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The Problem

Most owners got online one tool at a time. A relative registered the domain. A designer built the site. A booking app, an invoicing app and a review app all started sending email with the business name on it. Nobody ever wrote the whole stack down.

It all rides on one chain: registrar account, domain, DNS, then email, website and every link. Lose the first link and the rest goes with it, often on the same morning.

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The Ownership Stack

4 locks, closed in order, OWN first. Never spend an hour on a higher lock while a lower one is open.

• Lock 1, OWN: the domain and every account in your name, with a second admin and a recovery path you control.
• Lock 2, PROVE: your email passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC, from your main address and from every tool that sends as you.
• Lock 3, PUBLISH: the site loads on a phone, tap-to-call works, the form reaches an inbox someone reads, and the page says what happens next.
• Lock 4, GUARD: backups with a tested restore, uptime monitoring, renewals in a calendar, and a register you review every 6 months.

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What's in the Book

• Chapter 1, The 10-Minute Ownership Check: who holds your domain, when it expires, and whether your email passes. Free to read.
• Chapter 2, How Small Businesses Lose Their Own Website: the dependency chain, the 4 ways it breaks, and what it costs on your own numbers.
• Chapter 3, The Ownership Stack: the 4 locks and why the order matters.
• Chapter 4, OWN: the register, the domain-return message, the transfer rules, and the lapse timeline.
• Chapter 5, PROVE: the 3 email records, what the big inbox providers publish, and the tools that send as you.
• Chapter 6, PUBLISH: choosing a platform by maintenance capacity, connecting the domain, and the 5 visitor checks.
• Chapter 7, GUARD: restore test, monitoring, Search Console, an enquiry count you can trust, and the review.
• Then: 3 worked composites (1 that went wrong), the Ownership Scorecard, 4 metrics with your baseline, 10 common mistakes, the 30-day and 6-month look-back, and 2 dated appendices.

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A Sample: What a Day Offline Costs

A hypothetical business gets 3 enquiries a day, books 0.4 of them, and keeps $500 of gross profit per job. A day with no website or email puts 3 x 0.4 x $500 = $600 of gross profit at risk. Treat it as a ceiling, since some people try again. Every number is a round hypothetical. The book shows you how to run it on yours, and compare it with what the whole stack costs to run for a year.

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Questions

Someone else holds my domain. Does this help? Yes. It gives you the message to send, the transfer steps under ICANN's current rules, the order that avoids a 60-day lock, and what to gather if they refuse. A contested ownership claim is a legal question, and the book says when to call a lawyer.

Does it tell me which platform to buy? No single one. It helps you choose by how much maintenance you will really do. Dated prices sit in an appendix, checked October 2026.

Will it tell me what open rate or page speed to aim for? No. It gives you the tests and the counts, and your first count is your baseline.

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Who This Is For

The owner of a small local service business (a mover, a plumber, a salon, a cleaning company) whose domain, email and website were set up piecemeal, sometimes by somebody else, and who could not say today who holds each login or what happens if one of them lapses.