Category: Case Studies

Client:

Designs by Nature Gems is a bohemian boutique in Toronto that combines passion, beauty, craftsmanship, and a love for raw natural crystals to offer high-quality Canadian handmade artisan jewelry globally.

Brief:

Designs by Nature Gems applied to the Boost Your Business Technology Grant from the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following:

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. $7,300 in wage subsidies for each youth (18 – 30) hired to help execute its digital adoption plan.

Challenge:

Because over 80% of Designs by Nature Gems’ revenue comes from Amazon, when Amazon changed its algorithm, it dramatically impacted Designs by Nature Gems’ bottom line, resulting in staff layoffs. Designs by Nature Gems wants to diversify its revenue channels to prevent this from happening again. It also plans to create new brands with unique websites and target audiences without increasing staff, so it wants to improve efficiencies across its operations.

Strategy:

Designs by Nature Gems is a woman-owned business. The founder conceptualized the company in 2014, designing and crafting jewelry part-time on the weekends, eventually turning it into a full-time business with employees. In 2023, she received the 2023 Female Entrepreneur of the Year TITAN Women in Business Award. In 2022, she won the Stevie Award for Fastest Growing Company. She often shares her expertise at the Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada (WEOC).

Designs by Nature Gems’ vision is to champion Canadian art crafted by local artists. It rejects the idea of the ‘starving artist,’ firmly believing that art is a vital part of our world and every artist deserves fair compensation.

Designs by Nature Gems sells its products through Amazon, Etsy, and Faire. It practices sustainable and ethical business practices, such as minimizing waste production, revitalizing the local economy by hiring local employees, working with local crystal shops, and sourcing raw materials from sustainable sources.

Results:

I’ve listed recent Shopify feature enhancements (the Shopify Winter 2024 Edition comes with over 100 foundational product updates) and Shopify-approved apps to supplement and enhance its current processes. These updates offer more effective purchase conversion rates, ensuring that Designs by Nature Gems can earn more revenue and better attribute its marketing performance.

For a direct-to-consumer handmade jewelry market in North America, where competition is more intense and reaching the right audience is crucial, I recommended Designs by Nature Gems increase its advertising media spending to match its projected revenue growth.

I’ve recommended order management systems (OMS) to help Designs by Nature Gems manage operational efficiencies through its increasing sales volume.

The Designs by Nature Gems implementation roadmap includes work plans, timelines, dependencies, technology, implementation, and training costs for moving forward with the recommendations. In addition, I recommended hiring staff to help execute the Digital Adoption plan using the CDAP wage subsidy.

Client:

Shoppers Confidential Inc. supplies international secret shopping services to help organizations evaluate their customer experience and product and service offerings.

Brief:

Shoppers Confidential applied to the Boost Your Business Technology Grant from the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following:

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. $7,300 in wage subsidies for each youth (18 – 30) hired to help execute its digital adoption plan.

Challenge:

The pandemic severely impacted Shoppers Confidential as customers turned toward improving online sales processes while neglecting in-person and brick-and-mortar operational improvements. The change resulted in drastic revenue losses, requiring layoffs for Shoppers Confidential. Now, the industry is swinging back toward aligning offline and online sales. Shoppers Confidential wants to demonstrate an exceptional online-to-offline sales process in its own sales delivery.

Shoppers Confidential knows its website is essential to differentiating itself from competitors and attracting and retaining customers. While it performs well from an SEO perspective, it no longer emulates the sophisticated customer experience Shoppers Confidential promises its clientele.

Strategy:

Shoppers Confidential has access to over 350,000 secret shoppers and over 40 global collaboration partners to recruit shoppers who match its customers’ target audiences in demographics and psychographics.

It has served over 12,500 clients worldwide since its inception in 2005. It has high-profile customers like Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd (MLSE), the Toronto Eaton Centre, Harley Davidson, BSH Home Appliances, Carpathia Credit Union, and the Liquor Control Board of New Brunswick.

Its business development team has an exceptional close rate once it meets with a prospect and enters them into its HubSpot deal pipeline. It has a sophisticated sales process embedded into HubSpot, from when a prospect is identified to when they close the sale. Because of their familiarity with HubSpot, the staff built the latest version of their website with the HubSpot content management system (CMS). However, because of HubSpot’s expensive licensing costs, they question whether the HubSpot CMS is the right tool to redesign their website.

