The brief
Mr. Gary is an owner-operated painting business in Montreal. In February 2026 it sold interior painting and handyman work in Montreal, its surroundings and Ottawa, and it had no website of its own: the business lived on a Facebook page, an Instagram account and word of mouth. The owner is on the job himself, films it on his phone and posts it.
The engagement started on 17 February 2026 with a review of competitors' advertising and a plan for the first campaigns. The question from the client was simple: fill the calendar. The question underneath it was how a single painter can answer leads fast enough, because a lead that waits an hour has already called someone else. One of the first notes in the working chat, on 18 February, was about ad hours: run them when someone is free to reply within a couple of minutes.
Spring 2026: ads, a quiz, a landing page and a CRM
Meta campaigns from the client's own footage
The first campaign went live on 27 February 2026 on Facebook and Instagram, optimised for conversations, at $20 a day. Creatives came from the owner's own job photos and video. On 4 March we built a set around the owner talking to camera in front of footage of the process, because in a trade where the buyer lets a stranger into the house for days, a face does more than any claim.
A quiz that filters before it collects
On 3 March a short estimate quiz went live. The rules we set for it that day: every screen fits a phone without scrolling, the phone number defaults to +1, the number on the page is a tap-to-call link, and WhatsApp and Telegram links sit next to it. The purpose of the quiz was stated plainly in the chat: its job is to cut spam and warm the lead up a little, and collecting information comes second. A completed quiz posts into the client's Telegram with the answers and one-tap links to message the person on WhatsApp or Telegram.
The landing page and the CRM
The client filled in a site brief on 24 March and the mrgary.ca domain was registered on 26 March. Two decisions from the review of the first draft shaped the page. The first screen stayed bright orange, and the form on it asks for a handful of fields: name, phone, email and a message. A second, longer form at the bottom of the page takes project details and photos for those who want to give them. The reasoning, as written on 26 March: a chatbot or a call can ask the rest later, and a required field on the first step costs a client.
The landing page went live in English and French at the end of March with the Meta Pixel installed on 27 March, and requests from the quiz and the site started landing in a CRM set up for the client. On 3 April, on a call with the client, the next round of changes was set: services moved up right under the owner's photo, a free-estimate button after every service that jumps to the detailed form, clearer input fields and a WhatsApp button. For the CRM the same call set a deals stage, so that a qualified lead becomes a deal with its own estimate, and follow-up stages that remind the owner after one day, three days and a week.
Lead forms against the quiz
On 16 April we added a Meta lead-form campaign alongside the quiz traffic for a few days, to compare the quality of the two sources on the same offer. Lead forms are cheaper per request and carry more spam and more time spent warming people up, which matters most for a job that costs thousands of dollars. On 20 April the next step proposed was to cut the text on the creatives by 10 to 15% and to test French versions: part of the Montreal audience reads only French.
What happened in spring
The client's CRM holds 92 requests between 30 March and 24 August 2026 once test entries are removed (query run on 30 October 2026). They came from 90 distinct phone numbers. 89 of the 92 arrived between 30 March and 9 May, while the campaigns ran; the busiest week was the one starting 27 April, with 22. By source, 82 came through the quiz and 10 through the form on mrgary.ca, the first of those on 5 April.
The CRM went in at the end of March, so quiz requests from 3 to 29 March, which went straight to Telegram, are not in that count. The campaigns were paused on 12 May. After that the CRM recorded three more requests with no campaign of ours running: a quiz request on 18 June and two through the website form, on 8 and 24 August.
This case gives no sales figure. 18 of the 92 requests carry the status "Client" in the CRM, and we have not checked that status against completed jobs, so it stays a CRM label here.
The turn to kitchen cabinets
In late May 2026 the business narrowed. The owner opened a second Instagram account for on-site kitchen cabinet painting and posted 227 times between 26 May and 26 September, mostly video: day-by-day footage of each kitchen, from masking to the last door going back on. By September cabinets were the core of what he posted, and the spring landing page, written for painting and handyman jobs, described a different business.
On 28 September we ran a free search study of the Montreal market, because the paid keyword data source was out of credit that day. The findings that set the brief for the new site:
- In Google Trends for Quebec, French commercial queries about cabinet painting ran at roughly three times the English ones.
