Shah Fahad started Spark Digital UK in Harrow in 2022. The agency helps independent local businesses across London get found on Google and Google Maps, with a small team of a web designer and developer, an SEO specialist and a graphic designer.

I kept seeing good local businesses lose customers over things that could be fixed. A half-finished Google listing. A slow website. Nobody checking what was actually bringing in calls.

Think about how you pick somewhere to eat now. You type “pizza near me” into your phone and decide in a few seconds, based on the hours, the photos, the star rating and a couple of recent reviews. If those details are wrong, the customer scrolls on, and the owner never even knows they were there. That bothered me. I knew how to fix it, so in 2022 I set up in Harrow and started doing it, beginning with restaurants, cafes and takeaways around Harrow, Wembley, Edgware and Hornsey.

With numbers, mostly. Google Business Profile Insights, Search Console and GA4 tell me what happened, and they don’t care how I feel about it.

The best up is easy to point to. Farmhouse Pizza in Wembley got 5,276 phone calls in three months, from April to June 2026, from its Google Business Profile, according to Google’s own data. Nothing clever produced that. We got the basics right and then kept them right, month after month.

The downs are humbling in a useful way. This September our own website’s database was rolled back to an older copy, and weeks of work disappeared from the live site overnight. We had it saved locally, so we rebuilt it. Lesson learned. It taught me to keep backups before touching anything, and I take that into client work now.

Monday to Friday, nine to six, on paper. A normal day is a mix of Google Business Profile work, website fixes, replying to reviews and going through results.

There’s also a lot of talking to owners. Most of them are running a kitchen or a shop floor while we speak, so I keep it short. What changed? What did it bring in? What are we doing next?

Being a small business that sells to small businesses. My clients watch every pound, and they should. Everything we do runs month to month with no lock-in, so if the work stops paying for itself, they can leave. That’s uncomfortable. I still think it’s right, because it means the work has to keep earning its place.

The other challenge is deciding what to do next when you’re small. We began with restaurants because that’s what I knew. This year I opened up to other local businesses across London, and I don’t get to assume that what worked for a takeaway will work the same way for a tradesperson. We’ll have to prove it again.

The phone rings more than it did, and the owner can see why.

I’d take that over any award. I also count it as success when a family business beats a big chain on its own street, because the chain has a whole team doing this and the family has whoever is free after closing.

I start by looking at where they actually stand. We do a free audit before any quote, so the first conversation is about their listing, their calls and their competitors rather than about me.

Then I talk in plain English. Plenty of owners have been burned by someone who hid behind jargon and sent a report nobody could read. If I can’t explain a thing simply, I probably shouldn’t be charging for it.

There’s no single one. What I love most is sitting down with an owner, showing them the real numbers, and watching it land. Most of them have worked incredibly hard for years without anyone showing them what their Google listing was quietly doing for them, or against them.

By being the person they actually deal with. There’s a team behind me, but every client still talks to me, and when someone gets in touch I reply myself.

With the team, it comes down to the same thing we promise clients, which is real details. The right opening hours. The real menu. Photos of the actual place, never stock pictures. When everyone knows the standard is “is this true and is it useful”, there’s less to argue about.

Carefully. The next step is taking what worked for restaurants to other local businesses across London, starting with the trades and the kind of emergency services people search for in a hurry.

I’d also like to help owners who will never hire an agency, and that’s fine by me. Here’s what I tell them, free of charge. Search for your own business on Google Maps the way a stranger would, then fix what’s wrong. Set your Christmas hours now. Add ten real photos from this week. Reply to your last ten reviews in your own words. That’s about an hour’s work, and in my experience it’s the most valuable hour a small business can spend online.

Shah Fahad is the founder of Spark Digital UK, 14 Queensbury Circle Parade, Harrow. Find out more at sparkdigitaluk.com or shahfahad.co.uk.