How to Start a Google Ads Agency: We Did It by Running Campaigns That Were 90% Wrong

TL;DR: Peterson Rainey learned Google Ads while running his own lawn care company, running campaigns he later realized were about 90% wrong. It still worked well enough to sell that business and pivot into managing campaigns for other companies. Today Creekside manages $20M+ in ad spend. This is the origin story, including the failed businesses, the $3-an-hour early years, and the one step that actually matters.

How to Start a Google Ads Agency Without Agency Experience First

You run campaigns on something you own, fail expensively at most of it, and keep going because the 10% that works proves the idea. That is the actual path. Peterson learned Google Ads by running campaigns on his own lawn care business, not through a course or agency job, but by spending his own money on campaigns that were almost entirely wrong.

The fact that those campaigns worked at all is something he still finds surprising. If you look at how Creekside structures a new Google Ads account now, what Peterson was doing in those early lawn care campaigns would fail almost every audit check. No conversion history. Probably the wrong match types. Settings that any account review today would flag in the first five minutes. But there was enough right in the setup, around 10% by his estimate, that the leads came in. He scaled the business, eventually sold it, and that accidental hands-on education in paid search became the foundation for managing other businesses’ campaigns.

That is how you start a Google Ads agency without a media agency background. You run campaigns on yourself first.

This post is based on a video Peterson published on the Creekside Marketing YouTube channel: How To Start A Business.

The Real First Step: Work for Free to Learn Something Marketable

The most honest answer to “how do I make money without getting a job” is this: find a valuable skill and learn it by doing it, even without pay, even badly. Most people skip this because it feels inefficient. It is not. You are building the version of yourself that shows up in year three, which is the only version that gets paid well.

Peterson frames it as the natural progression through early business ownership: you build one thing, it teaches you something, that something makes the next thing work better.

His specific story: he was running Creek Boys, a lawn care company, and wanted to scale it. He did not hire a marketing agency. He learned Google Ads himself and ran campaigns to bring in more customers. The result was campaigns that were, by current standards, a mess. But they generated leads. He kept going.

“I don’t know why it worked,” he says. “It should not have worked knowing all that I know about Google Ads now. The fact that it worked for me when I was doing it and spending my own money is actually insane because I was doing probably about 90% of it wrong.”

That gap between “it should not have worked” and “it worked” is exactly where the real learning happened. Running your own money through a system creates attention that tutorial videos never produce. Every bad click is your bad click. Every wasted dollar teaches you something a free course could not.

Look, if you want to learn Google Ads, run a campaign. Even a small one. Even on something you barely need to advertise. The mistakes are the curriculum. Just make sure you are paying for them before you are charging someone else to run theirs.

The Businesses Before the Business

Before Creekside, there were businesses that did not work. This is not unusual. It is almost the requirement. The people who build something durable usually ran something that failed first, or several things. The skill you develop in a failing business becomes the foundation for the next one. Skip that phase and you are skipping the education that makes anything stick.

Peterson tried to start a company called Sweet Hands in fifth grade. The concept: 3D printed cookie cutters shaped like children’s handprints. He saved up all summer to buy a 3D printer when 3D printers had just come out. The product was, his words, “atrocious.” He made a Shark Tank-style pitch to his parents to get seed funding. They invested. The business went nowhere. Looking back, he thinks the early buyers were being kind.

Then came Creek Boys. Lawn care, started at age 13 out of his mom’s minivan with a few friends. Four kids splitting two lawns, making maybe $3 an hour. At 14, $10 was enough for a milkshake and some chips. That is not a breakout success story. It is the beginning of understanding that making money for yourself feels different than clocking hours for someone else.

His co-founder ran a parallel track. In college, he and a roommate bought bins of Legos at thrift stores for $10, sorted through them, and resold valuable minifigures online. A good minifigure went for $80. They ran the whole operation from a dorm room while playing college sports. That year, they made $2,500 in profit. Not life-changing money.

Here is the detail that stuck: presentation mattered more than product. The same minifigure, photographed on granite with a clean white backdrop and a Star Wars print in the background, sold for more than the same figure shot in bad lighting. “The pictures mattered more than anything else,” he says. You could charge more than everyone else listing the same figure if the photo looked better.