The Shoppers Confidential website is comprehensive, with over 100 pages and numerous blog posts that help position the company and enhance its SEO performance. However, the large volumes of content, some dated and some buried, also interrupt the natural flow of visitors navigating the website. Shoppers Confidential needs to edit its website content without negatively impacting SEO.

Results:

Its Digital Adoption plan recommends comparing its HubSpot CMS against comparable alternatives (WordPress, Drupal, and Webflow), adding tools (from the HubSpot App Marketplace) to enhance its online-to-offline sales process, and undertaking a list of prioritized activities to help it redesign its website.

The Shopper Confidential implementation roadmap includes work plans, timelines, dependencies, technology, implementation, and training costs for executing the digital adoption plan recommendations. It also recommends hiring a digital marketing coordinator and using the CDAP wage subsidy to offset their costs.

Brief:

The McKillop Mutual Insurance Company and Middlesex Mutual Insurance Company shared many values and visions, so it felt natural and comforting when succession plans resulted in a merger. They shared a commitment to supporting and residing in small-town agricultural communities.

Challenge:

When Rob Lilley, owner of Web Dev Interactive, was asked to create a website for the new brand, MutualONE Insurance Company, he asked me to help MutualONE’s marketing manager merge the content from the two sites into the new website, carrying forward a new vision with historical values.

Strategy:

I drafted a side-by-side comparison of the archives of the two insurance websites to help them capture their similarities and nuances. We then conducted an ROT analysis to edit out the redundant, outdated, and trivial content and identify gaps where new content was required. I then drafted a new content deck illustrating the details of the new website navigation, information architecture, wayfinding, and page content, working with MutualONE’s marketing manager to weave in the new brand positioning.

Results:

The new website captures the essence of over 100 years of rural community service in a new, modern, and small-town appealing website.

Client:

Big Country Raw is a raw pet food manufacturing company in Smithville, Ontario, using e-commerce to sell its products nationwide to wholesalers, retailers, and direct-to-consumers.

Brief:

Big Country Raw applied to the Boost Your Business Technology Grant from the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following:

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. $7,300 in wage subsidies for each youth (18 – 30) hired to help execute its digital adoption plan.

Challenge:

Big Country Raw was expanding into the Northeast US in 2024 and aimed to double its revenue over subsquent next five years. These were ambitious goals, but Big Country Raw was confident because The Globe and Mail listed them as one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies three times in the previous four years. In addition, analysts project the global raw pet food market to grow at a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 5.2%, with almost 50% of revenue coming from North America.

However, Big Country Raw needed to scale its website to market to its diverse target base. Its website was complex to manage because of numerous plugins and complex custom shipping algorithms, which limited future growth and expansion. In addition, it had a fragile custom integration between its website and ERP, which would break when updates happened to either platform. It also wanted to improve its CRM, ERP, and website integration to avoid manually moving data between them.

Strategy:

Big Country Raw wanted to use the CDAP to enhance its e-commerce experience, helping accomplish its goals by doing the following.

1. Improve its online ordering experience.
2. Better integrate its e-commerce platform with its ERP and CRM.
3. Separate its website into two sites, one targeting its direct-to-consumer channel and the other targeting wholesalers and retailers.
4. Offer more attractive shipping options to online shoppers.

Results:

Big Country Raw’s digital adoption plan ensures its website and systems integrations can scale along with its ambitious growth. The digital adoption plan identifies how BigCommerce addresses Big Country Raw’s pain points and recommends additional tools to complement BigCommerce and integrate it with Big Country Raw’s existing ERP and CRM.

Client:

Aquatell is in the water treatment sector, selling to residential consumers via e-commerce and to businesses and institutions via traditional direct sales, phone and email.

Brief:

Aquatell applied to the Boost Your Business Technology Grant from the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following:

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. Up to $7,300 in wage subsidies to hire a student or recent graduate to help execute its digital adoption plan.

Challenge:

The North American water treatment market is growing at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 6.8%, with demand resulting from increasing water pollution, aging infrastructure, budget cuts, and population increase in urban areas.

Water treatment systems are highly technical; installing them requires a professional or a confident do-it-yourself consumer. Miscommunications, misinformation, infamous news stories, and perceived complex technical systems have led to consumer distrust.

