About
Nine years across paid media, analytics, technical SEO and web development — four of them in UK agencies, two in-house, and the last stretch doing the same work for Australian businesses. No team, no account managers, no senior person at the pitch meeting who then disappears.
Where the nine years went
Accounts managed at once
15+
Agency side, day-to-day
Three chapters, and each one taught me something the next one needed.
Senior Search and Analytics Specialist at Candour in the UK, then contract work as a PPC Analyst at Bambrick Media in Brisbane. Eight to fifteen accounts at a time, B2B and B2C, budgets from £1,500 to $30,000 a month, with account managers relaying client requests.
Accounts run simultaneously
15+
Whilst liaising with account managers
What agencies quietly deprioritise
previewDigital Operations Specialist at Ingenia Lifestyle, Marketing Effectiveness Manager at Awin Global, and Digital Optimisation Specialist at Auction House. Automation, migrations, reporting to people who ask hard questions about return on investment.
Pages migrated
2,000+
Redirects and DNS, no noticeable organic drop
What in-house actually looks like
Having sat on both sides, I know what an agency will and will not tell you, and I know exactly why the in-house team never gets round to fixing the tracking. It is rarely incompetence. It is that nobody owns it. So I take a small number of clients and own it.
What you get either way
previewPeople you will deal with
One
Same person start to finish
Every figure below is from work I did personally, in the seat, not a team result I was adjacent to.
6x
Consistent return on ad spend for an Australia-wide engineering e-commerce business on a $30,000 monthly budget, unbranded new-customer traffic only
£40k
Largest single monthly budget managed, for a UK clothing brand across Shopping and YouTube at a consistent 4x return
2,000+
Pages migrated including redirects and DNS, with no noticeable drop in organic traffic through the cutover
30+
Distinct user actions tracked through Google Tag Manager on a single site, feeding a full Power BI reporting stack
Client names withheld under agency and contract terms. Happy to talk specifics on a call.
Including the parts that are genuinely worse. You should know both before you call.
You always get the senior person
There is no pitch-and-switch, because there is nobody to switch to. The person who audits your account is the person who rebuilds it and the person who explains it to you afterwards.
Nothing is lost in a handover
Most agency mistakes happen at the seams — between the strategist and the executor, or the account manager and the client. With one person there are no seams to lose things in.
I am one person, which is a real constraint
I cannot scale up overnight, I take holidays, and if I am full I will say so rather than take your money and stretch. For some businesses that is a genuine reason to hire an agency instead.
No incentive to inflate the scope
Fixed price, never a percentage of ad spend. Nobody benefits from spending more of your budget or finding twelve months of work where there were three.
The honest list. If something is not on it, I will tell you and point you at someone better.
Nine years is long enough to have used most of the tools and short enough to still remember that the tool is almost never the problem.
I studied English Literature and Language before I studied any of this, which means I wrote for a living before I did marketing. It is the reason there is no jargon on this site. In a field where complexity is often used to justify the invoice, being able to explain a server-side container to a finance director in plain sentences turns out to be a competitive advantage.
Outside of work I run, seriously and consistently, and I am a UK Athletics qualified Coach in Running Fitness. I also run Honest Running Co., a coaching business for beginners built on exactly the same principle as this one: tell people the truth, even when the truth is boring.
Both businesses are a reaction to industries drowning in hype. In running it is supplements and shoes that promise to find you minutes. In marketing it is growth hacks, dashboards and case studies with the caveats removed. The honest version is less exciting and it works better.
Years running
9+
Three marathons, still slow uphill
I would rather establish this on a first call than three months into a retainer.
This is a good fit if
Call someone else if
Something not covered? Ask me directly — you will get a straight answer, not a proposal.
Yes. There is no team behind this page. When there is more work than I can do properly I say so, and if a project genuinely needs a designer, a copywriter or a video producer I will introduce you to people I trust rather than pretend I do it.
Brisbane, working with clients across Australia and a few remaining UK accounts. I am planning a move to Melbourne, which changes nothing practical — almost all of the work is remote either way, and I travel for on-site training and workshops.
Monday to Friday, 9am to 4pm AEST. I answer email inside a working day. I do not offer out-of-hours support, and if that is a requirement then an agency with a rota is a better fit than I am.
Because the work I am best at — diagnosing a problem end to end and then fixing it — gets split into pieces inside most organisations. The strategist does not implement, the implementer does not measure, and the thing falls between them. Working this way I get to own the whole thing.
Yes, both. I do white-label tracking and analytics work for agencies, and I bring in trusted specialists for design and creative when a project needs them. If you are an agency, I do not approach your clients and I will sign something confirming that.
My other business — running coaching for beginners, built on the same anti-hype principle as this one. It is entirely separate commercially. It is on this page because it explains where the tone comes from, and because I would rather you heard it from me than found it and wondered.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no proposal attached. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person, including when the answer is no.
Call 0404 927 312
Email lukeguy12@gmail.com
Based Brisbane, working Australia-wide
A scoping call is free and I will look at the account before I quote. If I think you are better off hiring management instead, I will say so.
Call 0404 027 312
Email luke@lgdigitalconsultancy.com
Based Brisbane, working Australia-wide