Interview with Chris Hinman – Founder and CEO at TheBestReputation

Who you are

Tell us who you are and what you do.

I’m Chris Hinman, founder and CEO of TheBestReputation.com. We’re an online reputation management firm that helps executives, public figures, and brands control how they show up in Google, in the news, and increasingly inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. My personal site at ChrisHinman.com walks through some of the work and writing. Day to day, my job is simple to describe: we make sure the internet tells the truth about our clients.

What does your company do, and who does it serve?

TheBestReputation.com offers five core services: Google narrative management, content removal, review management, crisis PR, and what we now call AI visibility optimization, which is making sure clients are accurately represented when someone asks a large language model about them. Our clients are executives navigating PR crises, professionals rebuilding after expungements, public figures with outdated coverage following them around, political candidates, and growth-stage brands that have outgrown their search results. We’re equally comfortable on a quiet white-glove engagement and a live, public crisis.

How big is the operation today, team size, markets, scope?

We’re around a dozen full-time team members based out of Williamsburg, Virginia, serving clients across the U.S. and internationally. On scope, we operate as a services-led, product-enabled firm. The agency work is the core, and we’ve built proprietary tooling around it. AIOverview.com is the most visible piece of that. It’s a free tool that lets anyone audit how their brand is being represented across major large language models. I think every business should be running that audit monthly, whether they hire us or not.

How you got here 

What were you doing before this, and what made you make the leap?

I spent years inside digital marketing and reputation work, watching the same gap. The ORM industry was split between mom-and-pop shops that couldn’t deliver consistent outcomes and the big crisis PR firms, whose pricing made them unreachable for most of the people who actually needed help. Founders, executives, professionals whose careers were getting derailed by one search result. There was no serious, accountable firm in the middle, so I built one. The leap wasn’t a single moment. It was the slow realization that nobody else was going to do it the way I thought it needed to be done.

What’s the hardest thing you had to figure out in the first year?

Repeatability. In year one, you can win on hustle. You personally do the work, and clients are happy. The hard part is turning what’s in your head into a system other people can execute consistently, especially in an industry where Google rolls out major algorithm updates several times a year and what worked in Q1 can quietly stop working by Q3. Building processes that survive change, and a team that can run them without me sitting in every meeting, was harder than I expected and took longer than year one.

Was there a moment where the whole thing nearly fell apart? What happened?

A core algorithm update hit us hard a few years in. We had a stable book of business, results we were proud of, and overnight, a chunk of the strategies we’d built our delivery model on stopped producing the same outcomes. We could have white-knuckled it and hoped Google reverted. Instead, we tore the playbook up, rebuilt our content and authority strategy from scratch, and over-communicated with every client about what was happening. We lost some sleep. We didn’t lose the company. The firm that came out the other side was better than the one that went in.

What makes you different 

Why does your company win deals, what do clients come to you for that they can’t easily find elsewhere?

Speed, transparency, and range. Most ORM firms can push down a bad result but can’t run a crisis. Most crisis PR shops can do media strategy but can’t actually move what’s on page one of Google, let alone what’s inside an AI overview. We do both under one roof with a delivery team that actually answers the phone. Clients also tell us the transparency piece is unusual. We’ll tell you what’s realistic, what isn’t, and what we’d do if we were you. A lot of this industry runs on vague promises. We don’t.

Who do you consider your real competition, and how do you stay ahead of them?

Our competition falls into two camps. On one side, the legacy ORM firms that have been doing this for fifteen years and still operate like the search results page is the only thing that matters. On the other side, the large crisis PR agencies that own the C-suite relationships but quietly outsource the technical execution to people like us. We’re not trying to become either of them. We sit in a category that’s still being defined, and the way we stay ahead is by being the firm that’s already living in the next layer of the internet. We’ve been building AI visibility capability while most of our category is still arguing about whether it matters. By the time it’s obvious, we’ll have years of operational data on it.

What’s a decision you made that most people in your position wouldn’t have?

Building AIOverview.com as a free, public tool. The instinct in this industry is to gate everything and make a prospect get on a sales call before they learn anything useful about their own situation. We went the other direction. Anyone can go to AIOverview.com right now and see how they’re being represented across major LLMs, with no sign-up wall. Some of those people become clients. Most don’t, and that’s fine. The goodwill and the category authority you build by actually helping people is worth more than the leads you’d squeeze out of a paywall.

Where you’re going 

What’s the biggest bet you’re making right now?

That AI-driven search becomes the primary discovery layer for how people learn about other people and companies within the next two to three years, and that the entire reputation management category has to be rebuilt for it. Google’s first page still matters, but it’s no longer the only thing that matters. We’re investing accordingly, in tooling, in talent, and in IP. If we’re right, we’ll have built the category-defining firm for what comes next. If we’re early, we’ll just be the most informed firm in the room until the rest of the market catches up.

What does success look like for you in the next three years, concretely?

Three things. First, the firm operates without me in the daily flow. I want a team that runs the business while I focus on vision, partnerships, and the product side. Second, AIOverview.com becomes the default starting point for any executive, marketer, or PR professional who wants to understand their AI footprint. Third, revenue keeps compounding at the pace it’s been on, with renewal rates that reflect the quality of the work. If those three things are true, the rest takes care of itself.

What’s a shift happening in your industry that most people aren’t taking seriously enough yet?

AI visibility. Right now, most reputation firms are still optimizing for Google’s first page like it’s 2018. Meanwhile, millions of people are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity for summaries of companies and individuals, and those answers are being generated from sources nobody on the client side has audited or influenced. In eighteen months, executives are going to wake up to the fact that half their prospects, hires, and investors are reading AI-generated summaries about them that nobody curated. The firms that are ready for that conversation today are going to own the next decade of this category.

The person behind the title 

What drives you, beyond building a successful business?

Family first. My wife, my kids. They’re the actual point. Beyond that, I’m wired to build. I like solving problems that other people have written off as too messy or too hard. Reputation work scratches that itch because it’s part strategy, part technology, and part human. Somebody’s career, somebody’s name, somebody’s livelihood is on the line, and the answer is never in a textbook. I also enjoy the craft of running a company. Hiring well, designing comp plans that work, building culture from scratch. That stuff is its own creative discipline.

What’s the hardest part of the job that never shows up in press releases?

Carrying the weight of other people’s worst days. When somebody calls us, it’s almost never a good day for them. There’s a news article, a Google result, a viral post, a court case, a former employee. They’re scared. Sometimes they’re embarrassed. You internalize a lot of that, especially in the first few years, and you have to learn how to hold it without taking it home. The other thing nobody talks about is the loneliness of being the person who has to make the call when the answer isn’t clear. Founders carry more uncertainty than anyone sees.

What’s one thing you’d tell someone who wants to be where you are?

Build the boring infrastructure before you build the brand. Most founders chase visibility, the podcast appearances, the magazine features, the personal site, before they have the operations underneath that can actually deliver on what the brand is promising. I’m a believer in personal brand. ChrisHinman.com exists for a reason. But it works because there’s a real company behind it. Get the delivery right first. Hire one role ahead of where you think you need to. And don’t outsource the thing you’d most regret losing control of. For me, that’s been client outcomes and the product layer at AIOverview.com.