# Case Studies From 35 Years of Growth Work > The numbers belong to the engagements that produced them. Here's what I found in each one, what I changed, and the frameworks that carried the work, from AI visibility to agency restructures. > URL: https://michelfortin.com/case-studies/ > Last modified: 2026-10-29T15:49:47+00:00 ## Article Summary Michel Fortin is a fractional CMO, CGO, and CSO and the creator of Power Positioning. These case studies cover ten engagements from 2016 to 2025 and three earlier wins. Results include a 924% year-over-year rise in sessions from AI search at Consulting Success, 244% traffic growth at Musora Media, 197% ARR growth to nearly $5 million at seoplus+, and a 1,628% organic traffic increase after a rebrand. Each engagement started with a diagnosis before any campaign. ## Table of Contents - [Article Summary](#article-summary) - [Results at a glance](#results-at-a-glance) - [Consulting Success and the AI visibility rebuild](#consulting-success-and-the-ai-visibility-rebuild) - [Musora Media and the plateau reversal](#musora-media-and-the-plateau-reversal) - [seoplus+ and the move to pods](#seoplus-and-the-move-to-pods) - [Breslin Media Group and a 1,628% recovery](#breslin-media-group-and-a-1628-recovery) - [Ideal Protein and a conversion refactor](#ideal-protein-and-a-conversion-refactor) - [Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada at national scale](#big-brothers-big-sisters-canada-at-national-scale) - [More engagements from my agency years](#more-engagements-from-my-agency-years) - [Earlier proof points](#earlier-proof-points) - [The pattern across every case](#the-pattern-across-every-case) - [Where your firm fits](#where-your-firm-fits) - [Frequently Asked Questions](#frequently-asked-questions) I’ve run growth work across more than 200 industries over 35 years. This page isn’t the full record. It’s a cross-section, picked to show that the same method holds up regardless of size, industry, or decade. Where an engagement is public, I name it. Where it’s private, I describe the work without the name. And where a number is an estimate rather than a measured figure, I say so. One thing holds across every case below. The diagnosis came before the fix. None of these results came from a clever campaign. They came from rebuilding what sat underneath the campaign. ## Results at a glance EngagementMy roleYearsHeadline result**Consulting Success**Head of Growth2025924% YoY rise in sessions from AI search; AI-attributed SQLs up 23.53% QoQ**Musora Media (Drumeo)**VP of Growth2022–2024Traffic up 244% YoY; leads up 115%**seoplus+**Director of Search Marketing2021–2022ARR up 197% to nearly $5M; churn cut from 12% to 3%**Breslin Media Group**Director of Marketing (fractional)2019Organic traffic up 1,628% after a rebrand**Ideal Protein**Agency engagement lead2016–2019Traffic and tracked conversions up a combined 192%; bounce rate down about 32.5%**Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada**Agency engagement2016–2019112 sites rebuilt; main site traffic from 7,400 to 29,000 a month ## Consulting Success and the AI visibility rebuild This is the most recent case, and the one that shows how much the discovery layer has moved. I led growth at Consulting Success, a B2B consulting firm, starting in February 2025, and the results below were measured eight months in. The firm had about 200 articles built up over a decade of good SEO. But rankings were slipping faster than new content could replace them. Google’s updates were part of it. The bigger shift was buyers asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity instead of searching. My diagnosis was that the content was strong and the structure wasn’t. The articles read like human expertise, which AI rewards. But the schema, internal links, entity signals, and passage structure weren’t built for AI to retrieve and cite. So we rebuilt the engine instead of starting a content sprint. I led the rewrite and consolidation of about 100 core articles, adding schema, clearer entity signals, and passages written to be cited. Thin, overlapping pieces were merged into deeper pages. My [Context Vault](https://michelfortin.com/context-vault/) and the [CASE Framework](https://michelfortin.com/case-framework/) kept the rewrites on voice at scale. The results, tracked in GA4, were a 924% year-over-year rise in sessions from AI search and a 23.53% quarter-over-quarter rise in AI-attributed sales-qualified leads. New leads started naming ChatGPT and Gemini as how they found the firm. The frameworks behind it were [Power Positioning](https://michelfortin.com/power-positioning/), the [Triple-P Model](https://michelfortin.com/triple-p-model/), the SOME structure I describe in [how I structure content so AI cites it](https://michelfortin.com/ai-citations/), and [FORCEPS](https://michelfortin.com/forceps-framework/) for proof. ## Musora Media and the plateau reversal From December 2022 to October 2024, I was VP of Growth at Musora Media, the parent company of Drumeo and several music education brands with more than 100,000 active members. I didn’t apply through a job posting. I sent an unsolicited diagnostic audit to Chad Kettner, Musora’s chief marketing officer at the time. It flagged four gaps: missing knowledge panels, cannibalization across more than 2,000 pages, a gap between branded and unbranded search, and one data point that tied it together. “Drum