Big brands don't beat local businesses on effort. They beat them on know-how.

The view most marketers never get

I spent 2.5 years working for Google Ads, as a contractor on their support team, helping local businesses and the marketers running their accounts across North America. That job gave me a view very few marketers ever get.

I could see inside real ad accounts all day: a local plumber's sitting right next to a national brand's, and I could compare them directly. What struck me was that the difference was almost never effort. The local businesses were working just as hard, and often spending real money. They were losing on the technical details, the ones that quietly decide who wins: how the account was structured, what was actually tracked, where the budget flowed, which searches were worth bidding on.

The big brands had people who knew those details cold. The local businesses usually did not, and nobody was showing them. I learned this trade the hard way, by watching thousands of accounts and the mistakes inside them. That is an education you cannot buy, and it is the one I bring to every business I work with now.

Why I work with local businesses, and only local businesses

I do not do fintech apps. I do not do content-farm websites. I do not chase whatever is trending. I work with local businesses, whether that is a chiropractor, a plumber, a psychologist or a roofer.

There are two honest reasons for that focus. The first is that local businesses are a pleasure to work with, because they judge me on the only thing that matters: actual numbers. Booked jobs and real enquiries, not promises and pretty dashboards. If the phone rings more, I have done my job. If it does not, no report will save me.

The second is that most local businesses need the same core set of skills. Every account I work on makes me sharper on the next one, so the expertise compounds instead of scattering. The moment I start dabbling in unrelated industries, that edge gets thin, which is the opposite of what a local business is paying me for. Specialising is not a limitation here. It is the whole value.

How I actually work

The way I run this is deliberately simple, because complexity is usually where local businesses get taken advantage of.

• You work with me, not an account manager. The person who audits your account is the person who runs it.
• Judged on real numbers. Calls, enquiries and booked work, tracked properly, not vanity metrics.
• No jargon. If I cannot explain what I am doing and why, I should not be doing it.
• No lock-in. Fixed pricing, a free audit up front, and you can leave whenever you want.

Talk is cheap in marketing, so here is the work

Every agency says the same things, so I would rather show you. These are real local businesses, real accounts and real numbers, including the ones that took a while to get right.

• A new HVAC business that went from 2 reviews to 13 in 45 days and ended up generating leads with the ads switched off.
• A plumbing account that only started working once we dropped the form and built it around phone calls.
• A bloated Google Ads account cut from 100+ keywords to 15, for a 20% lift in return.
• A cleaning business that turned cold outreach into six recurring partnerships.

The full set lives on the case studies page.

Off the clock

When I am not in an ad account, I am based in Joondalup, in Perth, Western Australia, and I make music. Being remote is a feature, not a bug: it keeps my overheads low, which keeps your pricing fair, and it lets me work with businesses across North America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.