Most contractors never think about this until they’re already trying to leave. Then they find out the website can’t be moved, the Google profile sits in somebody else’s account, and a year of call history lives behind a login they just lost. This page isn’t about any one company. It’s about the six things that should have your name on them, and the questions that tell you whether they do.
While the phone’s ringing, none of this feels urgent. It gets urgent the week you decide to go somewhere else, or the agency folds, or the guy who built your site stops replying. That’s the day you find out what you actually bought.
Some agencies build on a proprietary platform you can’t take with you. It looks like your website. It has your logo on it. But there are no files to hand over, so when the billing stops, so does the site.
A Google Business Profile has one owner and any number of managers. If somebody else claimed it for you, they hold the owner seat and you hold a manager seat. Guess who can remove who.
Tracking numbers are registered to whoever set them up. If that number is painted on your trucks and printed on your yard signs, the trucks and the signs are suddenly wrong.
A year of call recordings, form fills and ad results sitting in a dashboard you no longer have access to. You can’t prove what was working, and the next agency has to guess from scratch.
Not most of them. All six. Ask about each one by name and write the answer down, because “yeah, of course it’s yours” on a phone call isn’t worth much the day you need it to be.
The files, the pages, the copy somebody wrote for you, and the domain the whole thing sits on. The domain especially. It should be registered in your name, in an account you can log into today, not one you’d have to ask for.
This is the big one. It holds your reviews, your photos, your map ranking and most of your phone calls. You want to be the owner, with the agency added as a manager. Never the other way round.
Your ad accounts hold the conversion history, and that history is what makes the ads cheaper over time. Start again inside a fresh account and you pay to teach the same lesson twice.
Not just the phone number. The recordings, the timestamps, and where each call came from. That’s the only honest record of whether the marketing worked, and you should be able to export it whenever you like.
Reviews live on Google, attached to the profile, so they survive a switch as long as the profile does. Which is exactly why the profile question above matters more than it first looks.
Service pages, town pages, blog posts, and the photos of your own crews on your own jobs. You paid for the words and you supplied the pictures. You should be able to walk out with both.
The website question is the one we get asked most, and it’s the right one to ask. So here are our own answers to our own checklist, in plain words, plus where to read them in writing before you sign anything.
Not a builder we rent you. Real WordPress, on a domain in your name, written by people rather than generated. Walk away whenever you like and you keep the site and the domain.
Onboarding asks you to give us access to your Google Business Profile. That’s all it asks for. You stay the owner, we do the categories, services, photos and posts, and you can pull our access any time.
If you ever add Google Ads, the spend goes straight to Google and never through us. You see exactly where every dollar went, in an account with your name on it.
Month to month, no setup fee, cancel any time. If you go, you keep the website, the domain, the reviews you earned and your full customer list. We hand it over and we don’t hold it hostage.
Read them off your phone on the call. You’re not being difficult by asking. Anyone who has thought about this answers in one sentence. Anyone who hasn’t will talk for a while and never quite land on a yes or a no.
A straight answer lists things. Site, domain, profile, reviews, customer list. A soft answer lists feelings.
Ask what it’s built on and whether there are files to hand over. If only they can host it, it’s rented, whatever the invoice calls it.
There’s a screen inside the profile that shows this. Ask them to share it while you’re still on the call. It takes ten seconds.
If the account is theirs, ask what happens to the spend history when you leave. That history is worth real money.
Ask for an export this week, not on the way out. If it can be sent today, it exists. If it can’t, you’ve learned something.
Especially the one on your trucks. Ask whether it can be ported out, who has to approve that, and how long it takes.
Nice on a call is worth nothing in a dispute. Ask which document says it, then read that part before you sign it.
Then ask what actually happens during it. The gap between the work stopping and the billing stopping is where the arguments live.
We’d rather say this than pretend a move is painless. Owning your assets makes a switch survivable. It doesn’t make it instant, and there are one or two things that genuinely can be lost on the way out.
The domain. The Google profile and every review sitting on it. Your customer list as an export. The website files too, as long as the site was built on something standard instead of a closed platform.
Automations don’t transfer. Missed-call text-back, follow-up sequences and review requests get rebuilt on whatever you move to. That’s days, not months, but it isn’t a copy and paste.
Tracking numbers, ours included. A number has to sit in a registered account before it’s allowed to send texts or attribute calls. Porting one out is possible and it isn’t instant, which is exactly why we never touch your main business line.
Rankings wobble while a site is rebuilt and redirected. Anyone who promises otherwise is guessing. If you have a slow season, that’s the month to do the move in.
The same answers we give on the phone, and the same ones you should demand from anybody else.
Yes. It’s a real WordPress site on your own domain. Cancel and you keep the site and the domain. It’s in the service agreement, not just in a sentence somebody said on a sales call.
You do. Onboarding asks for access to your profile, not ownership of it. If we ever part ways you remove our access, and every photo, category and review on that listing stays exactly where it is.
They stay. Reviews are attached to your Google profile, not to us, so as long as the profile is yours the reviews go nowhere. That’s the whole reason the ownership question matters so much.
Yes, and you can export it any time, not only on the way out. If you want to see what that export looks like before you sign anything, ask us on the call and we’ll show you.
No contract and no setup fee. Month to month, cancel any time. We’d rather earn the next month than trap you in twelve of them, and a contractor who wants out was never going to send us referrals anyway.
Your existing business number stays yours and we don’t touch it. The website and the automated texts run on a separate tracking number, because a number has to be registered on our side before it’s allowed to send SMS or attribute a call.
Please do. We wrote the checklist knowing it’d get handed straight back to us. If any answer sounds different on the call than it does on this page, that’s a problem, and you should say so out loud.
Book a 15-minute call and run the checklist at us. We’ll pull up your Google Business Profile live, show you who’s listed as the owner of it right now, and answer every question on this page while you’re on the phone. If we’re not a fit, you still leave with the checklist.
Book a call