Hi, Pete Bowen here

I've been a soldier, a Mormon missionary, and an engineer. I've owned a sound hire service, a plant nursery, and student housing.

But since 2007, I've focused on Google Ads.

I stumbled into Google Ads by accident. My (ex)wife and I moved with our four young kids from South Africa to the UK for a job as a structural engineer. Then the global economic collapse hit. Construction projects dried up within months of our arrival, making that job a lot less secure.

My family didn’t starve because Peter Carruthers invited me to team up. We taught small business owners to advertise on the internet.

I took the techniques we taught and programmed them into a tool to make it easy to build campaigns and landing pages. It worked like magic - even though our clients had never used Google Ads before.

We started receiving emails like:

• Just got my first lead and the student is coming on Monday for an introduction meeting!
• I put site up yesterday and in minutes had an enquiry, to date had 18 clicks and 4 leads!
• I have gone from zero enquiries and zero income to 20-30 enquiries and +20k income.

One day, one of our clients asked if I'd manage the ads for him because he was too busy to learn how. That request sparked the idea of using the tool to manage ads for other people.

I’ll never forget the excitement of hitting our first 1,000 leads. Later, we celebrated our first 1,000-lead month. Today, that tool has generated over 2,000,000 leads.

I plan to continue doing some version of this work for as long as I can add value to my clients.

I am concerned about the long-term viability of Google Ads, especially for smaller businesses.

Google seems determined to capture as much of the profit from their ads as possible. Somewhere at Google HQ, an MBA has figured out that advertisers only need to make just enough money to stay. This means the cost of generating leads from Google Ads will keep rising.

But, I'm also excited and optimistic because businesses will always need clients. I believe that businesses which blend human warmth and authenticity with technological opportunities will thrive.

I currently live in paradise (aka Gran Canaria) and try to start as many days as possible by surfing the dawn patrol.