I have put them there because you have been sold visibility before. You are not buying visibility. You are buying evidence that you are good at your job, in public.

That is why one new review from a customer lands differently to a page of ranking arrows. One is other people saying it. The other is a chart.

None of the five is a trick and none of it is new. The hard part is knowing which one comes first in your business, and then having someone actually do it.

That is what the Revenue X-Ray is for. Thirty days. One person. It ends in a 45-minute conversation, not a PDF you never open.

You get your Google listing scored out of 20. Your website and your reviews read properly. The three competitors you keep losing to, named. What your own customers are thinking, in their words. And a fix list, in the order to do it.

A$670. What that covers, and what it does not, is set out in full below.

If you have just read your Snapshot, this is the page it points at. You have already had a number off me for nothing. If you have not run one, start there. It is free and it takes two minutes.

What it takes to get named, in order

When someone asks their phone who to call, getting your name into that answer takes five things.

There is no trick to it and I am not going to invent one.

It is five things, and the order matters more than any single one of them.

1. Can the assistants read your site at all?

Some hosting is set to block AI assistants by default, and nobody tells you when it is switched on.

If they are locked out, nothing else on this list counts. It takes twenty minutes to check and it is a straight yes or no.

2. Do your details say the same thing everywhere?

Name, phone, suburbs — identical on Google, Bing, Apple Maps, hipages and the rest.

A machine will not confidently recommend a business whose own details disagree with each other.

And a perfect Google listing does less here than you would think. ChatGPT reads Bing, not Google.

3. Are reviews arriving on their own?

Not twelve in one week. A trickle that never stops, in customers’ words, with every one answered.

If you have to remember to ask, you will forget. That is not a character flaw. That is a Tuesday with a job running late.

4. Do your pages answer what people ask before they ring?

What it costs. How fast you get there. Whether you do after-hours. Which suburbs.

Most trade sites answer none of those. A machine cannot read out an answer that is not written down.

5. Is your name on anyone else’s website?

The local paper. The chamber. The footy club sponsors page you already pay for.

Your name in text, spelled the same way, somewhere you do not own. Slow, durable, and mostly already paid for.

That is the list. It is not exciting and it is not new. It is just rarely done properly, and almost never done in that order.

Why the order is the whole job

Work top to bottom. Each one assumes the one above it is done.

A business with brilliant pages, no reviews and a bot block is invisible. You build the roof last.

Most of what gets sold to tradies starts at number four. Pages are the visible bit, and the visible bit is what an agency can show you at month end.

Starting there is why the last lot showed you a lot of green arrows and nothing that changed.

What happened when I rang ten of you

In August I rang ten Northern Beaches trade businesses as a homeowner with an ordinary job.

Eight of ten answered or rang back. You are not bad on the phone. That is not the problem.

Two of ten gave me a price without driving to the house. Five said some version of we would need to come to site.

So the homeowner’s experience is not nobody rang me back. It is everyone was lovely and nobody would tell me what it costs until they had been to my house.

The bit that should worry you

There is a set of suburb-named websites on the Beaches. One for Manly, one for Narrabeen, one for Warriewood.

All three publish the same 1300 number. And all three publish prices. The local independents mostly do not.

The thing that wins is being run by an operator who is not local. The bloke who lives here is not doing it.

You have something that operator cannot copy. A homeowner who rings an 04xx gets the bloke who will do the work. A homeowner who rings a 1300 gets a dispatcher.

You get me, and I live here is a line a call centre cannot say.

Ten businesses rang, batch 1, 25/08/2026 — one afternoon, one sample. The suburb-named sites were read directly on the same date.

So why pay anyone, if the list is right there?

You would not, for the list. You would pay for two things the list does not contain.

The order for your business

Which of the five comes first depends on three things. What the machines currently say about you. What your Google listing scores. And where your work is genuinely coming from.

That last one is usually not where people think it is.

Somebody actually doing it

Most of this is not hard. It is fiddly, and it is a fortnight of evenings.

