Your fact sheet
Before anything is published under your name, we write down what is true about your business and who said so. This is that list. You can start it right now — read it, write your answers down, and bring them to the call. Nothing here is submitted anywhere; there is no form and no queue.
One rule sits above all of these, and it is the reason the list exists: the only valid source of truth about your business is you. Not our assumption, not something generated to fill a gap, and not your current website — that site may already say something wrong, and repeating it would make it ours as well as yours.
The legal facts
- Your registered legal name, spelled as it appears on the incorporation paperwork.
- The state you are incorporated in.
- Any trading names or DBAs that differ from the legal name.
Why: The most recent error on this site was a state. This company was described on its own privacy and terms pages as registered in the wrong one — for a day, including the clause naming which state's law governs a dispute. Nobody lied. Someone attested "we are incorporated", and the sentence that shipped added a state that no one had said. So the state gets its own line now.
What you do, and what you do not
- The work you actually perform yourself.
- The work customers often assume you perform, but that you subcontract, refer out, or simply do not do.
Why: The second question is the one that earns its place. Tom got this wrong himself years before any of this was built, with no software involved: he assumed a client did one thing, marketed them for it, and they did something else. It cost him the client. Marketing what you do not do is the most common way this goes wrong, and it is never caught by proofreading.
Your facilities
- Each address you work from, and whether you own it, rent it, or share it.
- Equipment and capability that is genuinely yours, as opposed to a supplier you buy from.
Why: A sentence claiming ownership of a production facility went live across 1,840 pages of a site whose owner has no such facility. It reads as a small flourish and it is actually a capability claim — a customer can place an order against it.
Your people
- Anyone who can be named on the site, and their role. "Just me" is a complete answer and a good one.
- Any licence, certification, or credential — with the body that issued it and whether it is current.
Why: A generation pass once invented an entire leadership roster, handed several of them accounting credentials nobody held, and put the result across 8,052 pages. Six thousand pages agreeing with each other reads like corroboration; it was a single invention, copied. Credentials need the issuing body because most are regulated titles, with rules about how a lapsed one may be described.
How long, and since when
- The year the business began, and in what form.
- Whether the years before that were a different entity, a different owner, or something you later took over from a relative.
Why: One business here had three different founding years in circulation at once. We store the year itself and let the page work out the rest, because any sentence stating how long you have been at it quietly goes stale while nobody edits it. Inherited history is worth recording with care: succession is often the part that is true but not yours to publish.
Anything countable — list it, do not count it
- Locations, business lines, crews, product categories, service areas: the actual list rather than how many.
- For anything that grows, say roughly where it sits rather than exactly.
Why: A tally of how many companies someone ran was approved once with no list attached, so the page decided for itself which ones they were, and got it wrong. A number with nothing enumerated behind it cannot be checked by anyone. Exact tallies also expire: a catalogue published at 58 items holds 62 today, so it ships as a floor and stays true without maintenance.
What we must never say
- Claims you cannot back up, even flattering ones.
- Numbers, rates, customers, or arrangements you would rather were not public.
- Anything a competitor says that you do not want repeated on your behalf.
Why: This list does as much work as the others. It is checked automatically before anything publishes, so a prohibition here is enforced rather than remembered.
Who attested it
- Your name, the date, and how you told us — phone, text, or in person.
- For anything you are unsure of: say so. Unverified is a real answer and it is recorded as unverified.
Why: A fact with no attributed source is not usable, and we would rather hold a blank than a guess. Unverified never means false — it means nobody has established it yet, and it can be filled in the moment you do.
Nothing here has to be finished before you call. Most of it comes out of one conversation, and the questions above just mean you know what is coming. Anything still open stays open on the record, in your words, until you say otherwise.