A tire shop with zero foot traffic, sold for $1.45M within three years.

How I got in

My dad bought a tire shop on Barton Street in Hamilton in August 2022. He knows cars, knows people and knows how to run a floor, but the shop he bought was a ghost town: zero foot traffic, no website, no Google listing, no digital presence at all. He looked at me and said figure this out. So I did.

The problem

The shop was invisible. If you searched for tire shops in Hamilton, it did not exist. No reviews, no listing, no ads running. People in the neighbourhood did not know it had reopened under new ownership. The business was bleeding money every month on rent, inventory and staff, with almost nobody walking through the door. And the part nobody puts in a case study: my dad is a mechanic’s mechanic. He can diagnose a wheel bearing from the driveway, and he has never once said “thanks for coming in.” Customer service was not his department, so once the shop got busy it was busy with new faces: the Google profile and the ads kept driving in first-time customers faster than the counter could lose them. Not how you are supposed to run a tire shop, but a very clean test of whether an acquisition engine works, because nothing else was helping.

What I built

I started with the basics in January 2023: IT, website and email. Then the Google Business Profile: claimed it, filled in every field, uploaded photos and started collecting reviews from the first customers we did get. From November 2023 I ran Google Ads at about $60 a day, aimed at people searching for tires, brakes and auto repair in a 30 km radius, with conversion tracking on every call. I built an AI support chatbot for the shop, wrote tire-shop management software with QuickBooks and plate recognition, helped recruit the staff, and from October 2023 worked the floor myself to see where customers actually came from.

The results

Campaign weeks produced days of about $3,500 in revenue and one stretch of $10K in three days on that $60-a-day budget, and the Google listing became the way new customers found the shop. The profile still carries the business: 4.4 stars from 191 Google reviews as of September 2026. My dad kept the work honest and the bays full; I kept the new customers coming. In May 2024 the sale was agreed at $1.45M including the property, about $550K over what he paid, and it closed in April 2025. My dad’s last day was March 25. From ghost town to a sale in under three years, with a front counter that never learned to smile. The brand held up well enough that the new owners kept it: the only change on the sign is an “A” in front of the name. The sale price reflects the business and its property together; what the marketing did was bring in the new customers.

Built with

• Google Business Profile
• Google Ads
• Meta Ads
• Conversion tracking

The services involved