It is also the first thing to fall over when you have a job running late in Narrabeen.

The Revenue X-Ray

Thirty days. One person. It ends with a 45-minute presentation, not a PDF you never open.

What you get

Your Google listing, scored out of 20. Field by field, against what actually gets a trade business named. You get the number and the gaps whatever the number says. It is a figure you can hold the next bloke to, me included.

The three businesses beating you, named. Your own site and your own reviews, read alongside theirs. No more guessing which van in your street is taking the work. You get the names, and what they are doing that you are not.

Which of your suburbs are worth a page, and which are not. Built off the jobs you have actually done, not a list of postcodes off a map. If one is not worth it, that is what the list will say.

The fix list, in the order to do it. First, second, third, with what each one takes and who does it. Hand it to your web bloke or work down it yourself. Either way the argument about what comes first is settled.

What your customers are thinking

This one is new, and it is the part people did not expect.

Every review you have, read line by line. Your call recordings and any transcripts, if you have them.

It settles what your customers actually care about, in writing, before you spend money on saying it.

Not a template about your trade. Yours.

Out of that you get:

What your customers praise, and what not one of them mentions. That gap is the thing I am reading for. It is the difference between what you think you sell and what they think they bought.

The words to use, lifted straight from their own reviews. Not phrases I invented to sound like you. Theirs, in their spelling. Put them on your site, in your quotes and on the van.

Five questions to answer on your site. The ones they ask before they ring, taken out of your own reviews. Answered in writing, they are five conversations you are not having at 7pm.

Five things worth writing about, named. Real topics, out of your customers’ own words. No more sitting down on a Sunday night with nothing to write. The next one is already picked.

What to photograph on a job, and why each shot earns its place. Swap take more photos for a named list of shots. Short enough to hand to whoever is on site with you.

What to say when someone tells you they are getting three quotes. Written out, short enough to say at the tailgate, and it does not sound like a salesman. Now you have the line ready before it comes up, instead of composing it in the driveway.

No more being told what your customers think by somebody who has never met one. You will recognise every line of it, because you were there.

You become the bloke who can say what he is good at, and point at who said it.

And if you have not got many reviews yet, you still get it.

Any line carried by your customers’ own words is published as fact. Any line without one is marked, on the page, as my assumption — with how we would go and prove it.

That is the same rule the whole thing runs on. We mark what we did not measure.

Having few reviews is not a reason to skip this. It is the finding.

None of this is visibility. It is evidence that you are good at your job, in public. It is already sitting in your reviews. This is the part that goes and gets it.

What it costs

A$670. If you go ahead with a full build within 30 days of the presentation, the A$670 comes off it in full. The credit expires at 30 days and there are no exceptions.

If it does not give you at least three things you can act on, tell me within 14 days. You get the lot back, and you keep everything I produced either way.

Total time from you across the thirty days: under three hours.

What you would have to bring

Your real prices. The hardest ask on this list, and the one that does the most work. Eight of the ten I rang would not give me one over the phone. The ones publishing prices are not local.

Your licence number.

The suburbs you actually work. The ones where you have finished jobs, in writing. Everything I build with your suburbs sits on that answer. Pad it and you have paid me to work on a place you do not go.

Five photos a job, from your phone. Not staged and not a photographer. The one you already took on Tuesday, before you packed up.

Then about an hour a month afterwards. A couple of job stories, a few photos, and the two-minute habit of asking for a review.

If that is not coming, tell me now and we will build you something that does not depend on it. That is a real option and I will not be offended. What neither of us wants is finding out in month three.

One business per trade, per area

One plumber. One sparky. One builder. One bathroom renovator — in each area.

The areas are Brookvale–Dee Why, Frenchs Forest, Manly, Mona Vale and Terrey Hills.

One business per trade, per area. A Dee Why plumber holds Brookvale–Dee Why. He does not hold Palm Beach.

