Your Business Fact Sheet: One Source of Truth

Somewhere right now, two websites disagree about your business. One has the hours you set in 2024. One spells your name with an ampersand you stopped using. This page fixes that permanently, with one document: the fact sheet. It’s the upgraded version of the note you wrote at the top of the six listings — a single place that holds the canonical version of every fact, so that every listing, your website footer, and your email signature are copies of one original instead of five competing drafts.

A fact sheet is not a brand guide. It’s a half-page of plain text. Keep it wherever you’ll actually find it: a pinned note on your phone, a doc, a piece of paper taped to the wall by the desk. The format doesn’t matter. The rule does: facts get changed here first, then pasted out — never edited in place on some website from memory.

Why machines cross-check

When a search engine or an AI assistant decides what to say about your business, it doesn’t trust any single source. It compares them. Your Google profile says one phone number, Yelp says another, your website says a third — and now the machine has a problem. It resolves that problem one of two ways: it guesses (and sometimes serves a customer the number from the directory you abandoned in 2023), or it goes quiet — hedging, ranking you lower, leaving you out of the recommendation because a competitor’s record is clean and yours isn’t.

Mismatched facts don’t read as “small business, busy owner.” They read as uncertainty, and machines route around uncertainty. The fact sheet is the fix-once tool: one canonical record, pasted everywhere, character for character.

What goes on the sheet

1. Your exact name. Pick the spelling once — suffix, punctuation, and all — and never deviate. The failure pattern we hear about most, and it’s so common we gave it a name: name drift. A landscaper registers as “Greenline Lawn & Landscape LLC.” Google gets “Greenline Lawn & Landscape.” Yelp gets “Greenline Lawn and Landscape” because the ampersand felt fussy that day. The website header says “Greenline.” Four spellings, one business — but a machine cross-checking those records can’t be sure it’s one business. The result is split reviews, duplicate listings, and an AI assistant that describes “Greenline Lawn & Landscape” while having no idea the 40 reviews under “Greenline Lawn and Landscape” belong to you. Decide: LLC or no LLC, ampersand or “and,” Inc. or not. Write it down. That spelling is now law.

2. Address, or service area. If customers come to you, the exact street address as the post office writes it (Ste. vs Suite — pick one). If you go to customers, the list of towns you serve and the rule for the edge cases (“within 25 miles of downtown Springfield”). Never list a home address as a storefront — page 3.1 covers why Google suspends profiles for that.

3. One phone number. Exactly one. The trap: some directories and ad platforms will offer you a “tracking number” — a unique number per directory so you can measure which one sends calls. Tempting, and wrong for a small business. Tracking numbers mean every surface shows a different phone number, which is precisely the inconsistency machines read as unreliability. You’ve paid money to look less trustworthy. If you want call tracking later, do it on your website with a number that forwards — never on the listings. The listings get the one true number, forever.

4. Hours — including the asterisks. Real hours, plus the exceptions: “closed the first Monday of the month,” seasonal changes, and what you actually do on major holidays. Holiday hours matter more than owners think — “is it open today?” is one of the most common questions machines answer about you, and a wrong answer costs you the customer and an angry review.

5. The one-sentence description. The format: “[Name] is a [category] in [town] that [who you serve / what’s different].” Boring on purpose — it’s written for a stranger and a machine at the same time, and both parse it perfectly. Three worked examples:

Hartley & Sons Plumbing is a residential plumbing company in Dayton,
Ohio that answers its own phone and offers same-day emergency service.

Marisol Tax Group is a tax preparation firm in Mesa, Arizona that
specializes in self-employed and gig-economy filers.

Bluebird Grooming is a dog grooming salon in Cary, North Carolina that
welcomes anxious and senior dogs other groomers turn away.

No slogans, no “passion,” no “your trusted partner.” Category, town, one honest differentiator. When an AI assistant summarizes you in a sentence, this is the sentence you want it to find — so write it yourself.

6. The rest of the record. Four more lines: your categories (the primary category you chose on Google in page 3.1, plus the two or three secondary ones, so you pick the same ones on every platform that asks), your founding year (“in business since 2023” — machines and customers both use it, and it only grows), your payment methods (card, check, Zelle, financing — another question machines answer constantly), and your one website URL, with or without www, matching wherever your site actually lives.

That’s everything the sheet holds. The business fact sheet checklist is the same list as a printable fill-in, if you’d rather start from that.

The trade: 45 minutes now, hours back later

Here’s what this page costs and what it pays. Writing the sheet is 45 minutes once. What comes off your list in exchange: every future round of “update the hours on five sites from memory,” every duplicate-listing cleanup, and the entire category of citation-cleanup services that exist to fix inconsistencies you’ll no longer have. If you were considering paying a service $30 a month to “sync your listings,” this document is the part of that product that works, for free.

It also changes the math on maintenance. The quarterly surface check — the walk-through of every place your business appears — is a 40-minute job when you have a fact sheet, because checking a listing is a comparison: does this page match the sheet, yes or no, fix and move on. Without the sheet, the same check is an afternoon of “wait, which hours are right?” — you’re re-deriving the facts at every stop instead of reading them off a card.

One last rule, and it’s the one that keeps the system alive: when a fact changes — new hours, new service area, you finally drop the landline — change the sheet first. Then paste it out to the six listings, the website footer, and anywhere else in one sitting. The day you edit a listing directly “just this once” is the day you have two sources of truth again, and two sources of truth is none. Page 3.4 shows you what the machines built from this record actually say out loud — go read your own reflection.