Our company review methodology

When looking at any market area, we first seek to collate a list of all players in that market, thus allowing us to do a complete market review.

We only publish reviews for the companies that meet our strict standards and usually only publish the very best companies on our "Best of Review" section of our website. However, we publish full reviews for some of the other companies that have missed out on our best rating.

All the companies we review go through our rigorous review process. Unlike several other internet review sites, we do NOT just look at what others have said online.  Our process has these unique steps to ensure we provide the most accurate, unbiased information we can.

Below you will find an outline of our process. 

1. Identify all players in the potential market we are going to evaluate
2. Contact each company and acquire any educational material or marketing material they provide
3. Evaluate any material provided in step three
4. Evaluate any reviews and testimonials on the companies website
5. Evaluate and review testimonials and complaints on the following sites Better Business Bureau (BBB), Business Consumer Alliance (BCA), TrustLink, TrustPilot, Google Reviews, Facebook, National Ethics Association, Most Trusted, My 3 Cents, and The Rip Off Report.
6. Do a preliminary ranking and eliminate the companies we have concerns about.
7. Contact the remaining companies whilst posing as a prospect and evaluate their responses, helpfulness, and accuracy of any answers they give. We deliberately ask them a range of challenging questions; we also ask questions in regulated areas where they should not be offering advice to check they do not provide advice. We ask them to provide additional information and educational material to judge the timeliness of the provision and the quality of the information provided. After this, again, we cut some potential providers from our selection process.
8. We then take the companies that remain on our list and inform them that we are not an actual prospective customer. Instead, they have been undergoing our evaluation process. At this point, we can ask them questions about any negative reviews we have encountered. We are looking to find out their side of the story and a genuine reason for the complaint. Additionally, we want to explore if there was a genuine reason to address the complaint with the end customer and what systematic process improvement they have put in place to ensure this type of complaint does not happen again.
9. The penultimate step of our process is to provide a long list of testimonials we have found on their website and ask the company to reach out to the customers who wrote these testimonials so we can check the testimonials are genuine. We seek to get at least five checks done from each company we review. If the company cannot furnish five customers to check, they do not go on our recommended list.
10. The final step in our evaluation is to stack rank the companies to provide our top recommendations.

We believe in being open and honest, and we must declare that some of the companies we feature on the BearLakeGold.com website may pay us affiliate commissions; not all do so.

Our review team never knows which companies provide affiliate commissions or how much these affiliates pay us. This non-disclosure is done deliberately to keep our evaluations as unbiased as possible.

If we are paid affiliate commissions, you will never pay more than if you had gone direct to the customer yourselves.