Sign the Cheap Quote, Scottsdale. Then Go and Get Yourself Reviewed.

Sign the cheap one.

I don’t mean that as flatly as it reads, so let me take part of it back before you forward this to your accountant. Price tells you something. In Scottsdale it just doesn’t tell you the thing you’re currently using it to decide.

The quote is open in front of you with a total at the bottom and a list of what you get above it, and you’ve spent your whole afternoon on the total.

Spend it on the list instead. Pages, a design, something that behaves on a phone, hosting, a form on the homepage.

All real work, and I bill for every line of it myself.

Now read the list one more time and look for the part where anybody promises to put stars beside your name.

You won’t find it. It isn’t on mine either, and I’ve been writing these documents for years.

The city that does the technical half properly

I’ve been auditing small business websites across 24 cities, and Scottsdale came out on top at 75 out of 100.

That grade reads the front of a building. Owning the best-built site in town and being busy are two separate things, and the second one never shows up in a score like mine.

Most of the technical work up there is already done. 95.5% of the sites I opened load over a secure connection, which is the kind of result you get when a machine does the job instead of a person remembering to do it.

That’s what a quote actually buys you, cheap or expensive. The boxes get ticked because the software ticks them while someone sets up your hosting, and the gap between the cheapest builder in that city and the most expensive one is narrower than either of them would like you to think.

So if the technical half is close to settled, what’s left?

The line nobody quotes for

Nothing I check in that city finishes lower than its Google reviews.

88.0% of the businesses up there hold at least one, which puts the best-scoring city at 13 of 24 on the one line of your listing a stranger reads without clicking anything at all.

That secure connection finishes higher. The writing finishes higher. Every box a supplier ticks on his way through your hosting account finishes higher than the plain question of whether a single customer ever said a single word about you in public.

It’s also the same 88% I get nationally, which is the bit that keeps nagging at me. Nearly everything else about that city sits above the country. This one is the country.

So what do you suppose the cheap quote is going to do about that for you?

What she sees at the other end

She types your name into her phone at a red light, or on the sofa at half past nine with the television still on.

She doesn’t see your hosting. She has never once in her life wondered about your hosting.

She sees a name, a row of stars and a number in brackets. Or she sees a name with a gap where the stars belong.

Which one of those do you tap, when it’s your own money and your own Saturday on the line?

A gap doesn’t read as new to her. It reads as untested, and she has three other tabs open where someone already has the stars, so untested loses quietly and nobody writes to tell you it lost.

Have you looked at your own listing lately, on your own phone, the way she would?

The ones who ask

The businesses up there who do ask end up a long way ahead of the ones who don’t. Businesses in Scottsdale average 170 reviews at 4.7 stars, which is a mountain of proof gathered one customer at a time by people who opened their mouths and asked for it.

None of them bought that. There’s no supplier in the country who could’ve delivered it on a schedule.

Tampa owners stack them up the same way, and a pile that size is a habit rather than a campaign.

Of all the people you did good work for last year, how many would put a sentence in writing if you asked them properly this week?

And the ones sitting on nothing usually aren’t lazy or badly reviewed. They just never got told that asking was part of the job, because the only people they hired for the website were people like me.

The objection I hear most

Your customers are private. Or they’re busy, or elderly, or they pay in cash and vanish down the driveway before you’ve found a pen.

I’ve heard every version of that, and some of them are perfectly fair. Software founders hand me the same list, and I have weighed every one of their reasons in turn.

It still doesn’t help you, because the comparison happening in her head isn’t you against the other business in your trade.

It’s you against the last time she took a chance on a stranger and it turned out fine. That one had a wall of stars behind it, and she remembers how safe it felt to tap the button.

Why it isn’t on anybody’s quote

Think about who could honestly sell you that line.

Not me. Your customers have never met me, and a note from a stranger asking them to praise you in public lands about as well as you’d expect it to.

Not the cheap builder, and not the expensive one either. The work needs your own customers to do something, and your customers don’t work for any of us.

Nobody prices a job they can’t finish on their own, which isn’t a scam and isn’t laziness. A quote covers what a supplier controls, and your reputation has never once been on that list.

So the most valuable job of your year is missing from every document on your desk, and not one person involved is going to remind you about it.

What I’d do with the money

I build websites for businesses in Scottsdale and I lose bids on price often enough to have stopped taking it personally. Go and read my price before you write back, because I’d rather you ruled me out at midnight than sat through a call just to hear a number.

If the cheap quote covers the work, take the cheap quote. I mean that one straight.

What’s the difference between the cheap quote and the expensive one, in money you could actually spend on something?

Whatever that number is, spend none of it. The part still missing from both documents costs nothing at all except a bit of nerve on your side.

And if you want someone to go over the site you already own before you sign anything, send me the address.

Go back to the quote

Print the one you’re about to sign. Yes, on paper, like it’s 2009 and we both have a fax machine.

Underneath the total, in your own handwriting, add the line no supplier offered you: ask the next customer who thanks you to say so on Google, this week, while she still means it.

Make it one tap for her when you do, because the ask fails on effort long before it fails on goodwill.

Give that line a due date, the same as everything else on the page. Who’s it going to, and by when?

Then sign whichever quote you like best. That decision matters far less than the one you just wrote at the bottom of it in pen.