Find where the internet disagrees with you, in 20 minutes

Your details are published in more places than you can name

A phone number, a set of hours, a list of suburbs, a licence number. Each one was entered somewhere by you or by somebody who rang you, and each one was correct on the day it went in.

Then you changed phones. Dropped a suburb because the drive was killing you. Renewed a licence under the company instead of your own name. Every one of those was a real decision, and none of them travelled to the other places your old details are still sitting.

You have probably never seen those places side by side. That is the entire exercise, and it takes 20 minutes.

What you need before you start the timer

A private browsing window, signed out of everything. A browser that knows who you are shows you your own listings first and hides what a stranger sees.

A grid with 6 columns: where it appears, phone, address or service area, hours, licence number, and the business name spelled exactly as printed. Paper is fine.

Minutes 0 to 5: find the places

Three searches, in this order.

• Your business name on its own.
• Your business name plus your main suburb.
• Your phone number, in quote marks, as a search by itself. This is the one that surfaces the listings you forgot you ever made.

Write down every result that is about you rather than by you. A typical trade business turns up some mix of: the Google Business Profile, a Facebook page, your own site’s contact page and footer counted separately because they often disagree, two or three directories, a lead platform you signed up to once, a supplier’s find-an-installer page, the footy club you sponsored, a licensing register entry, and at least one old listing you never created and can’t remember agreeing to.

Stop at 10 entries or at 5 minutes, whichever comes first. You are not trying to be complete. You are trying to be honest about the ones a customer would actually hit.

Minutes 5 to 12: fill the grid

Five facts per row and nothing else. Don’t read the copy. Don’t judge the photos. Don’t get pulled into fixing anything yet, because fixing is a different afternoon.

• Phone. Copy the digits exactly as printed, not what you know it should be. This is where people cheat without meaning to.
• Address or service area. Write the suburb list in the order it appears. A list that starts with a suburb you stopped covering is worth noticing.
• Hours. Any listing showing “open 24 hours” gets flagged on its own, because somebody will believe it at 11pm and ring.
• Licence number. Exactly as printed, including the prefix and any spaces.
• Business name. The exact spelling. Pty Ltd or not. Trading name or entity name. “&” or “and”.

Minutes 12 to 16: the two you can check against an authority

Four of your five facts can only be checked against each other. Two of them can be checked against a register that has the final say, and this is the block that turns up the ugly ones.

Your licence: every state and territory runs a public register through the body that issued it. Search your own number. Check three things — that it’s current, that the expiry is what you think it is, and that the name it’s held in matches the name on your invoices.

The register you want depends on where the licence was issued, not where you work. In Queensland it is the QBCC; in New South Wales, Fair Trading; in Victoria, the Building and Plumbing Commission (formerly the VBA) for building and plumbing, and Energy Safe Victoria for electrical; in Western Australia, Building and Energy; in South Australia, Consumer and Business Services; in Tasmania, CBOS; in the ACT, Access Canberra; in the Northern Territory, the licensing board for your trade. Each publishes a searchable register and each one is free.

Your business name and ABN: the national ABN Lookup register shows the entity name, any registered business names, GST status and whether the registration is current. Hold that against what’s in your website footer and on your quotes.

What this block commonly finds: a licence held in a sole trader name years after the company took over, a business name registration that quietly lapsed, or an ABN whose entity name is nothing like the name on the ute.

Minutes 16 to 20: mark every row with one of 3 words

Now go down the grid. Every cell gets one of three marks, and the distinction between the last two is the part most people get wrong.

• Confirmed. Two or more independent places say the same thing, and it’s what you’d tell a customer today.
• Conflict. Two published things disagree with each other, or something published disagrees with you. An old mobile. Hours from before you put a second van on. A suburb you dropped. A licence in the wrong name.
• Gap. Nobody publishes it at all. Your licence number appears in no listing. Your hours are absent everywhere except Google. Not wrong. Missing.

Keep them separate, because they’re different jobs. A conflict has to be decided — somebody has to say which version is true, and that somebody is you. A gap only has to be filled, which is typing. Mixing them makes the list look twice as bad as it is, and a list that looks unmanageable doesn’t get worked through.

A few conflicts is normal

When we start a build, we compare what you tell us with what’s already published about you. Where two sources disagree, we ring you rather than picking a winner.

Nothing gets written until a person decides which version is right. Only you know whether your old mobile or your new one is the real one.

A few conflicts is not a bad score. It’s the normal state of a trade business that has been running for a few years and moving forward the whole time. Businesses relocate. Hours change. A directory keeps a number from two phones ago and never asks. What costs you money isn’t having a few. It’s having a few and not knowing which ones.

Fix them in the order a customer meets them

1. Phone number. A wrong number is a job lost today, and it’s worse than no number at all, because the caller thinks he tried.
2. Hours. Someone either drives out to a closed yard or doesn’t ring at all.
3. Service area or address. Wrong suburbs cost you the drive or cost you the call.
4. Licence and business name. Slower harm, but the kind that ends in a complaint rather than a lost quote.
5. Gaps. Last. They’re the easiest and the least urgent.

Mark the rows you can’t change yourself — a directory with no login you can remember, a supplier page somebody else maintains. Each of those becomes one email. Write the date you sent it next to the row, and let that list become its own dated file. Same discipline as a day-zero baseline: the date is what makes it usable in three months.

The part that’s yours

We don’t check your details against the licence registers for you. That part is yours, and it’s the 20 minutes above.