Best Company (Pleasant Grove) is on a mission to boost word-of-mouth advertising with “trusted and transparent” tech. The B2B directory and marketing platform centers on verified customer reviews and service rankings in the home-purchase industry—empowering businesses to earn, not buy, their consumer reputation.  

Best Company’s first iteration took root in 2013: a B2B lead-generation and SEM agency following the typical rules of list buying and customer profiling. “The landscape we worked in had standard practices: broker between publishers and lead sources, segment and distribute, and manage the pay-to-play tools—with lots of unethical tactics and hostage negotiation,” says Alex Knight, CRO of Best Company. “We discovered various pain points for both consumers and businesses. We had the opportunity to differentiate our model from the industry gimmicks.”

The startup set out to create a more transparent, user-focused review platform for businesses and their customers. “We wanted to build a compelling platform to serve two demographics: businesses leveraging market opportunities and customers researching services online,” explains Knight. “We were uniting the parties for the benefit of both.”

Best Company’s CEO, Landon Taylor, has built bootstrapped businesses for over 13 years. A graduate of Brigham Young University, Taylor currently serves on the board for Skyrocket Media (Pleasant Grove), which he co-founded in 2013; and Especially for Athletes (Spanish Fork), an educational, training, and motivational program for athletes to maximize their talent and influence to assist others. Along with his co-founders, Taylor started Best Company as a passion project in an industry “ripe for positive change.” 

Today, the platform has evolved to support what Knight calls “highly-considered home purchases”—industries like solar installation, mortgage services, and pest control, when a customer makes an infrequent but significant investment. “Due to the importance of these transactions, a customer’s experience can make or break a company’s upsell,” says Knight. “Businesses should be highly attuned to that potential.”  

Knight explains how the Best Company platform lets businesses capitalize on referral and word-of-mouth awareness through its tech-enabled solutions, customer sharing tools, and micro-affiliate motions. “When there’s a great customer-client experience, the next logical step is to make it work for you,” says Knight. This means sending out follow-up text sequences, turning a fan’s written review into additional social assets, and even paying out spiffs for referrals—all of which can be done with a Best Company business profile.  

At Best Company’s core is the algorithm-based ranking system. The platform calculates a user-review index and market index, which factors in review date, star rating, and how quickly a company responds to customer disputes. (This index makes up most of the overall score.) The market index calculates industry-specific purchase criteria (e.g., price) to score the company relative to industry peers.  

“And all of this bolsters the third-party backing,” Knight adds. “A listing on an external site with thousands of business profiles and review-based search algorithms—that’s a real asset to companies who do right by their customers.”  

Capital-wise, Best Company is completely bootstrapped. “We’ve been fortunate to maintain optionality without outside capital,” says Knight. “We’re a lead-gen engine that’s been able to parlay profits into our buildout and platform. We have to be discreet and thoughtful about our development and structure, but we’re nimble enough to do things on our own.”

If the startup were to raise funds, Knight explains, they’d likely look toward a “private equity growth capital play”—seeking a singular but significant round to accelerate their business with runway. “It would likely be a single round at an inflection point after establishing a highly compatible product-market fit, then we’d work to hit target growth projections in specific B2B verticals,” says Knight. “But that’s a hypothetical. Now and forever, we’re committed to user personalizations and building better tools and insights for our companies.” 

To claim your Best Company business profile or learn more, visit bestcompany.com. 

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