The short version: a busy Toronto pet shop with a healthy walk-in business and a web store that was quietly shrinking. Six months of funnel repair later, online revenue roughly doubled — and the best month on record was the most recent one.
It's a good store — The Beastiary: loyal regulars, a real neighbourhood business. And the owner was busy the way only an owner-operator is busy — floor, staff, suppliers, animals. The tech-web-marketing side of the business barely ever got touched. Not neglect; physics. The online side showed it. Through 2025 the web store averaged about $3,700 a month, and it was sliding: July's $4,700 had eroded to $2,700 by November. Checkout had friction. Shipping options confused people at exactly the moment they were ready to pay. The back room had lost a key employee whose know-how lived in their head. Ads were running at a few hundred dollars a month, pointed at a funnel that leaked.
This check-up wasn't just screens. I spent a few days in the store — basically an extra set of hands: watching how orders, shipping and receiving actually happen, helping where I could, talking to everyone.
It found five leaks stacked on top of each other:
January to June 2026. Fix first, scale second:
Yes, ad spend scaled too — that was the plan. Revenue grew about twice as fast as spend did, and none of these numbers count the people who saw an ad and walked into the store: Google can't measure that, and any physical-store owner will tell you it's very real.
One more thing the chart doesn't show: about a third of the store's online customers come back and order again — one in five of this year's new wave already has. Each month's buyers quietly feed the next. That's the part that compounds.
An intensive sprint, January to June — everything in the funnel's path, fixed in weekly shipped pieces. Then the hand-off to the chair: monthly monitoring, ad checks, small fixes before they become big ones. The store keeps its momentum. The owner keeps running the store.
Where it goes from here, depending on the owner's appetite: keep scaling ads while they pay, open the channels the store hasn't touched yet (Meta is untapped), and grow the service lines the internet never knew about — the reptile-boarding push is in progress right now, and a proper receiving system for the back room is next on the bench.
The check-up that found these leaks is free. I go through your funnel like a paying customer and hand you the list, biggest leak first. Worst case: you keep the list.
Get your free check-up