Reputation Intelligence

What the book argues

Reputation Intelligence is not primarily a book about AI. It did not set out to be a book about marketing, and it is not a manual for manipulating what a search engine or a chatbot says about a company. It started with a question Greg Cummings could not answer the way he wanted to: a homeowner who trusted him personally but had no independent way to trust the organization behind him.

The book's real question is whether you are building a company worthy of recommendation, one that can survive being looked at closely by people, and increasingly by AI, who never walk through the building.

AI did not create the need for trust. It exposed how much of trust has always depended on available evidence.

Author's Note

The trial

The frame is a courtroom. Your company is on trial, with employees, customers and family in the gallery, and the jury box filled with AI platforms reading whatever evidence they can find. You are not in the room. You do not get to interrupt, and you do not get to explain the one job that went sideways. The verdict is never announced. It is simply acted on, in calls that stop coming and appointments that slow down.

Near the end, the book stands three companies before that jury: the great company nobody can see, the company doing good work without the organization underneath it yet, and the company whose cracks are real and visible. By the time it finishes describing the third, the reader already knows which one is theirs.

Contents

1. Author's NoteWhy I Wrote This Book
2. PrologueYour Business Is on Trial
3. Chapter 1The Kitchen Table That Changed Everything
4. Chapter 2Great Companies Have Great Leaders. Without Exception.
5. Chapter 3Growth Is Getting Stronger, Not Bigger
6. Chapter 4Culture: Challenge. Develop. Deliver.
7. Chapter 5Stop Building a Company. Build a Community.
8. Chapter 6Customer Experience Is the Result
9. Chapter 7The Second Kitchen Table
10. Chapter 8The Emphatic YES
11. Chapter 9The Evidence Gap
12. Chapter 10The Transparent Organization
13. Chapter 11See What the Jury Sees
14. Chapter 12The Power100 Standard
15. Chapter 13Earn the Ranking, Unlock the Authority
16. Chapter 14Build the Case
17. Chapter 15Three Companies Standing Before the Jury
18. Chapter 16Worthy of Recommendation
19. AfterwordA Letter From Greg
20. Back MatterThe Monday Morning Audit

How it is built

The first half is about the company: the leader, and the five pillars the book evaluates a business on. Leadership, growth, culture, community and customer experience, in that order, because each one produces the next.

The second half is about evidence: the second kitchen table that opens after the salesperson leaves, the evidence gap between the company you built and the company the world can see, the answer a strong record produces, and the standard a company has to meet before anybody should help it become louder.

Then it closes on the word in the last chapter title. Not visible, not famous, not dominant, not optimized. Worthy.

Who it is for

Reputation Intelligence is written for CEOs and owners of companies that serve the public, and for the leaders they are developing underneath them. It is not only for the biggest contractor in a market, and it is not only for the company chasing a hundred-million-dollar number. Size is not the point of the book. Strength is.

It is also written for the leader who is already successful and wants to be made uncomfortable.

If you are already a successful leader, I hope parts of this book make you uncomfortable. I hope you question whether revenue is hiding weakness. I hope you question whether the culture would survive without you. I hope you question whether the outside evidence resembles the inside reality. That is not criticism for the sake of criticism. That is leadership.

Author's Note

The author

Greg Cummings is the founder of Power100, which ranks the top CEOs and companies in the home-improvement industry against a standard evaluated independently of any commercial relationship. He wrote the book from that seat, after years of watching companies scale next to companies that were struggling, and after the one question at one kitchen table that he could never put down.

Pre-order the book

Publication: fall 2026. Reserve your copy below. No payment is taken now, and when the book is ready to ship, Power100 writes to you first.