Karl opened Rocket Tint in March 2021. He's exactly the kind of owner I like working with: real craftsmanship, a strong work ethic, and repeat customers who talk him up unprompted. What he didn't have was a marketing engine. He pieced together a website himself, ran Instagram when he had time, and tried paid ads on his own between jobs. Over the next two and a half years, March 2021 to September 2023, the entire business generated $67,000 in total sales. Karl was good at the job. The marketing was the bottleneck, not the tint work.
The apples-to-apples test
Marketing by Magnet took over the ad accounts and the funnel in September 2023. Same business, same founder, same craftsmanship. The only thing that changed was the marketing. Over the next two and a half years, September 2023 to April 2026, the same length of time as the solo baseline, Rocket Tint did $474,221 in sales on $52,600 in ad spend. That's a 9x return on ad spend and a 7.1x lift over the solo period, and none of it is a projection. It's traceable end-to-end in Karl's own Google Ads dashboard, and it reconciles against his own point-of-sale export, not against anything we control.
The part that happened before we spent a single ad dollar
The first move wasn't a bigger budget. It was an audit of the site Karl already had, and a fix to the lead-capture flow so every ad click had a clean path to a booked appointment. No leaks between the click and the conversion. This is the part case studies usually skip past to get to the revenue chart, but it's the part that made the revenue chart possible. A great ad pointed at a broken funnel just buys expensive traffic that never turns into a booked job.
Two channels, both aimed at buyer intent, not reach
Google Ads got pointed at "near me" buyer intent specifically, "window tint near me," "mobile tint STL," low-volume, high-conversion searches. We tracked the searches that actually book, not the ones that pad a vanity report. Facebook got built around local automotive intent, audiences of automotive enthusiasts and recent car buyers inside Karl's actual service radius, with creative rotated regularly and retargeting layered on top of the prospecting. Neither channel was chasing impressions. Both were chasing the moment someone was already looking for exactly this.
Every dollar tied to a number neither of us controls alone
We track ad spend in Karl's own Google Ads dashboard. Karl tracks revenue in his own point-of-sale system. The $474,221 figure is the all-time closed-invoice export from that POS, and it covers the full lifetime of the business, including the smaller-ticket solo-era invoices, which is worth being precise about: as trust built and reviews accumulated during the Magnet period, Rocket Tint moved up-market into higher-end vehicles and ceramic coating, and the average ticket climbed past $300. The 9x return-on-ad-spend figure specifically isolates the Magnet-attributable ad spend and revenue, exported live from Karl's Google Ads "all time" view. Two different ledgers, two different owners of the data, one number that both agree on.
Still running, still compounding
The campaigns we set up in September 2023 are still live today. Karl held the ad budget steady, we optimize creative on a regular cadence, and the local-market awareness kept compounding underneath it without needing a bigger monthly spend to keep growing. That's the actual shape of a funnel that works: it gets better with age, not just with more money thrown at it.
Why this is the "owned" case study, not just the paid one
The reason I keep coming back to Rocket Tint on client calls isn't the 9x. It's that the site, the Google Ads account, and the point-of-sale system are all Karl's, in his name, on his logins, the entire time. We never built this on a white-label platform we control and rent back to him. If Karl ended the engagement tomorrow, he keeps the funnel, the account history, the retargeting pool, and the ledger, all of it, because none of it was ever ours to take with us. That's the same argument I make in owned vs rented, just proven with a tint shop's actual invoices instead of a philosophy.