visiting the Spyder Trap offices (that are awesome!), but hopefully seeing more of Dad daily will make them forget their office whiteboard art sessions.
Holler!
Get in touch with me (aaron@getfivestars.com) if you are interested in a demo of GetFiveStars and of course I’m all for any referrals to companies that need reputation management and customer feedback systems!