What Harrier jets taught me about Google Ads

The best training I had for paid search wasn’t a marketing course. It was engineering.

Before any of this I was in the Royal Navy, working on Harrier jets. Then offshore as a marine engineer. Years of treating machines as systems, where every part connects to another and nothing happens by accident.

That mindset never left me. It’s still exactly how I look at a Google Ads account.

A system is a system

An aircraft engine and an ad account have more in common than you’d think. Both take inputs and turn them into outputs. Put good inputs in and you get good results out. Put crap in and that’s what comes back, no matter how much you spend.

The other thing engineering drills into you is fault-finding. When something’s wrong, you don’t patch the symptom and walk away. You trace it back to the cause, because the symptom will only return, usually at a worse time.

Most underperforming accounts aren’t broken by one big mistake. It’s death by a thousand cuts. A bit of wasted spend here, a tracking gap there, a campaign type that doesn’t suit the business, all compounding until the whole thing leaks money and nobody can say exactly why.

Fixing that is engineering work. Find the faults, fix the causes in the right order, then build on solid ground.

Why I built the business this way

I spent the best part of a decade agency-side after moving into PPC in 2014, working up to Technology Director. A lot of that job was building the systems that let a small team manage hundreds of accounts without the quality falling apart.

I learned that consistency is a system problem, not an effort problem. Good people still produce uneven work if the process around them is weak. Get the process right and the floor comes up for everyone.

So when I started Run The Numbers in 2023, I built it around that idea. Tight systems doing the repetitive heavy lifting, senior people spending their time on the judgement calls that actually move the numbers. The technology isn’t the story. The speed, the coverage and the consistency it buys you is.

The fault I started the business to fix

There was one pattern I kept seeing that I wanted no part of. Agencies win the client with a senior pitch, then hand the account to whoever has capacity. Results swing wildly depending on who picks it up.

That’s a system failure, plain and simple. The inputs were never reliable, so the outputs couldn’t be either.

Run The Numbers is the opposite by design. No contracts, senior people on every account, and reporting that tells you the truth. Same principle I learned with a spanner in my hand twenty years ago. Get the inputs right and the results follow.