- Several sites in the Google top 10 for Montreal cabinet painting queries had 4 to 10 pages, and one of them sat at #3 in French on a domain registered in September 2025.
- The client's Facebook page was already #8 for two of the main English queries. In Google Maps he was absent from the top 70 from the city centre, West Island and Laval, and #57 from a point on the South Shore.
- His Google Business Profile had no website and five reviews, all five stars. The AI Overview lists on these queries were drawn from Business Profiles, and one company with 12 reviews appeared in them.
September and October 2026: the new site
The new site is built for one service in two languages. It has 116 pages, 58 in English and 58 in Quebec French, each pair linked with hreflang: ten service pages by cabinet material and job type (oak, MDF, thermofoil, melamine, spraying, single doors, vanities, colour change), nine projects, nine area pages from Westmount to Brossard, six guides, a blog, a cost page and a page comparing painting with refacing. French URLs use the words Quebec searchers type, such as peinture-armoires-de-cuisine and soumission, and the French copy follows local usage: cherry wood is cerisier.
Everything on it comes from the owner's own material. Before-and-after pairs are his photos and stills cut from his Instagram videos at matching angles, and project pages list the area, the month, the starting finish, the colour code and the coating, then the job day by day with links to the posts. Facts about the process (on site, five days, Renner 2K coatings, sprayed finish, every door labelled) come from his captions. Reviews are quoted word for word from Google and Facebook; we collected 30 of them on 28 September 2026. Prices and warranty terms appear nowhere on the site, because the client has not stated them in writing.
The request path changed with the business. The main call to action is a photo quote: the visitor sends three to eight phone photos of the kitchen, a door up close and any damage, and gets a quote back. For search engines and AI assistants the site carries structured business data, breadcrumbs, a llms.txt file and phone-first image sizes. Redirects from every address of the old site are already in its configuration, mapped on 28 September from the old sitemap and server rules.
On 30 October 2026 the site runs on a staging address with indexing switched off. The move to mrgary.ca is waiting on the client.
October 2026: the course and its funnel
In October the client asked for an online course that teaches his method to handymen and builders who want the same business. We built an online course on the engine of our own course platform: "On-Site Kitchen Cabinet Refinishing", eight modules that follow the job from Day 0 (winning and planning it) to Day 5 (unmasking, reinstalling, handing over), then a module on pricing and selling, and a final exam. That is 24 lessons and 8 tests in English, French and Russian, plus a 35-page field guide in each language.
The client's own read was that a course sold cold from a website would not move, so the funnel is built as a ladder. Lesson 1 is open to anyone, lesson 2 needs a free account, the rest needs a purchase. Ahead of that sit a two-page pricing checklist sent by email, a free live webinar every other Thursday at 7 p.m. Montreal time with the first one set for 19 November 2026, and email sequences timed off the sign-up and the webinar date. Launch creatives in the course's colours are ready, the webinar ones in English and French.
On 30 October 2026 the course runs in test mode with payments off. Launch waits on three things from the client: his own payment account, a postal address for the footer of every email (Canada's anti-spam law requires one) and the inbox where sale and sign-up notifications should go.
What we would do next
Google reviews. Five reviews in Google against 25 recommendations on Facebook is the cheapest gap to close. A review link sent on the day the doors go back on, while the kitchen still smells of new paint, moves the business toward the dozen or so reviews at which competitors started appearing in Maps and in AI answers.
The domain and the profile. Point mrgary.ca at the new site, add the address to the Business Profile, and let the 116 pages start earning rankings before the January to March peak that Google Trends shows for kitchen cabinet searches in Quebec.
French campaigns. The spring campaigns left French-speaking audiences out. The search study puts French demand at roughly three times English for this service in Quebec, so the next campaign should start in French, pointed at the photo quote.
Speed to lead. The quiz already posts straight into Telegram. An automatic text to the person at the same moment, carrying the business name and the photo quote link, keeps the request warm while the owner is on a ladder.
Related
The campaigns: targeted ads. The quiz and the spring page: landing page development. The new site: corporate websites and SEO. Visibility in AI answers: LLM SEO and GEO. The course: educational websites. On Maps and reviews: local SEO and Google Maps. The same quiz and Meta approach for another trade: Beaver Movers.
Project lead: Marketing MIX. Client: Mr. Gary, kitchen cabinet painting, Montreal, Quebec. Year: 2026.