What ninety dollar oil has to do with your testimonials

I want to talk about your fuel bill for a minute, and then about something else.

If you run a van, you already know. You didn't need a headline to tell you. You've been watching it climb at the pump since about March and doing the arithmetic in your head on the way to the first job.

The newspaper version of what you've been feeling goes like this. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively shut since late February. Before that, roughly a hundred and thirty ships a day went through it. In early August it was running somewhere between eight and fifteen. About a fifth of the world's oil used to move through that gap. Brent is sitting near ninety dollars, up about a quarter since this started, and the US Energy Information Administration does not expect Middle East production back to anything like normal until early 2027.

I've got no opinion worth printing on any of the politics, and this is a website about testimonials, so I'll leave that where it belongs. What I do want to point at is the second thing that happens after the fuel bill, the one nobody warns you about.

Your customers are shopping differently now

A homeowner opening a heating bill that's up a third does two things.

They put off what they can. The bathroom can wait. The deck can wait. The tree that's leaning but hasn't fallen can wait one more winter. That work doesn't vanish, but it slides out past the horizon.

They shop harder on what they can't put off. The furnace that quit is not optional. Neither is the pipe that let go behind the wall. But somebody who'd have called one guy in a normal year is now getting three quotes, and reading every one of you before they call.

That second part is why I'm writing this. Your total number of jobs may be down. The scrutiny per job is up. More people are looking at you longer before they decide, which means whatever you've got sitting there for them to look at is doing more work than it did a year ago.

And now the ugly part. When money is tight, the cheapest quote does not automatically win. What wins is the quote people believe. Somebody choosing between three numbers they can't really evaluate falls back on the only thing they can evaluate, which is whether other people were glad they picked you. A stranger will pay a couple hundred more to avoid the guy who might not show up.

This is the worst possible time to buy your way in

The other thing that's happened since February is that everything with a delivery truck behind it costs more, so margins in the trades are thinner than they were.

Which makes it precisely the wrong moment to solve a slow phone by spending money on ads. I've watched people do this. Work goes quiet, panic sets in, somebody signs up for a few hundred a month of clicks, and the money goes out the door at exactly the point in the year when there's least of it to send. When it's turned off, whatever it bought stops with it.

Proof works the other way around. It's slow, it's cumulative, and once a client's written it, it sits there working on your behalf for years at no further cost. Your diesel goes up, that testimonial doesn't. Nothing else in your business behaves like that.

The catch, and it's a real one

You cannot start this in the week you need it.

Everything I've just written runs into that wall. Testimonials are the thing you want most in a slow season and the thing you can only build in a busy one, because they come from finished jobs and happy people and there's no way to conjure either on demand.

The business that's comfortable right now is the one that spent last spring asking, back when the phone was ringing anyway and nobody felt like they needed to bother. Which is a maddening thing to read if you're in the thick of it today.

So take it as two pieces of advice depending on where you're standing.

If you're busy: ask now. Today, on the job you just finished. You will not feel any urgency about it, which is why it works. You're building the thing that carries you through whatever the next one of these is.

If you're slow: you're not out of it. Go back through the last two years of work and ask the clients who were happiest. There's no rule that a testimonial has to be collected the day of. "I'm putting together some client feedback for the website, and I thought of that job at your place last spring" works fine, and people are generally pleased to be asked. You can have six good ones by the end of the week if you make the calls.

What I'm not going to tell you

I'm not going to tell you that testimonials fix a hard year. They don't. If the work isn't there, the work isn't there, and no amount of anything on your website conjures a furnace failure that didn't happen.

What they do is narrower and worth having anyway: when somebody who was already going to hire somebody is comparing you against two other outfits, they tilt it your way. In a normal year that's worth something. In a year where every customer is getting three quotes instead of one, it's worth considerably more.

The case ends there. It's not a strategy for a war and I'd be embarrassed to dress it up as one. It's just that the cheapest thing you own got more valuable, and most people haven't noticed.

If you want the asking done for you, Exalted costs nine dollars a month and takes about as long to set up as a fuel stop. It works the same for a plumber, a roofer or a tree service, or anybody else whose phone got quieter this spring.

Written late August 2026. The figures above were accurate then and this is a fast moving situation, so check a current source before quoting any of them back at me.