Manual 5 · Vendor Defense · 5.9
Check a marketing company
before you trust a word they say
Plain answer, first
You do not have to take a marketing company's word for anything. Before you pay them a dollar, you can look them up yourself — the state's records, the complaint files, the court files, and the groups behind the badges on their site.
It is public. Four of the five steps are free, need no login, and run on the phone already in your hand. The court-records one needs an account, and PACER says to allow seven to ten business days for the code it mails you. Four fast, one slow, is just the shape of it.
A badge is a picture. The record is the proof.
Nothing on this page puts a meeting on your calendar. This is you, checking a company the same way you already check everything else.
Your built-in filter is the tool
You catch what does not add up for a living. You reconcile the card statement. You hear a bad sales pitch coming and end the call early.
So when a company's website feels a little too smooth, you have already caught something. That is the same eye that keeps your books straight, turned on a new target. Catching what does not sit right is part of running the job.
Here is the belief worth dropping: that a clean website, a row of awards, and a "member of" badge tell you a company is real. They do not.
A website is what a company writes about itself. Anybody with an afternoon can build a slick one, stack it with trophies, and glue on a seal. The records below are different — they are written by someone other than the company, and they cannot be edited to flatter.
The truck-magnet test
You would never let a sub onto your job just because his truck had a sharp magnet on the door. You run his license number against the state's list first. The magnet is marketing. The license is a fact.
A marketing company works the same way. The seal on their site is the truck magnet. The state's business record is the license.
The only real difference is how many records you pull. A sub hands you one license number and you are done. A marketing company has no single number that settles it, so checking one is a short run of public records instead. Four of them are free searches. The court file needs an account. Here is the run.
The badge you almost trust
A marketing company's site can carry a row of awards, an official-looking seal, a "proud member of" badge for some industry group. The polish reads as proof.
The picture does not tell you which you are looking at: a badge a group actually granted, a trophy a company handed itself, or a trust-seal that clicks through to a page the company owns.
So you do what you already do for every sub and every bill. You do not argue with the badge. You go to the record.
The five-step run
1. Find them on the state's list
Search the company's exact name on your state's official business list — the government's roster of every company registered to do business there. Missouri's is the Secretary of State business search. It is free and needs no login.
You want two facts: is the company actually registered, and how long has it existed? A company that pitches like a national outfit but registered ninety days ago just answered a question the website couldn't.
A blank screen is not that answer. These search boxes are fussy — "LLC" against "L.L.C." comes back empty on a perfectly real company — and plenty of honest outfits are registered in another state, or under a legal name their website never shows you. Blank means you do not know yet.
So try it three ways before you decide: the first word of the name alone, then the name with "LLC" or "Inc" dropped, then whatever legal name or state is printed at the bottom of their own website, searched on that state's list. Still nothing? Then you have a question, not a verdict: what name and what state are you registered under? Write it down and check it. Refusing to answer is the actual finding.
Checkable result: a registration date in hand — or a blank screen and one question to put to them.
Executor: you, on your phone.
2. Read what peers say, not what the company says
Search the company name with the word complaints, then the name with reddit. You are steering away from the pages the company controls. Read those threads for specifics you can check, not for a verdict.
The quick version — just confirming the company shows up online at all — lives over in the five questions. This step goes further, into what people actually say about them.
Checkable result: you read the company described on pages it does not control.
Executor: you.
3. Pull the complaint and court files
Two public files carry more weight than any review.
The first is the complaint database at the Better Business Bureau, searchable by company name. When someone files, the BBB forwards it to the business and asks for a response within fourteen days, and it takes complaints on any company — accredited or not. Treat that number as a floor. What surfaced is only what somebody bothered to file, and how the company answered each one tells you as much as the total.
The second is court records. Lawsuits and judgments against a company are public, and a case on the docket says in writing what a sales page will deny. The courts' own site is the PACER Case Locator. Two things to know before you start.
PACER holds federal court records — that is its whole job, in its own words. An unpaid invoice or a broken contract can sit in state or county court, which PACER does not hold. And it is not a two-tap sign-up: register without a credit card and PACER mails you an activation code, which its own page says to allow seven to ten business days for. Registering costs nothing. Pulling a document is ten cents a page, capped at three dollars. That cap does not cover search results — a name search bills by the page with no ceiling — but the fees are waived entirely if you spend thirty dollars or less in a quarter, which one vendor lookup will not come close to.
None of that makes it useless. It makes it one drawer of a two-drawer cabinet. So work the free drawer first — the company name with lawsuit, the name with sued, then your state's name plus "case search" for the county file. Then hand PACER to whoever runs your screens and let it land when it lands. A clean PACER search means nothing federal. It does not mean nothing.
Checkable result: you know what the complaint file says, and which court records you actually got to — federal, county, or neither yet.
Executor: you — hand the PACER part to whoever helps with the computer, because the account is the slow bit, not the searching.
4. Make every badge prove itself
Now the seals. Click each one.
A badge that reaches the actual website of the group it names gives you somewhere to go next. One that links nowhere leaves you where you started. When you reach the group's real site, do the last move: look for its member directory — the group's own public list of who actually belongs — and search the company's name in it.
Not every group publishes one. Some keep the list behind a member login, which is the exact thing you do not have. Some print only the members who paid extra. So there are three answers here, not two: the name is on the list, the name is missing from a list that plainly exists, or there is no public list to be missing from. The middle one is the one to say out loud on the call. For the last, send the group's contact page one line — is this company a current member? No reply leaves you where you started.
This matters because a seal is not decoration. The Federal Trade Commission — the government's truth-in-advertising watchdog — treats the name or seal of an organization as an endorsement in its own right, so a seal a group never granted is an endorsement it never gave. The full run of that move, and the ones like it, is laid out at the scam playbook.
Checkable result: you clicked every badge, and you know which of the three answers the directory gave.
Executor: you.
5. Write down what you found, and where
Last, write it down — one line per company: the registration date, the complaint count, the badge that failed. Writing it down is what actually protects you. Six months from now, the detail that matters is the one nobody trusted themselves to remember.
A page of records is how the decision stops being your gut against his pitch and becomes a thing anyone can check.
If money already left your account to a company like this, getting it back is its own job — fighting the bill.
Checkable result: a short written record, yours to keep or forward.
Executor: you.
Run it once, right now
Do not file this to read later. Take the one company closest to getting your money today, and run the five steps on the name — the real one, this minute. The state's list, the complaints, the court files, the badges, one line written down.
The fast four get you something the website could never tell you. Start the court-records account tonight and let it land when it lands. Do not hold the decision hostage to the slow one unless the fast four came back ugly.
That is the whole point. A badge is a picture. The record is the proof.
For a helper: the slow bit is Step 3. PACER registration is free, but if it is set up without a credit card the activation code comes by mail, and PACER says to allow seven to ten business days. Start that one first and let the other four run without it. Everything else is a plain name search.
What this page does not do
Two jobs live on other pages. What to say to the company on the phone — the questions that get the real terms out loud — is the five questions. Whether a price they quote is fair for your trade and your town is what things cost. This page is only about checking who they are, without asking them anything.
And if the records come back clean? That gets a company past the first gate, not the last. You still read the paper before you sign — how to read a proposal — and you still run the five questions on the call.
Everything these companies pull, gathered in one place, is the vendor-defense hub.