Short answer: if they own it, it leaves with them. Your website can go dark overnight. Your Google listing can keep sending customers to a dead page. The phone numbers they set up can stop ringing your phone. And you’re left starting over, still not knowing how any of it works, because you never had to.
I know because I just spent months cleaning this up for a client.
The job I thought I was taking
Mark has run a roofing company in Milledgeville, Georgia since 1994. He’s on a roof six days a week. He doesn’t have time to learn Google, and he shouldn’t have to. That’s what he paid marketing companies for.
When we started working together, I thought I’d be setting up his Google Business Profile. Clean slate, do it right from day one.
That’s not what I found. I wasn’t setting anything up. I was going to have to fix it. And honestly? That was a little disheartening, because fixing is a lot harder than starting fresh.
Here’s what years of paying for marketing had left him with:
- A website that returned an error page. He had been renting it. When the payments stopped, the company pulled the content. But Google still had his site listed, so anyone who looked him up and clicked “Website” hit a dead end. Some of them just called the next roofer.
- A Google profile he had never touched. The marketing company did “all the Google stuff” for him. So when they were gone, he didn’t know how any of it worked.
- Six different phone numbers floating around the internet. Some were tracking numbers set up by vendors. When a vendor relationship ends, those numbers can stop reaching you, or keep sending your customers somewhere else.
- A copycat website with his business name on it, set up by a former vendor and still routing calls through their phone number.
He’d paid for marketing for years. He owned almost none of it.
The hardest part of fixing it
Two things made this hard.
First, dealing with the old vendor. They were not easy to work with. When a company is losing your business, getting them to hand things over or take things down is not their priority.
Second, chasing down all those phone numbers. They were scattered across directory sites, map apps and listings, many of them in accounts I didn’t have access to, because Mark didn’t either. So I had to go in as a third party, find every listing, and request corrections one by one. Then check again later, because some of them changed back.
None of that work grows his business. It just gets him back to zero. That’s the real cost of not owning your stuff: you pay once to build it, and then you pay again to dig it back out.
Before you sign with a marketing company, ask this
Make sure you own all of your assets. Not them. You.
Some marketing companies own their clients’ websites, their domain names, and even their Google Business Profiles, and the business owner doesn’t even have a login. Everything’s fine while you’re paying. But if you get frustrated and leave, or they go out of business, or they just stop answering, you have nothing left. You have to start all over again, and you still don’t know how to do it, because you never learned the first time.
Before you sign anything, ask them directly:
- Whose name is my domain registered in? It should be yours, in your own account, on your own card.
- Am I the Owner on my Google Business Profile? Not a “manager,” not “they’ll add you later.” You should be the Owner, and they should be the manager.
- Do I have my own logins to everything? Website, Google, Facebook, directory listings. If they say “we handle that,” that’s a red flag.
- Whose phone number is on my listings? Tracking numbers aren’t always bad, but you need to know which ones exist and what happens to them when you leave.
- If I cancel, what do I walk away with? Get the answer in writing.
Red flag: any company that gets vague, says “it’s easier if we hold it,” or won’t put ownership in writing. Walk away.
Already working with someone? You can check what you own yourself in about 15 minutes. Here’s the step-by-step checklist.
How I do it differently
You own all of your assets. Not me. You own everything you’re paying me to do.
- Your domain is in your name.
- You’re the Owner of your Google Business Profile. I’m added as a manager, and you can remove me any time.
- You get your own logins to everything.
If you ever decide to leave, you don’t lose anything. That’s the point.
Where Mark is now
Mark now has a fast new website on his own domain and is starting to show up again. When we started he had zero Google reviews; he has his first ones now. On a recent map check of “roof repair” searches around his shop, he showed up in the top 3 at 80% of the points we checked. He’s not there yet across the whole town, and there’s still work to do, but he’s building on something he owns this time.
Not sure what you own?
If you’re a contractor and you don’t know whose name your website or Google profile is in, that’s the first thing to find out. I’ll take a free look and tell you exactly what you own, what you don’t, and what to do about it.
Get a free look-up