Why We Don’t Belong to the Better Business Bureau

by Sharon Hassler, President, Go Get Experts

Members sometimes ask if we recommend joining the Chamber of Commerce or the Better Business Bureau. Your local Chamber may be beneficial for networking if you focus on non-loan signings. Belonging to the BBB establishes credibility but I don’t think notaries generally need this or can afford the BBB. For us, we promote our business nationwide not locally, so the Chamber doesn’t make sense. As for the BBB, here’s our story…

A year after we started Go Get Experts, a friendly, enthusiastic salesperson (yes, salesperson) from the Arizona Better Business Bureau called to compliment our clean record and said we were exactly the type of company they liked to have as a member. After a couple more sales calls, we decided to spend the big(!) bucks and sign up for both their local and online memberships. We completed the application and sent in our money. Over the next few weeks, we kept checking for our online profile. Nothing. My phone calls and emails weren’t returned. (There’s something ironic about poor service from the BBB!) Then two months after they cashed our check, I received a refund with a canned letter saying we weren’t accepted, but we could appeal. Huh? Appeal what? What was the problem? There was no clue in the letter.

I started calling again and could not get a response until I contacted the local chapter who contacted the state office on our behalf. Finally, I received a call from a BBB representative who said the person who reviewed our websites reported we were strictly referral sites with outgoing links, no intrinsic value, and promoted work-from-home businesses. I pressed for more details and found their work-from-home complaint especially infuriating. The BBB in Phoenix has determined that home-based businesses are probably scams, so they ban any mention of them on members’ websites. Well, that’s hard to overcome on our GoGetNotary site since notaries have home-based businesses. Plus they didn’t like the Google ads at the bottom of our articles. (We invest the revenue from those ads into buying Google Adwords to bring more traffic for our members.) Apparently, on pages where the words “work” and “home” were mentioned, Google occasionally delivered an ad about a work-from-home business. We thought we could fix this particular problem easily by setting up a filter on Google to block all such ads. I contacted the BBB again and offered to send screenshots showing how the filter worked but that wasn’t good enough: They said unless we removed all ads from our sites or got a statement from Google saying they would never ever accidentally post a work-from-home ad, we could not join. This was now about three months since the first friendly sales call saying how much they wanted us as a member. We had had enough. Finito.

While the general public is impressed with the BBB seal, and we definitely recommend checking their complaint reports on both member and non-member businesses, we wouldn’t join if they offered us free membership. After being confronted with the questionable logic and guidelines in the Phoenix office, we no longer place any importance on another company’s BBB membership or lack of it.

©Copyright Sharon Hassler. All rights reserved. Sharon Hassler is president of Go Get Experts, LLC, owner and operator of GoGetRealEstate.com, GoGetLoan.com, GoGetNotary.com and GoGetEscrow.com. A former loan officer and real estate agent in Southern California, she served as Communications Manager for First American Title-Arizona for 11 years. For more about Sharon, visit GoGetNotary.com/Get/Sharon.