How one review bankrupted my first company — and what I did differently the second time

The first company

I fitted kitchens for twelve years, the last five of them under my own company name. Two fitters, a van each, work booked three months ahead almost entirely from recommendations and from people looking us up online. We had nineteen reviews and a rating of 4.7. In the trades that is the business. Nobody lets a stranger take their kitchen out without reading what the last few customers said.

Then we had a dispute. A client changed the design halfway through, the extra work was quoted and agreed by text, and at the end they refused to pay the difference. Ordinary stuff. What was not ordinary was what came next: a very long one-star review saying our work was unsafe, that we had no certification, and that they had been forced to pay someone else to redo it. None of that was true. We had the certification, the work had been inspected, and nobody had redone anything. Within a week two more one-star reviews appeared from accounts that had never been customers, repeating the same claims.

What I did, which was the wrong thing for nine months

I replied. At length. I posted photos of the certificates. I explained the dispute. Every time I replied, the review moved back up the page because of the activity, and every reply made us look like a company that argues with its customers.

I also did nothing else, because I did not know there was anything else. I assumed a review was a review. The phone went quiet in about three weeks. Recommendations still came, but almost every one of them said the same thing when they called: “I saw the reviews, can you explain?” About half did not call at all; I know because the people who recommended us told me later.

By month four we were doing one kitchen a month instead of four. By month six I had let my second fitter go. By month nine, with van finance and a tax bill due and nothing booked, I took advice and the company went into creditors' voluntary liquidation. The review was not the only reason. We were thin on cash before it happened. But it was the trigger, and I will never fully separate the two in my head.

Starting again

I set up a new company six weeks later, under a different name, with one van and a lot of determination not to repeat myself. Within two months, I was given the chance to prove it: a client whose invoice was three weeks overdue posted a one-star review saying we had never finished the job. We had finished it. They had signed it off. They just had not paid.

The difference this time was that I had read, properly, how reviews actually get removed. Not deleted by the business, which is not a thing that exists, but removed by the platform when a review breaks its rules and someone shows that it does.

What I did differently

I did not reply. Not that evening, not the next day. That was the hardest part.

Instead I put together, in one document: the signed completion sheet, the photos from the day we finished, the invoice and the reminders, and the text where the client acknowledged the work was done and said payment was coming. Then I set that against the specific statements in the review that were untrue. Not “this review is unfair”, but “this review says X; here is the document showing X did not happen”.

I asked someone who handles these cases for a living to look over the file before it went in, because the first time around I had learned exactly how expensive getting it wrong is. The case was filed on a Monday. The review was removed and confirmed in writing on the Thursday. I then wrote one calm reply to a different, genuine three-star review from the same month, thanked them, and left it there.

The client paid, eventually, through the small claims process. That is a separate story and a boring one, which is how it should be.

Two years on

The second company has 44 reviews and sits at 4.8. Two of them are three-star and I have left them exactly as they are, because they are real and because a profile with nothing but five stars looks like a profile someone has interfered with.

I ask every customer for a review on the day we finish. Most say yes. I check the profile every Friday, not obsessively, just to know what a stranger would see. And I have a folder on my phone where every job's completion sheet and photos go, because the day you need them is not the day to start looking.