The Aquatell brand is rooted in having a knowledgeable technical background and the ability to answer complex questions in a consumer-friendly manner. Aquatell believes in the information reciprocation model; if you offer high-quality content for free, consumers will trust you, and when they trust you, they feel more confident purchasing your products.

Aquatell prides itself as a customer-focused, transparent and ethically run business. It offers unmatched pre and post-sales support, which is unique to an industry that often fails to deliver sufficient customer service. Customers show appreciation with positive feedback and outstanding Google review ratings, averaging 4.8 out of 5.

The owner intends to invest and grow annually by diversifying its customer base, increasing its business-to-business channels total revenue, and digitizing how it educates consumers.

Strategy:

While Aquatell uses technology to support its business operations (sales, marketing, fulfillment, shipping, project management, and manufacturing), it needs to build more integration between its systems (beyond manual efforts). It requires an approach that allows it to offer consistent, automated and helpful customer service throughout the purchase, installation and maintenance process.

Results:

Aquatell’s digital adoption plan offers seven recommendations to build a more robust, consistent, and integrated digital ecosystem that will allow it to continue to provide exceptional services in a more scalable manner.

1. Upgrade to Shopify 2.0: a significant undertaking with many benefits to Aquatell, including more control over the content and branding and the ability to offer a unique shopping experience for its clients.
2. Procure a CRM: help Aquatell unify its customer interactions and activities. It calls for changing many internal processes to systemize Aquatell’s sales, marketing and customer services. A systemized approach will lead to more consistency and a superior customer experience.
3. Define a content marketing strategy: Aquatell can approach every customer touchpoint strategically, consistently demonstrating its value proposition and creating a more intentional brand experience.
4. Better SEO: ensure that every aspect of Aquatell’s digital experience exemplifies its unique approach to the market.
5. Add life cycle email marketing: a life cycle approach to email marketing allows Aquatell to create an intimate brand experience with its clients that competitors can’t easily replicate.
6. Set up analytics and dashboards: Aquatell can monitor its digital experience’s effectiveness and measure its investments’ impact – allowing it to spot areas for course correction quickly and from a higher vantage point.
7. Use paid media to scale: Aquatell can use paid media to control the volume and type of traffic visiting its website – offering an opportunity to increase or decrease sales leads and better manage its pace of growth.

It’s a prioritized plan where each milestone supports the previous while preparing a better digital ecosystem for future projects. It includes a roadmap with a corresponding timeline, identified dependencies, technology, implementation, and training costs.

Client:

Wheatland County Counselling (WCC) is a full-service practice with a team of therapists supporting children, teens, couples, families, and adults in Strathmore and Drumheller, Alberta.

Brief:

The lead psychologist recently purchased the practice from the previous owner and wanted to update the website to reflect its growth.

Challenge:

I partnered with Rob Lilley, owner of Web Dev Interactive, to audit WCC’s website and identify opportunities through SEO keyword research and reviewing competitor websites (their strengths and weaknesses, messaging, brand positioning, and website features). After completing the audit, we recommended how to move forward with an immediate website launch and longer-term plans.

Strategy:

The audit identified strategies to better position WCC, further differentiating its practice from competitors and leading to a more informed website redesign and development project.

Results:

The audit recommended changing the tone, voice, look and feel, reflecting WCC’s warm and genuine approach compared to the typical highly clinical sector websites. Dave Jumaquio, owner of Jumaquio Media, joined us to create the new website design, visually capturing WCC’s brand position.

The SEO keyword research showed the benefits of expanding WCC’s service pages, recognizing frequently searched client concerns and creating content explaining treatments to remedy them.

We created FAQs to let visitors privately learn the benefits of therapy and what to expect from visits to WCC.

We sourced numerous photos to make the website more welcoming while reflecting WCC’s brand positioning.

We softened up the fees page to explain how WCC priced itself in the market and encouraged visitors to speak to WCC to learn how to work with insurance providers and the potential of sliding-scale rates to ease service costs.

We redesigned the contact form, gathering more pertinent details while simplifying efforts to complete it.

Google Maps and new location pages identified WCC’s offices and the unique benefits of each.

The new website uses SEO best practices to improve WCC’s search performance, and we created more informative Google Business Profiles and set up a monthly plan to maintain exceptional search results.