The peninsula runs Manly to Palm Beach on two roads that both bottleneck. You and a Palm Beach plumber are not competitors. You cannot service each other’s work and you do not share the same blokes for referrals.

So there is no sense selling you a territory you cannot get to, or blocking someone who was never taking your jobs.

Anyone can run the free Snapshot. The build is where it goes exclusive. Once somebody signs in your area, that trade is closed there — and paying for an X-Ray holds your slot while you decide.

The reason for any of it is simple. What I sell is being first, and two plumbers in one area cannot both be first.

What happens after, if you want it

The X-Ray is a diagnosis. You can act on it yourself, and plenty do.

If you would rather I built it: A$2,670 for the first five founding clients, A$3,470 after that. Ninety days.

Then A$870 a month for the rhythm — the reviews, the listings, the score. Six months, then month to month.

The two guarantees, and what they cover

These two belong to the build and the monthly. They are not part of the A$670, and I am not going to blur that.

If your Google profile is not at 18 out of 20 within thirty days of the build starting, month one is free.

And every enquiry gets an automated answer inside three minutes, or the month is free. You can test that by ringing your own number.

The X-Ray has its own term, and it is the one above. Three things you can act on, or your money back.

What I will not promise you

I will not promise you that your name comes up, on any date.

I will not promise you more calls. I will not promise you a ranking. I will not give you a number and a month to go with it.

Nothing here moves in a fortnight. Anyone telling you thirty days is taking month one’s money to spend month two inventing excuses.

We ran this on ourselves and scored zero

26/05/2026: nothing. 09/06/2026: nothing. 07/07/2026: nothing. 02/08/2026: nothing.

Four readings. Sixty-eight days. Twelve chances each time.

What we got wrong, in public

Then in late July we found our own web host was blocking three of the four assistants. We wrote that up as the answer.

It was not the answer, and we got that wrong in public.

The host later dated those blocks to mid-July — seven weeks after our first zero. Two problems, seven weeks apart, and we filed them as one.

We did not edit the old rows. We wrote the correction underneath them, dated, and left the wrong version there to read.

Where it stands now

On 05/09/2026 we scored 1 out of 12 — the first cell in four months.

One cell, on one run. I am being careful with it, because a single reading is exactly the kind of number this whole thing exists to stop people over-reading.

If your score is still zero at month four and the inputs are all done, I will tell you to stop paying me.

When I would tell you not to bother

I said I would tell you straight, so here it is.

Under $500K a year. The fixes cost more than they return at your size. Come back when the phone is busier.

Jobs live in your head and a diary. Half of this hangs off job software. Get onto ServiceM8 or Tradify, use it properly for six months, then ring me.

Winding down inside two years. This compounds slowly. The payback sits past that. Keep your money.

Already flat out and turning work away. Then the question is not more work. It is whether the work you are getting is the work you want, and that may not need me at all.

One of my own rules is that the X-Ray is doing its job when people say no. So I have no reason to talk you into it.

Questions

Ask me

Two ways to do this, and neither is a call in disguise.

If you just want an answer. Tell me your trade and your suburbs. I will tell you what I would do first, and roughly what it would take. That costs you nothing.

Email: [email protected] Or ring: +61 420 745 357

If you have decided you want the X-Ray. Fill this in. It asks what I need before I start — your trade, your suburbs, and what you are already doing.

I read every one myself. If your area is already taken for your trade, I will tell you that on the day rather than take your money.

If you would rather see the whole thing first, the monthly log of our own results is here — including the four months our number did not move.

Tell me your trade and the suburbs you work. I will tell you what I would do first and roughly what it would take.

That reply costs you nothing and it is not a call in disguise.

[email protected] +61 420 745 357

Rowan Shead. Fifteen years quoting and marketing trade and building businesses before this one — locksmiths, sparkies, plumbers, chippies, builders, fabricators. Manly Chamber of Commerce, seven years. One person, not a rotating account manager.

Not ready for this? Run the free Snapshot instead. It costs nothing and it takes two minutes.

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