lessons” was searched 817% more than “Drumeo lessons.” The audit got me the role. From there, we reorganized the content around category searches, collapsed the competing pages into clean clusters, closed the knowledge panel gaps, and built [EAT 2.0](https://michelfortin.com/eat-2-0/) (Empathy, Authenticity, Transparency) into the content’s tone. Traffic rose 244% year over year, and leads rose 115%. The work ran on the [IDEAL Framework](https://michelfortin.com/ideal-framework/) as the diagnostic loop. [OATH](https://michelfortin.com/oath-formula/) named the awareness gap, since buyers knew the category but not the brand. The [Bullseye Method](https://michelfortin.com/audience-targeting/) showed where they were searching. ## seoplus+ and the move to pods From May 2021 to November 2022, I was Director of Search Marketing at seoplus+, a bilingual Google Premier Partner agency in Ottawa. The agency was healthy but siloed. I was hired to lead three separate teams, SEO, paid ads, and content, with 18 people between them. Good work was getting done, but a client could touch one department without the others ever informing it. The diagnosis was an operating problem, not a marketing problem. The team structure was mine to fix, so I brought the three teams together into pods, with SEO, paid, and content specialists working side by side on the same clients. Those processes were internal. Around the same time, the agency repriced its offers and moved from its .ca domain to .com. That project came from the two people I reported to, our COO and co-founder and our VP of Operations. It started with a question from our COO: should we switch to .com? I ran the audits, did the market research, reviewed our competitors, and projected what a migration would do to our results. Once the approach was approved, we timed a rebrand to coincide with the move, since the agency was due for one anyway. I built the strategic plan, executed it, and led the teams that implemented it, including the new site structure and publishing our pricing on the site. ARR grew 197% to nearly $5 million over 18 months, and client churn dropped from 12% to 3%. That was a team result. The rebrand and repricing were part of it, alongside the restructure. The frameworks were Power Positioning and FAME at the agency level, with the [Diagnostic-First Approach](https://michelfortin.com/diagnostic-advantage/) deciding what to rebuild first. ## Breslin Media Group and a 1,628% recovery In 2019, I served Breslin Media Group as Director of Marketing on a part-time contract. It was an established online media company with several properties and partnerships, and visibility had been lagging across all of them. They’d tried several tactical fixes, and nothing moved. My diagnosis was that the brand had drifted from the audience it was built for. Years of separate decisions had left a set of properties competing with each other instead of one brand people recognized. I recommended a full rebrand, consolidating the properties and migrating the sites. The client called the consolidation bold and the migration risky. Both calls held up because the diagnosis had named the cause. Within months of the relaunch, the brand was outperforming its toughest competitors, and organic traffic was up 1,628%. This was Power Positioning at full scale, with FAME guiding what the brand stood for and who it served. ## Ideal Protein and a conversion refactor During my years at the agency SEO Twist, our team had designed Ideal Protein’s website, and we were later asked to redesign it. The site drew more than a million visitors a year across four very different markets: businesses, consumers, partners, and franchises. The board, owners, legal, and the C-suite drove the redesign concept, so our room to move was limited. When the redesign launched, results were lackluster. Bounce rates were high, conversion rates were poor, and Google Analytics alone couldn’t tell us why. So I recommended an in-depth audit, partly to find the culprit and partly to give stakeholders evidence they’d accept. Using Google Tag Manager, heatmaps, event tracking, and customer journey mapping, we found where people dropped off. The culprit was on the front page: a cookie-based layer that asked visitors to choose their path before they could go anywhere. We removed that layer, rebuilt the architecture into a SILO structure with a subdomain for each market, and rewrote the messaging for each one. Bounce rates fell by about 32.5%, and the combined lift in site traffic and the conversions we tracked worked out to about 192%. The [QUEST Formula](https://michelfortin.com/quest-formula/) ran differently for each market, and FORCEPS supplied the proof each path needed. ## Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada at national scale Also during my time at SEO Twist, we redesigned the Ottawa chapter’s website for Big Brothers Big Sisters, which led to an invitation to bid on the entire Canadian network. That was 112 websites, including the bilingual Quebec sites. I led the quarter-long bid, from the audits and the site plan to helping our sales team write the RFP response, and we won it. The challenge was keeping one national brand consistent while letting each local chapter sound like its own community. So the build had to support both. We built a multisite WordPress platform on Google Cloud, with customer journey audits, keyword research, content, rebranding, and SEO across the network. The national site alone tripled its traffic, from under 7,400 to over 29,000 visitors a month, and the chapter sites saw their own traffic gains. Power Positioning held the national brand together, the Bullseye Method shaped each chapter’s local audience, and EAT 2.0 kept the local voice from getting flattened by the template. ## More engagements from my agency years A few more from my agency years, in shorter form. **Oxfam Canada and Oxfam Quebec.