Got a burning question you want the answer to? Stuck on some marketing jargon? Unsure how AI fits into the future of your business? Just want a straight answer to a question no one’s ever explained properly? Send it our way. We’ll pick the best ones to unpack in future episodes.
Hello and welcome back. Episode fifteen. Today is a checklist episode, the little things that quietly become a real pain when they go wrong. Mel has been delivering a version of this “tech 101 for business owners” for about ten years, and the list keeps growing. Work through these, tick the boxes, and you will sleep easier knowing none of them are about to blow up on you. None of this is about being lazy. It is just that we are all busy, and we tend to assume this stuff is someone else’s job, right up until it is very much our problem.
Do you own your own domain?
Your domain, for us 3by2.com.au, controls both your website and your email. When you register it there are two contacts that matter: the registrant, who is the ultimate owner, and the technical contact, which might be your IT or web company. You want to be the registrant.
Here is the horror story. A client called because their website was down and their email had stopped. It turned out a one man band IT mate had registered himself as both the registrant and technical contact years earlier, then gone travelling and stopped answering his phone. The domain lapsed, someone else bought it the moment it became available, and by then the business was a five million dollar company being asked for ten thousand dollars to buy back its own domain. We appealed to the auDA and recovered it, but the lost emails alone caused real damage.
Two quick tips. Set your domain to auto renew on a credit card, because it is cheap and the peace of mind is worth it. And do not use an email tied to that same domain as your registrant contact, because if the domain breaks you will not receive the warning. Use a separate address you check regularly.
Are you the ultimate admin on your own platforms?
Having access is not the same as having ultimate admin control. We took on a client operating several WA pubs whose part time marketing person had left for Brazil, taking the only administrator access with her. The owner had access, but not the top tier kind, so he could not add us, could not easily post, and we spent weeks producing business registration certificates and utility bills to Meta just to prove he owned his own pages.
Check it across everything: your Microsoft accounts, your Facebook and Instagram, your TikTok, your CRM. As Mel puts it, the question is not “yes, I have access,” it is “yes, I have the top tier access required.” Keep a master sheet of who has been given access to what, and remove people when they leave.
Cheap website hosting is not a saving
There is a difference between hosting and maintenance, and most people only pay for the first. Hosting is the server your files sit on. Maintenance is the human work of applying the security patches that keep the many apps behind a WordPress site working together and protected. Skip the maintenance and you collect vulnerability after vulnerability.
Why does that matter? Because bots hack sites to make them look legitimate. We took over one site and found a page that perfectly replicated a Telstra payment page, built by hackers to harvest credit card details via phishing emails. The consequence is blacklisting, where your emails land in spam and browsers warn people away from your site. Getting whitelisted again is a long, painful process, and you lose real business while your quotes vanish into junk folders. For an extra hundred or so dollars a month, proper maintenance is simply an insurance policy.
The rest of the checklist
A few more to tick off. Own your Google Business Profile, with the password and admin access in your hands, connected to your phone so you see reviews, hour prompts and even a malicious “permanently closed” edit the moment they happen. Make sure Google Analytics is set up in your name, that you have the login, and that it is configured to filter out bot and spam traffic so your benchmark data is actually clean. And consider call tracking.
That last one is a Mel favourite for a reason. At a competitive training provider, the owner insisted our lead data was wrong and that nowhere near that many people were enquiring. After a fair bit of getting yelled at, Mel played him the call recordings. His own receptionist was politely turning warm, ready to buy callers away by insisting they book through the website, where they never returned. As Mel puts it, “We can only deliver the lead to you. Can the person that answers the phone do the right job to convert that lead?” Call tracking is cheap, it changes nothing about your phone system, and the data it gives you for sales training is gold.
Open up the notepad
Beyond what we have covered here, Mel and Mon get into the trap of “free” advertising vouchers that quietly require you to spend hundreds first and load a credit card you then forget about, how long it genuinely takes to set up a proper pay-per-click campaign, and why you should set clear, realistic KPIs before hiring an eighty to one hundred thousand dollar marketing resource. Each one comes with a real story and a simple action you can take the same day.
The thread running through all of it is ownership. Are you the ultimate owner of the things that represent your business to the outside world: your domain, your socials, your Google Business Profile, your CRM? Get those right, and as Mel reckons, you are already ninety percent ahead of most business owners she meets, and you will save yourself buckets of time and money when something goes sideways. Go and check them. That is how you raise the bar.