business growth · engineered

I grow businesses like an engineer.

Find the constraint. Fix it. Automate it. 22 years in engineering, from draftsman to manager of a 70-person department. Two e-commerce brands built and run since 2014. AI is my current best tool — it replaced $75K+ a year of agency work in my own businesses before I ever built a system for a client.

Based in Oakville, Ontario — serving the GTA and beyond

GK
Greg Kowalczyk - Business Growth Engineer in Oakville, Ontario
$0K+ Agency Costs Replaced
0+ Years in E-Commerce
0 iOS Apps Shipped
0+ Pages Per Client
0 Weeks Typical Delivery
AI for Business Hamilton business meetup — Thursday September 10, 5:30 to 7:30 PM at CoWork at the Cotton Factory, free to attend
FREE MEETUP

AI for Business — Hamilton

· 5:30 – 7:30 PM

A monthly evening for local business owners on using AI to save time, improve margins, and get more done. Real examples, open Q&A, and a room full of other owners working on the same problem. CoWork at the Cotton Factory, 270 Sherman Ave N, Hamilton, ON L8L 6N4. Free to attend.

// Proof, Not Promises

Client Project

Traditional Retail Shop to Full E-Commerce Operation

New owner, one week into a long-established specialty retail business. Zero e-commerce experience. Working 84+ hours a week. Needed a complete digital transformation plan — fast.

What I built

  • 18 deliverable areas — competitive analysis, pricing strategy, SEO, email, social, UGC, partnerships, financial tracking
  • Custom Content Creator PRO v5.3 — web app for generating platform-specific AI prompts, handed over running
  • Corporate gifting program with B2B sales materials — a six-figure channel that didn't exist before
  • Pricing optimization strategy — a six-figure annual gain from margin adjustments alone
  • Interactive client dashboard deployed on GitHub Pages — live, browser-based, no downloads
6 Weeks
Delivery Time
Six Figures
Added From Pricing Alone
New Channel
Corporate Gifting, Built From Zero
~2×
Revenue Trajectory
it does not. The build gate fails on a client name either way. */}
Built Without Waiting

It Used to Take Days. Now I Do It From My Phone.

Every change used to mean going to a developer. A blog post, a price update, a page that needed fixing — write the brief, wait, review it, wait again. Days, every time, for work that took minutes to describe. And nothing shipped while you waited.

That's the part that changed. I make the change myself now, often from my phone, and it's live before the conversation is over. Not because I became a programmer — I'm a mechanical engineer and I've never written software professionally. Because describing the work precisely is now enough to get it built.

What's been shipped that way

  • Two iOS apps, live in the App Store — SunUp, which calculates real burn time from skin type and live UV, and RunMate Pro, GPS tracking with shoe-mileage management. RunMate was rejected 39 times before it was approved.
  • Helm — seller intelligence that pulls Amazon SP-API, Amazon Ads, Shopify, Meta, Klaviyo and Search Console into one place, then exposes it to Claude as tools. "Why did ACOS jump last week" gets answered in a sentence instead of an afternoon.
  • A full event platform for a chip-timed road race I direct — over a thousand people involved across runners, families and spectators, plus what that brings into the local economy. Registration, course and festival info, sponsor pages, and a permanent searchable photo archive.
  • Two Shopify stores running on API connections, with product content and blog production automated end to end.
  • SportsClinicFinder — a Canada-wide clinic directory covering every province and territory, searchable by city, injury, and specialty.
  • Magpie — a shared research brain for the team. Drop in a link and it enriches, categorises, and makes it searchable across every brand, so nobody researches the same thing twice.
  • Marketing sites for both apps, plus this one — statically built, deployed on Vercel, with a post-build audit that fails the deploy on a dead link or a broken image.
  • Content Creator PRO — built for a client, handed over running. A web app that produces on-brand content for Instagram, email, Google Ads and product pages, so they stopped needing an agency on retainer to do it.

This is the same capability I hand over. When a client wants a page changed, a post published, or a price updated, the answer stops being "I'll ask the developer and get back to you next week."

See all of it, with the stack behind each one →
Minutes
To Ship a Change — Not Days
2 Apps
Live in the App Store
12
Projects Shipped
$75K+
Annual Agency Cost Removed
My Businesses

Two E-Commerce Brands Running on AI Tools I Built Myself

Two e-commerce brands. $2M+ in ad spend. Paying $75K-$125K annually for agencies, freelancers, and services. Needed to cut costs without cutting results.

What I built

  • Custom AI content generation systems (100+ product descriptions, brand voice maintained)
  • Marketing automation workflows replacing manual email, social, and ad management
  • 2 iOS apps (SunUp by GearTOP, RunMate Pro) — built as a non-coder using AI tools
  • Analytics dashboards aggregating data from Shopify, Amazon, Google, Meta
  • Operational automation (inventory alerts, reorder triggers, journey orchestration)
$75K+
Annual Savings
5-10x
Content Volume
15-20x
Email Marketing ROI
2 Apps
Live in App Store

// About Greg

Mechanical engineer. 14 years leading engineering teams at SMS-Siemag (prior PRO-ECO LTD). Then independent consulting. Then e-commerce — two brands built from scratch since 2014.

