Spot a local business with a broken website, and quote the fix properly
Show a café owner their own website, fixed, on your phone, in ten minutes, without touching their real site. Then learn the 12 problems almost every small business site has, check each in about two minutes with free tools, and turn them into a fixed-price quote the owner can say yes to.
- A fixed-price quote: three options, a clear scope, what's not included and payment terms
- A first-pass script that sorts a list of 50 sites, worst first, so you only check the promising ones
- Outreach that follows UK rules: emails for limited companies, a walk-in script for sole traders, a weekly routine and a scoreboard
- A laptop with Chrome, Edge or Firefox. The developer tools you need are built in
- One local business website to practise on. Find 20 businesses worth pitching shows how to pick them
- Optional: Unlighthouse, to check every page of a site at once: Scan a whole website for slow pages
- About 100 minutes for the mission, then about 7 hours a week when you start pitching
Know the gap, what it takes and the rules
Thousands of local businesses have websites that quietly lose them customers. Fixing that is a real service, and here's exactly what it takes.
Here's the gap. A café's website says it's shut on Sundays while Google says it's open. A plumber's phone number can't be tapped on a mobile. A salon's booking link has shown an error page for a year. The owners are busy running the business, and nobody has told them. Most of these take under an hour to fix. Most people won't do the boring bit (checking properly, quoting carefully, following up politely), which is exactly why it works for the people who do.
This mission covers the part between finding a business and getting paid: the 12 problems, how to check each one with free tools, how long each fix really takes, and how to quote and present it. It builds on the rest of the site rather than repeating it:
- Find 20 businesses worth pitching: building your list, and checking who's a limited company
- Scan a whole website for slow pages: Unlighthouse, for checking every page at once
- Audit any business's Google visibility and Turn the audit into a pitch deck: the bigger SEO pitch
- Price it, pitch it, get paid: the 15-minute call, invoices and tax basics
- Build a fast website for a local business: for when a site needs replacing, not fixing
Careful- What it takes. Most of the effort goes on getting a stranger's attention. Owners get scam calls about their website and their Google listing all the time, so you earn trust by leading with something they can see (step 7). Hunter's State of Email Outreach 2026 ↗ report, based on 31 million emails sent in 2025, puts the average cold email reply rate at 4.5%, about 1 reply in 22, so plan on steady weekly outreach. Jobs are a few hundred pounds each, so you'll want several, and you'll work inside other people's WordPress, Wix and Squarespace sites, which takes practice.
- The timeline: the 12 checks get easy after 20 to 30 practice sites, a week or two of evenings. Getting quick at the fixes takes around a month. Your first paid job usually comes after a few weeks of steady outreach.
- Who this suits: you're careful with detail (you'll be working on someone's livelihood), you're happy to learn your way round a website editor, and you keep outreach going while replies build. Keep your day job while you build it. Everything in this mission uses free tools, so there's nothing to spend upfront.
The rules of lookingYou check a business the way any customer could. Nothing more:
- Never log in, or try to. No guessing passwords, no poking at
/wp-admin. Getting into a computer without permission is an offence under section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 ↗, whatever your reason. - Never run security scanners or vulnerability tools on a business that hasn't asked you to in writing. You don't need them for this.
- Never send anything through their contact form, not even one test. It lands in a busy owner's inbox, it can look like spam, and pitching yourself through it is still unsolicited marketing. Step 2 shows what you can check without pressing Send.
- Never say or hint that you're from Google, or a "Google partner". Google's own help page on fraudulent calls ↗ warns owners about callers who say they work "with Google" or "for Google". Sound like one of them and you've lost the owner.
- Never scare them. No "you'll be fined", no "your site is illegal". You aren't their lawyer, and misleading marketing to businesses is covered by the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008 ↗.
- Never log in, or try to. No guessing passwords, no poking at
Keep any scanning gentle: if you use Unlighthouse on a prospect, use the 5-page, one-page-at-a-time settings from its lesson. Keep your findings private, because they're for the owner, not for social media. And only note business details that are already public.
TipYour first win, today. Pick a café near you, open its home page on your laptop, press F12 then Ctrl + Shift + M for phone view, and follow move 1 in step 7: change the headline, add a Call now button, fix anything out of date. Screenshot before and after. That pair of pictures is the whole service in one glance, and it takes about ten minutes.Get the kit nowYou'll fill it in as you go. Download the kit (one zip with everything), or open the files one at a time: the 12-point check sheet (also as a CSV), the fix-time estimator, the quote template, the outreach templates, scope and checklists, the scoreboard, the first-pass script and the kit guide.