Local business heroes are the reason we get out of bed in the morning at Rising Star Reviews. As a company, our most closely held value is celebrating and helping local businesses who are making people’s lives better every day. Local businesses drive job growth and economic prosperity for everyone.
But too often, the local business owner is an unsung hero who gets little public appreciation. And that’s why we’d like to sing the praises of these otherwise-unsung heroes when their heroic efforts are too important to ignore.
So we’ve selected Debbie Sardone of Flower Mound, Texas as our first-ever local business hero we’d like to highlight.
Debbie owns and operates a maid service in Lewisville, Texas called Buckets & Bows Maid Service. But Debbie doesn’t just think of her business as a way to make as much money as she can at the expense of her clients. Quite the opposite: Debbie sees that her business makes a real difference in her clients’ lives. And that’s what gets her out of bed in the morning. The mission of her business is obvious in its tagline, “Because you have better things to do with your time.” To us, Debbie is a hero every day, because she’s focused on saving her clients’ time so they can focus on the things they care most about–spending time with family, enjoying life–rather than spending that time worrying about cleaning.
But more recently, Debbie demonstrated her heroism in a new way by helping her fellow local business owners recover from Hurricane Harvey. In addition to running Buckets & Bows Maid Service, Debbie also owns and operates an online maid training program that helps people everywhere learn to build their own local maid service business, spreading her time-saving mission beyond her own local area to the world at large. But of course, not all of Debbie’s students are spread out all over the world. Some are in her own area in Texas, and were severely affected by the hurricane.
Debbie wanted to help these local business owners get their maid services back on their feet quickly. So she decided to raise money to help them by offering her maid service training course at half price for 24 hours with 100% of the proceeds going toward helping the maid service businesses affected by the hurricane. In that 24 hours, Debbie was able to raise $10,000, which is now getting distributed to Harvey-impacted maid service businesses. Debbie’s mission to save people time prevails, rain or shine (or hurricane).
But Debbie’s heroism doesn’t stop there.
It turns out that, almost 10 years ago, Debbie took on a different cause: cancer.
Debbie realized that her maid services could not only save anyone time to live their lives more fully, but that the time savings could be life changing for women going through cancer treatment. These women often don’t have the money to afford a maid service, but they have an even greater need for the service than most, since they often find it too physically taxing to clean for themselves.
So Debbie started a charitable organization to help these cancer patients with free cleaning services. Not only does Debbie clean the homes of cancer patients herself, but her organization helps other heroic local business owners provide free maid services to cancer patients in their local areas, too.
Debbie is clearly a local business hero worth highlighting.
But why are we so obsessed with singing the praises of local business heroes here at Rising Star Reviews? We’re all about helping business get more 5-star reviews, right? What does that have to do with a “human interest story?”
Simple: We believe in serving local business owners and managers, because we believe that most of them are heroic in their own small, “unsung” ways. And so we believe that when a business owner’s heart is in the right place, this shows up in their online reviews. And when their heart is not in the right place and they’re not focused on serving their customers well, their lack of customer focus also shows up in their online reviews.
Take for example how Toys “R” Us customer reviews foretold their bankruptcy. Or see how Equifax’s reviews showed their complete lack of customer focus, making it no surprise that they didn’t prioritize the security of their customers’ data enough to avoid the biggest data security breach in history up to this point. These are the anti-heroes we at Rising Star Reviews have no interest in serving.
By contrast, Debbie’s cleaning business, Buckets & Bows Maid Service, currently has a 4.8 star rating on Facebook. They also have a 4.4 star rating on Google based on 28 reviews, and a solid 4-star rating on Yelp based on 13 reviews. Debbie has also taken care to claim her Google and Yelp listings, keep their information up-to-date, and even add 22 photographs to her Yelp profile…none of which either Toys “R” Us headquarters or Equifax headquarters bothered to do.
Once again, a local business hero’s online reviews outshine the reviews of major publicly traded corporations with well-staffed marketing departments and multi-million-dollar marketing budgets…just by being focused on creating value for her customers every day.
Great job, Debbie!
