Integrity. Openness. The Underdog.

A business rating is a grade or score that tells customers how far to trust a business. The method behind it decides what counts: complaints, reviews, payments, licensing, or the evidence a business can show.

Different ratings measure different things. A Better Business Bureau letter rating looks at complaints and how a business handles them. A star rating averages what reviewers felt. A business credit score looks at payments, loans, and financial health, the things lenders care about when they weigh profit, not the customer experience. None of them was built to help consumers find the best new business in town, or to give newer companies a fair way in.

That is the gap the IOU Method fills. It rates what a newer business controls today, whatever products or services it sells: running a legitimate operation, showing its work, being open with customers, and doing something its competitors are not.

The BBB rating system grades businesses on a letter rating scale from A+ to F. Better Business Bureaus publish profiles for accredited and non-accredited businesses alike, so a business has a BBB rating whether or not it is accredited.

The BBB scores businesses on a 100-point scale and converts the score to a letter: A+ takes 97 to 100 points, and an F is anything under 60. When there is not enough information to rate a business, the BBB shows NR, for no rating.

Seven rating elements feed the score: complaint history, type of business, time in business, transparent business practices, failure to honor commitments to BBB, licensing, and advertising issues. The complaint element looks at the number of complaints filed, the size of the business, and whether the business responded on time. Time in business is one of the seven, which is one reason a brand-new company starts at a disadvantage.

Local BBBs serve communities across the United States and Canada, and your local BBB handles business profiles, complaints, reviews, and accreditation in your area. The network is coordinated at the national level by the International Association of Better Business Bureaus, whose affiliated programs include the BBB Wise Giving Alliance (Give.org) and BBB National Programs.

Accreditation is separate from the rating. To be accredited, a business affirms it meets the BBB's eight Standards for Trust, keeps at least a B rating, and pays a fee. The BBB says accreditation dues do not buy a rating, and that the fee supports its mission of advancing marketplace trust. That funding model means the group that grades businesses also collects membership fees from many of them, which is why the BBB states plainly that the two are kept apart.

Complaint history is the heaviest part of a BBB letter rating. Better Business Bureaus look at how many complaints were filed against a business, weigh that against the size of the business, and check whether the business responded on time.

That design makes sense for established local businesses with years of records. For example, a company with 200 employees and five complaints looks very different from a two-person shop with the same five. But a business in its first year may have no complaint history at all, and the bureau has little to support a grade either way.

Neither a letter rating nor a review score is a fraud check. To confirm a business is operating legally, use the state license lookup. To report fraud that uses a business name, the BBB runs Scam Tracker.

Star ratings average how reviewers felt about a business. They are useful for spotting patterns in customer reviews, but they reward companies that have been collecting reviews for years. For consumers, the stars are easy to access and hard to verify.

A business that opened last year may have a handful of reviews and no complaints on file, which leaves most scoring methods with not enough information to say anything useful. Higher ratings tend to follow time and volume, not quality alone.

Reviews can also be filtered or bought. The Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews bars fake reviews and review suppression, and our reporting in Rigged covers how paid placement sits next to the ratings on the big directories.

The IOU Score rates evidence, not volume. Every one of its 25 checks is pass or fail, every passed point is published with a source link and a date, and no check depends on how long a business has existed or how much it spends.

A small business builds trust by making its record easy to check. Before the reviews pile up, customers and partners look for signs that the business is real, reachable, and honest about what it charges.

For example, a two-person company can publish its license number, its pricing, and its warranty on its website today. It can name its owners, show three recent projects, and answer the phone. Each of those is an IOU check it passes on its own, and each one is an advantage over bigger local businesses that hide the same information.

Entrepreneurs operating on a tight budget often focus on marketing first, creating ads before creating a record worth advertising. The better order is proof first, then marketing materials that point to the proof. Keep your record current, monitor your license status, and treat online profile management as part of the job, so the facts match everywhere a customer might look.

A trustworthy rating publishes its rating criteria, shows the evidence behind each grade, and says plainly who funds what, so consumers and business owners can check the research themselves. If you cannot see how a grade was made, treat it as advertising.

Openness is the test we apply to other ratings in Rigged, and the test we hold ourselves to. The IOU Method is versioned, the checks are public and accessible to anyone, the scoring data ships with each list, and every correction is noted on the page it affects. That is how we support fair grading at the local level, one metro at a time.

Check the license first, then the ratings. A grade from any source is only as good as the record behind it, and a few minutes of research lowers the risk of a bad hire.

Most older ratings measure time: years of reviews, years of complaints, years of credit. A newer business has not had the time, so it lands at the bottom or goes unrated, no matter how good its work, its services, or its sales are. Across the United States and Canada, that is the same story for first-year companies in every industry.

The IOU Method flips that. The Underdog pillar looks only at businesses first licensed or registered within the last five years, and it rewards growth, active upkeep, and recognition that was earned rather than bought. A small business with a sharp plan and honest pricing can outscore a legacy name here, because every point is something it can prove today.