Most agencies sell you a plan they have never run themselves. We do the opposite. Before any idea leaves the workshop, we run it on our own business, in the open, with real customers and real money on the line.
Our test bench is Pinelaki, the auto-body shop Garo has run for 35 years. It started in Lebanon in 1991 and was rebuilt in Cyprus. It is a working business with real enquiries, real quotes, and real customers who will leave if we get it wrong. That is exactly why it makes a good lab.
Why our own shop, and not a client's
New tools are easy to talk about and hard to trust. AI marketing in Cyprus is full of confident promises and thin proof. We did not want to learn on someone else's business, on someone else's budget. So we made a rule: if we would not run it on Pinelaki first, we will not sell it.
That rule keeps us honest in three ways:
- We feel the cost. If a tool wastes time or annoys a customer, it wastes our time and annoys our customer first.
- We see the whole loop. Not a demo, but weeks of ordinary Tuesdays: the awkward enquiries, the edge cases, the follow-up.
- We can show you, not just tell you. The proof is a live thing you can go and poke, not a slide.
The Pinelaki estimator, in the open
The clearest example is the Pinelaki estimator. Someone dents a panel, panics, and wants two answers fast: can you fix it, and roughly what will it cost. In Cyprus that question lands on Viber and WhatsApp at all hours, often with a photo attached. For years it sat unanswered until the shop opened, by which point a faster shop had won the job.
So we built an AI damage estimator and put it on the shop's own site. Upload a photo, answer a couple of plain questions, get an honest range in seconds, any hour, then a human follows up. You can try it yourself at pinelaki.com/estimate. It is not a mockup. It is answering real customers today.
We build in public because it is the only honest way to prove a claim. We are not showing you a polished case study about a client we cannot name. We are showing you our own shop, our own leak, and the exact fix we now trust enough to bring to you.
What this means for you
When we suggest something for your business, it has already survived contact with ours. We know where it helps, where it does not, and what it costs to run, because we paid that cost first. Nothing reaches you as an experiment.
That is the whole method: find the leak on our own business, plug it, prove it works, then bring it to yours. If you want us to look for the same leaks in your business, we start every engagement with a free diagnosis. No theory, just what is open and what to fix first.