That lesson shows up everywhere in paid advertising. It shows up in ad creative. It shows up in landing page layout. The packaging of an offer changes its perceived value. That is not a marketing strategy, it is just how people make purchase decisions.

The $3-an-Hour Years Are Not Optional

The early low-earning years are not a sign that something is wrong. They are the process. Peterson and his co-founder spent two to three years working at roughly $10 an hour before Creekside became profitable at any reasonable rate. The co-founder started at around $100 a month and now makes six figures on the same team.

That progression is not unusual. It is what happens when you are building infrastructure and skills simultaneously without outside capital. The 90-day ramp we use on new Google Ads accounts follows the same logic: the first phase is data collection, not performance. You cannot skip the collection phase to get to the performance phase. You can only try, fail, and waste money doing it.

The YouTube channel follows the same pattern. Peterson ran it for a long time before any traction appeared. It took 460 videos before the channel hit monetization. It took 80 short-form videos before one cleared 1,000 views. Count each video as a success or failure event and the failure rate in the early period is high. The 460th video is what changes the math. Not the 50th.

For anyone thinking about how to start a Google Ads agency, this is the honest timeline. The first year is probably not profitable by any reasonable accounting of your own time. The second year might break even. Year three is where the compound learning starts to show up in results and, eventually, in what you can charge.

Patience in the early phase is not a weakness. It is the only thing that makes the math eventually work.

The 9-to-5 vs. Starting a Business Question

Both paths carry real risk. The 9-to-5 feels safe because the risk is less visible day to day, but that does not make it lower. Government workers went months without paychecks during a shutdown. People with 20-year tenures at large companies found themselves laid off for efficiency reasons. The security was real until it was not, and it disappeared without warning.

Starting a business has different risk characteristics. The income varies. You think about it at 10pm on a Saturday. There is no one else responsible for making the operation work. When Peterson made the transition from his full-time engineering job to running Creekside exclusively, he worked 80 to 100 hours during the one-month overlap period. That is what it cost to make the numbers work well enough to justify leaving.

Most people do not have 80-hour months available. That is a real constraint, not a personal failing.

But the bigger point: if you believe the 9-to-5 is the safe choice because the risk is less visible, you are comparing against a benchmark that is not what you think it is. The actual comparison is variable income and high ownership versus income that feels stable until external forces decide otherwise.

Peterson’s framework for who should go the entrepreneurship route: can you tolerate the variability? Can you wake up every day and decide what to work on without needing someone else to set the agenda? Are you fine thinking about work at midnight because something needs solving? If those things genuinely do not bother you, the entrepreneurship path probably fits.

If you need structure, clear direction, and the ability to fully disconnect after hours, that is not a character flaw. Society needs both types. The mistake is choosing a 9-to-5 only because you think it is safer when the data on what counts as “safe” is much thinner than most people assume.

Once you are actually running client accounts, the weekly management system we use removes most of the operational chaos that makes the early years so draining. The structure does not eliminate uncertainty, but it reduces the time spent figuring out what to do next.

The One Move That Actually Applies to Everyone

Take the first step before the timing feels right, because the timing will never feel right. Not for starting a business, not for running your first Google Ads campaign, not for anything else worth doing. The people who waited for ideal conditions mostly kept waiting. The ones who built things started before the conditions were right.

Peterson’s co-founder, when asked to join what became Creekside, had a simpler, faster path to income available at the time. He chose the slower, harder path because of where the trajectory seemed to lead, not where it was in month three. His dad did not understand the bet. Then Peterson went full-time on the agency. His dad’s response: “You were right.”

Do not wait until the microphone is better, the savings buffer is larger, or the free time is more predictable. The step matters. Its size matters much less than most people assume.

Here’s the thing: the version of you that waits for the right moment and the version of you that starts badly and figures it out on the way are not equally likely to get somewhere interesting. One of them has 460 videos. The other one is still waiting.

About the author: Peterson Rainey is the co-founder of Creekside Marketing, a paid advertising agency that manages $20M+ in Google Ads and Meta Ads spend. He started his career running Google Ads on his own lawn care company, got most of it wrong, and has spent the past several years helping business owners in dental, home services, legal, med spa, and e-commerce scale profitably through paid advertising.

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