Client:

Upper Canada Stretchers (UCS) is in the art supply sector, manufacturing and supplying stretcher frames, art panels and products supporting frame construction across North America.

Brief:

UCS applied to the Boost Your Business Technology Grant from the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following:

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. Up to $7,300 in wage subsidies to hire a student or recent graduate to help execute its digital adoption plan.

Challenge:

USC’s supply costs have fluctuated and become more volatile since the pandemic, with its material costs varying by as much as 10% – 15% from receiving a customer order to completing projects and invoicing, which makes profitability challenging to predict.

UCS provides high-quality products at reasonable rates in a niche market. Given the sizable volume of custom projects, it can often increase prices with little pushback from clients.

UCS implements price changes as a percentage increase across all products and services; however, it wants to develop a more exact pricing approach which accounts for all costs incurred (for example, materials, labour, sales and marketing).

Its high volume of small orders presents difficulties for staff to manage efficiently, and its production manager is concerned that the team doesn’t follow a consistent process.

UCS recently licensed Zoho One, and as it begins to roll out Zoho across its organization, it hopes to achieve numerous departmental goals, ultimately allowing it to attain higher and more predictable profit margins.

UCS wants to use the CDAP to learn how Zoho One can digitize its business processes (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Order Management, Shipping, Production, Inventory, and Accounting) to handle increased sales volume and profit margins without requiring additional staff.

Strategy:

UCS knew it needed to digitize its business to handle increased sales volume while improving its profit margins. In preparation for its CDAP Digital Adoption Plan, it drafted almost fifty business goals it hoped to achieve across its service areas.

UCS’s Digital Adoption Plan illustrates how to achieve UCS’s goals using specific Zoho applications, including a summary table of recommended applications.

Following the plan will result in more accurate and transparent costs, visually accessible to essential staff across the organization through cloud-based dashboards. UCS will apply more targeted price increases, testing for price sensitivity and ensuring it maintains its loyal customer base while capturing deserved profits.

UCS’s digital systems will encourage the consistent capture of pertinent project details shared by customers early during project discovery, becoming accessible to essential staff throughout, resulting in quicker and more accurate project completion times and costs.

Completing the plan will allow UCS management to gain control over their profit margins, helping them achieve more consistent growth.

Results:

UCS’ digital adoption plan identified over forty Zoho applications to address each business goal, including an implementation roadmap with a phased approach, corresponding timeline, identified dependencies, technology, implementation, and training costs.

Client:

Globyz BioPharma Services (Globyz) specializes in clinical trials material supply, specialty medicines, wholesale, distribution and third-party logistics, and warehousing in the life sciences, healthcare, and pharmaceutical sectors.

Brief:

GLOBYZ applied to the Boost Your Business Technology Grant from the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following:

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. Up to $7,300 in wage subsidies to hire a student or recent graduate to help execute its digital adoption plan.

Challenge:

Globyz has a complex sales process, including numerous touchpoints (social media outreach, follow-up emails, telephone calls, and in-person meetings). Its primary marketing channel is global trade shows, and its sales reps use LinkedIn to gain access to ideal prospects.

Globyz has high-quality service standards, delivering end-to-end integrated solutions tailored to each client’s needs – becoming a seamless extension of the client’s supply chain. It seeks long-term relationships, forming deep connections by creating essential partnerships between its staff and customers.

The Globyz management team and scientists have extensive sourcing, clinical packaging, supply chain and clinical trials backgrounds, offering deep experience and regulatory management expertise in the pharmaceutical industry.

Globyz’s primary objective for the digital adoption plan is to improve customer acquisition through effective content marketing, leveraging the thought leadership of its highly experienced staff.

Strategy:

Globyz’s plan includes recommendations from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) to improve its content marketing strategy, planning, and execution to enhance customer acquisition throughout its sales cycle. In addition, it recommends tools to help discover and identify topics (Jasper) and to improve content quality (Grammarly).

The plan helps Globyz identify the essential pillars for its content marketing strategy using Stregyzer’s Value Proposition Canvas to map issues that resonate with its target audience and link to relevant value propositions.

Using the CM Brand Hero’s Journey and Tamsen Webster’s Red Thread Framework, it offers story constructs to help content contributors consistently build stories that capture the audience’s attention.