** I co-managed SEO, rebranding, paid search, social media, and landing-page campaigns for both charities, including awareness campaigns during humanitarian crises. The Canadian site ran on a Google Ad Grant with strict monthly performance requirements. Monthly traffic grew from under 10,000 to as high as 55,000, with peaks of 150,000 to 200,000 during fundraising drives and the Christmas season. **Nautical Lands Group.** This group of retirement and executive residences across Southern Ontario needed to sell units, often before the buildings existed. We ran SEO on their three main sites, plus paid search, Facebook ads, split-tested promotions, and landing pages for 12 property sites. All but two properties sold out before construction, each with 60 to 100 units. **Tosoni MD.** A cosmetic dermatologist came to us with a popular site built on outdated, keyword-stuffed SEO that wasn’t mobile-friendly, and it was costing her. We rebuilt the site, rebranded her practice, and restructured the content around the conditions she treats instead of only her services. Traffic went from about 300 visitors a month to 2,600, and her practice doubled in less than a year. **SKINS Dermacare.** For this group of cosmetic clinics in Ottawa, we handled the rebrand, the websites, local SEO, Google 360 virtual tours, review management, and Google Ads, and helped launch a third location. Organic traffic grew from 130 to 700 visitors a month per location, with paid campaigns adding about 2,000 more visits a month. ## Earlier proof points The same pattern shows up long before AI search existed. In August 2004, I wrote the sales letter for John Reese’s Traffic Secrets launch. It became the first digital product to reach $1 million in sales in 18 hours, earning $1,080,496.37 in 24 hours with no paid advertising. We used video before YouTube existed, and that launch is what led me to write The Death of the Salesletter. During GetResponse’s early startup phase, I helped produce $4 million in sales. And for a plastic surgery clinic group, I helped grow annual sales from $400,000 to $1.2 million, then planned and rolled out sales and marketing protocols across 12 international franchise clinics over two years. ## The pattern across every case Every case started with a diagnosis that named the cause underneath the symptom. The agency had an operating problem, not a marketing one. Breslin had a positioning drift, not a visibility problem. Consulting Success had a structure problem, not a content quality problem. Every case then rebuilt the structure before adding activity. And every case ran on a named framework, which made the work teachable to the team and easy for the buyer to understand. The numbers are evidence the system worked. They’re also specific to each engagement, and I won’t promise them to anyone else. What carries over is the method. ## Where your firm fits If you want to know where your own growth has stalled, that’s what [The Gauge](https://michelfortin.com/services/) is for. It’s built on the same diagnose-first approach behind every engagement on this page, and I use the [PULSE Diagnostic](https://michelfortin.com/pulse-diagnostic/) to find where the problem sits before I recommend anything. --- ## Frequently Asked Questions What results has Michel Fortin produced for clients? Documented results include a 924% year-over-year rise in sessions from AI search at Consulting Success (2025), 244% traffic growth and 115% lead growth at Musora Media (2022–2024), 197% ARR growth to nearly $5 million at seoplus+ (2021–2022), and a 1,628% organic traffic increase after a 2019 rebrand. Results are specific to each engagement. How does Michel Fortin start a client engagement? He starts with a diagnosis before recommending any campaign or tactic. In his fractional practice, that diagnostic is called The Gauge, and it uses his PULSE Diagnostic to find where organic growth has stalled. The roadmap is built from what the diagnosis reveals. Why are some of these case studies anonymized? Some engagements were private, and the clients paid for confidentiality. Those cases describe the industry, the problem, the work, and the result without naming the company. Engagements cleared for naming, and roles held as an employee, are named. What frameworks does Michel Fortin use in client work? The core framework is Power Positioning, built on the FAME pillars (Focus, Aim, Multiply, Engage). Others include the Triple-P Model for AI visibility, IDEAL for diagnostics, OATH for buyer awareness, the Bullseye Method for audience targeting, QUEST for buyer journeys, FORCEPS for proof, CASE for briefing AI, and EAT 2.0 for human trust signals. Are these results typical? No. Each result reflects a specific company, market, and starting point, and none of them is a guarantee. What carries across engagements is the method: diagnose first, rebuild the structure, then add activity on top of it.