Ask Joey

What it does

You open a chat and say what's going on. "The phone isn't ringing." "I pay a guy $2,000 a month and I couldn't tell you what he does." "Some other roofer shows up above me every time I search." It asks two or three questions, no more, and then tells you which of the audits below to run first and why. If you just have a question, it answers it.

It's the same conversation I'd have with you on a first call, minus the call. I wrote down how I decide what to look at first, and the rules I actually run accounts by, and put them in one file.

What it routes you to

• Phone not ringing, slow season, need more jobs → the local SEO audit first, then the website audit. Ads come after those two.
• Paying for Google Ads and can't tell what you get → the Google Ads audit. First question: can you sign in yourself? If not, that's finding number one.
• A marketing company you don't trust → all three, in money order: ads, listing, site. Plus five ownership questions to ask them before you sign anything else.
• Web guy wants $8,000 to redo the site → the website audit. Half the time the fix is a phone number and a form.
• Junk calls, wrong city, price shoppers → the ads audit if you run ads. The search terms report is where junk calls come from.
• Pay-per-lead sites → no audit. It explains why that lead was sold to three other guys, and points you at the two things you own.
• "I use ChatGPT for texts, what else?" → Where You Stand with AI.

The rules it answers with

These are the ones in the file. They're how I run every account.

• Clicks don't pay for the truck. Booked jobs do. The only number that settles "is it working" is cost per booked job, by platform.
• Count before you spend. If you can't count calls and forms by where they came from, every report you've been shown is a guess.
• Own everything. Domain, site, listing, ads account, tracking numbers. In your name. You pay Google directly.
• Two free assets catch almost everything: the website and the Google listing. Everything paid stands on them.
• Fix what you have before you buy more.
• One phone number everywhere. Trucks, site, listing, ads.
• Every ad lands on its own page about that exact service. Never the home page.
• Never bid on a competitor's name.
• Name the competitor. "You're not top three" is useless until you know who is.
• Nobody can promise rankings.
• A lead you don't answer isn't a lead.

The honest part

This is me giving away the first call. People want to be left alone by guys like me until they're ready to talk, and I get it. So the first call is a file now. Run it, run the audits, and you'll know more about your own marketing than most salespeople who'll call you this year. If you want a second set of eyes after that, my email is at the bottom of every findings page. If you don't, you still got the audit.

The idea is borrowed from Matt Pocock's /ask-matt, a skill that tells engineers which of his skills to use. Same shape, different trade.

It's working if

• It asked you three questions or fewer before it pointed somewhere.
• The audit it picked matches the thing that's actually bugging you, not the thing that's easiest to run.
• When you asked it a question, it answered in dollars and jobs, and it didn't try to sell you anything.

Common questions

Does this need Claude Code?

No. Paste the file into a plain chat in Claude or ChatGPT and talk. The three audits it points you to need an AI that can drive a browser; it tells you that up front.

Is it going to pitch me?

No. There is one line at the very end of each audit with my email, and that's it. The file says "do not sell" in it, in those words.

Will it change anything in my accounts?

Nothing. It can't. It's a conversation. The audits are read-only too.

What does it cost?

Free, MIT. Use it, copy it, give it to your buddy who does gutters.

Where it fits

Start here. Everything else on this page is something Ask Joey might send you to.