Notes
Things I’ve worked out on the job, written up properly. Real numbers, and what I don’t know as well as what I do.
A CRM migration rarely goes wrong at the import. It goes wrong in what the import didn’t tell you.
What I found moving 305,713 records out of four Airtable bases in August 2026. A table with 118 empty columns out of 161, duplicates that came from the design rather than the data, a consent checkbox that read as ticked whether anyone ticked it or not, and 506 rows that looked lost and turned out to be 58. What goes wrong, and the order I do things in now.
A law firm isn’t buying traffic. It’s buying somebody who won’t create a problem.
What marketing for a regulated firm has to survive if somebody looks at it properly. The five things every consent record needs, the list of 15,233 people I switched off rather than argued about, a rate change corrected across 126 files, and the questions I stop and send to a solicitor instead of answering.
Everybody shows you the week after a migration. Here’s the week after that.
I moved a 690 page regulated site off WordPress in August 2026. Clicks went from 484 to 611 in the week after cutover, and back to 443 the week after that, which is the week nobody publishes. Why the dip is organisational rather than technical, the 84 redirects a fuzzy match got confidently wrong, and the three moments and seven numbers I capture on every migration now.
Your franchise ranks nationally. Your locations are invisible in their own towns.
I audited 16 UK franchise networks in August and September 2026 and kept finding the same thing. The brand ranks, the individual locations are missing from the map results where their customers actually search, and the free spots go to local independents. Several were paying for ads on searches their own locations should own for nothing. The method, what I found, why it happens and what I’d do about it.
Run a franchise network?
I’ll audit your locations in their own towns and show you what I find.