At the pointy end of owning a small business, the gap between a 4.6 and a 5-star score on Google reviews can mean the difference between success and failure. Edmund Butcher found this out the hard way.

In the late 2010s, Butcher had a furniture fitout company that installed couches, beds and sofas for overseas investors. It was a good business, until one day it wasn’t. “I just started receiving one-star reviews from people that I had never dealt with. They were Bangladesh IP addresses, I think, and it was just a spam attack,” he says.