You changed your hours in one place. Here's every other place.

Say you started opening at ten on Saturdays instead of nine. You changed it in the booking app, because that’s where you change things. Done.

Then at five past nine on Saturday, somebody’s standing at a locked door.

He didn’t misread anything. He read a copy you forgot about.

A change is one edit plus every copy

Your hours aren’t one thing. They’re written down in a handful of places: the booking app, the footer of your website, your Google profile, Apple Maps, your Facebook page, the sign on the door. Maybe a directory you set up years ago and haven’t opened since.

Unless something copies a change across for you, it stays where you made it. Every other copy keeps saying the old thing, and nobody tells you. Customers who read the old copy don’t call to complain. They show up at the wrong time, or they don’t show up at all.

The same goes for prices, your phone number, and which services you offer. Any fact a customer acts on lives in more than one place.

Keep one list

Take a sheet of paper. Down the left side, write the facts a customer acts on:

• Hours
• Prices
• Phone
• Services

Next to each one, write every place it lives. Don’t guess. Go and look, the way a customer would, from a phone and signed out.

From then on, a change isn’t one edit. You run it down the whole list on the same day, and a change isn’t done until the last copy says it.

The customer at the locked door is your best check

You will miss one. Everybody does. When somebody turns up on old information, don’t write it off as bad luck. Ask them where they looked.

That answer is the one check you didn’t have. Fix that copy, then add that place to your list. Now the same miss can’t send the next customer to a locked door.

That’s the whole habit: fix it, find out where it came from, and add it to the list.

Finding the copies you forgot

The hard part is the first list, because you can’t write down a copy you don’t know exists.

That’s what section A of our free Presence Audit is for:

“A · Where you show up — every listing that has you, and every one that disagrees.” — The Presence Audit, Gumroad listing, section A (read 2026-10-26)

It’s eight pages. You score it yourself, and it works with a pen. If your listings come back clean, it says so and tells you not to buy anything.

Get the Presence Audit, free →