In 2024 I went all-in on AI. Built custom tools that replaced $75K+ in agency costs. Shipped two iOS apps as a non-coder. Now I build AI systems for businesses that want working solutions — not strategy decks.

Who this is for

If the same task lands on someone's desk every week, it probably shouldn't.

Every business has a handful of jobs that repeat — quoting, scheduling, chasing, reporting, answering the same question for the hundredth time. They're too small to hire for and too constant to ignore, so they get absorbed by whoever has capacity. Usually the owner.

That work is now automatable, and it doesn't much matter what industry you're in — a pottery studio chasing class bookings and a distributor chasing purchase orders are the same problem wearing different clothes. What matters is whether someone will actually build the thing, deploy it, and stay until your team can run it.

I'm based in Oakville and work across the GTA and Ontario, plus remotely. The proof isn't a slide deck — it's the ecosystem I build in public: two e-commerce brands, two iOS apps in the App Store, a race with a thousand runners, and a directory at local-search scale. Client work runs on the same playbook.

Looking for AI consulting in Oakville?

Start with the task, not the tool. I help Oakville and GTA businesses find the repeat work that is slowing the owner or team down, then build the AI workflow, automation, or internal tool that removes it.

Good fits are quoting, intake, product content, reporting, research, customer follow-up, launch workflows, and internal search. Bad fits are vague AI strategy projects where nobody owns the finished system.

What that's looked like

Pottery studio

Class booking, waitlists, and the follow-up nobody had time to send

Race organization

Registration, sponsor pages, and a permanent searchable photo archive

Fitness studio

Member onboarding and retention sequences that run unattended

Specialty food retailer

Retail shop to full e-commerce operation in six weeks

E-commerce brands

Two of my own, since 2014 — where everything gets tested first

Pharma consultancy

Research and reporting workflows that used to be manual

Six businesses that look nothing like each other. The underlying work was nearly identical.

// Common Questions

Custom AI tool development typically runs $5,000-$25,000 depending on complexity and scope. Compare that to $75,000+ per year for agency retainers delivering similar capabilities. Most of my projects deliver ROI within the first quarter. I scope every project with a clear budget before writing a line of code.

Most projects deliver working systems in 2-8 weeks. A recent client project — 100+ pages of strategy plus a custom AI tool — shipped in 6 weeks. Simple automation workflows can be live in days. I don't do 6-month timelines. You get working software fast, then we iterate based on real data.

The biggest risk is doing nothing while competitors adopt AI tools that cut their costs and speed up their operations. Implementation risks are manageable: I test everything on my own businesses before recommending it, build incrementally so you see results early, and train your team so you're never dependent on me. You own everything I build.

Look for someone who builds, not just advises. Ask to see working tools they've deployed, not just strategy documents they've written. Check if they have skin in the game — do they use AI in their own business? I run two e-commerce brands on AI tools I built myself. That's the difference between theory and practice.

It's a practical evaluation of where AI and automation will generate the highest return in your specific business. I look at your operations, identify repetitive manual work, assess your existing tech stack, and prioritize implementation by ROI. Not a generic checklist — a targeted plan with specific tools and timelines. Then I build it.

Track what matters: time saved, costs reduced, revenue generated. For my own brands, the math is simple — $75K-$125K in annual agency costs replaced by $2K in AI tools. For clients, I set measurable benchmarks before building anything. If we can't quantify the return, we don't build it.

It depends on your biggest pain point. For content generation: Claude + custom prompt systems. For email automation: Klaviyo with AI-driven segmentation. For ad optimization: AI-assisted bid management across Google, Amazon, and Meta. For operations: custom automation workflows connecting Shopify, Amazon, and your fulfillment systems. I've built and tested all of these on my own e-commerce brands.

Not entirely — but it can replace the $75K-$125K in repetitive work you're paying agencies to do manually. Content generation, email sequences, social media scheduling, reporting, ad copy testing — all of this can be automated with custom AI tools. You still need strategic thinking. But you don't need to pay agency rates for execution work that AI handles better and faster.

Yes — and this is where real experience beats theory. I've built two product brands from zero to multi-platform e-commerce since 2014. I know exactly what breaks when you first launch on Amazon, why Shopify stores don't convert out of the box, and how to avoid the expensive mistakes most businesses make trying to figure it out alone. I coach you through the setup and build the AI tools that make it scale.

Yes. Electricians, landscapers, plumbers, HVAC — any local service business that's invisible online. I build your digital foundation: professional website, Google Business Profile, and local SEO. Then I optimize it for LLM search so AI assistants recommend you when people search for your services. The next generation finds local businesses by asking Siri, ChatGPT, and Google. I make sure you show up in all of them.

Platform fees are low — Shopify starts at $39/month, Amazon at $39.99/month. The real investment is the setup: getting listings right, content optimized, and systems in place so you don't waste money on ads before the foundation is solid. My coaching engagements typically run $3,000–$8,000 for the initial setup phase. After that you're running independently with AI tools I've built for you.

// Writing

Practical posts on AI tools, automation, and building things that actually work.

Ready to Build Something?

Tell me what's eating your time or budget. I'll tell you if AI or automation can fix it — and exactly how I'd build the solution.

Book a call