Globyz can gain inspiration from the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop content for its website and blog. Jasper promotes itself as an on-brand AI content creator. It claims to reduce the time required to create first drafts by 80% while increasing content downloads by 40% with a 3.5x return on investment.

Like Jasper, Grammarly utilizes generative AI to provide a consistent experience of robust, real-time feedback on your writing. It has an intuitive writing environment, or you can work directly in your preferred applications, such as web browsers, desktop apps, email clients, MS Office tools, Google Workspace tools, and more.

Results:

Globyz’s implementation roadmap includes work plans with a corresponding timeline, identified dependencies, technology and implementation costs for moving forward with the digital adoption plan recommendations.

Client:

The Little Campus (TLC) is a private early childhood education centre in South Etobicoke, Ontario, offering premium services to families who desire the best care and learning experience for their children.

Brief:

TLC applied to the Boost Your Business Technology stream of the Canada Digital Adoption program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following:

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. And up to $7,300 to fund work placements for students or recent graduates to help grow through digital adoption.

Challenge:

TLC applies a digital-first approach to its operations, benefiting from the owner’s deep technology experience (having already built and sold three technology startups). It manages a combination of on-premise and cloud applications and plans to use the BDC loan to upgrade to a fully-integrated cloud infrastructure.

Strategy:

TLC had developed custom applications as needed and when no substitutes were available and wanted to unify its digital ecosystem. Its digital adoption plan recommends grouping functionality into microservices and unifying them through interfaces. A microservice design keeps TLC’s infrastructure agile and more flexible to manage and upgrade.

TLC’s plan recommends a two-pronged approach to accomplish its goals. Initially, use sector-specific cloud applications (Brightwheel or Himama) while developing its custom application. The strength of these solutions is how fast TLC can begin using them, which makes them excellent MVP (minimum viable product) solutions that act as a stopgap while TLC develops its custom-developed application.

Results:

TLC’s implementation roadmap includes work plans with a corresponding timeline, identified dependencies, technology and implementation costs for each recommendation.

In addition to reviewing Brightwheel and Himama, the plan maps out the microservices, including prime functions and APIs. And a table compares each alternative’s strengths, challenges, costs and time-to-launch.

Client:

MyoWorx is a physiotherapy clinic in Guelph, Ontario, specializing in treating concussions, chronic pain and complex conditions using its proprietary technology and methods. 

Brief:

MyoWorx applied to the Boost Your Business Technology stream of the Canada Digital Adoption program (CDAP) for an opportunity to receive the following: 

1. A grant of up to $15,000 covering 90% of the costs for a digital adoption plan developed by a registered digital advisor (me);
2. Up to $100,000 in interest-free loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help implement their digital adoption plan;
3. And up to $7,300 to fund work placements for students or recent graduates to help grow through digital adoption.

Challenge:

The MyoWorx clinic operates exclusively using copyright treatment programs. Patients receive one-to-one treatment from registered physiotherapists and kinesiologists. It offers accelerated recovery programs to non-province patients, providing daily treatment with extended-length sessions for two weeks and helping patients with task-oriented recovery. Patients will often continue to receive ongoing care at home through telehealth.

MyoWorx intends to invest the BDC loan in a private subscription-based telehealth platform to host exercise and self-treatment instructions while providing exclusive access to live workshops and seminars. The investment will make the MyoWorx treatment methodology more accessible to those who need help and cannot easily travel to its offices for extended periods.

Strategy:

After prioritizing MyoWorx’s requirements, it became apparent that a learning management system (LMS) was an ideal platform capable of addressing many of its needs.

The digital adoption plan reviewed three LMS alternatives (Desire2Learn, Canvas LMS, and LearnDash LMS), each closely matched to MyoWorx’s requirements. The recommendations also offered an option to extend MyoWorx’s Google Workspace licencing to include Google Classroom (Google’s LMS).

MyoWorx’s digital adoption plan includes timelines and costs for each recommendation and a course curriculum development plan, which MyoWorx can follow to set up its courses, regardless of which LMS it selects. In addition, there’s an alternative work plan using Google Workspace as an MVP (minimal viable product) as a precursor to using an LMS.

Results:

MyoWorx’s digital adoption plan allows it to gradually create and implement an online learning environment for its patients. It encourages an iterative approach within a two-year timeline with options to slow or excel progress at given points.