From Bin Man to 7-Figure Agency

The £400 Google Ad That Changed Everything

When Ashley was looking to break into the industry, he was based in Hull – not exactly the digital marketing capital of the UK, as he freely admits. He knew he needed to stand out, and so he did. Ashley looked at what would get the attention of the people he most wanted to work for.

His solution:

Build a landing page with his CV and a booking link, then bid on the names of Carrie Rose, Stephen Kenwright, and Rise at Seven as Google Ads search terms. For around £400 in free ad credit, his ad appeared above Rise at Seven in search results, with copy that simply asked: can I have a job?

It worked. Carrie Rose and James Hayward Brown reached out. Ashley got his interviews, and joined the SEO team and spent the next phase of his career building the knowledge and hunger that would eventually lead to Deviation.

It is a story worth telling not for its novelty, but for what it reveals about how great leaders think. They do not wait for opportunity to arrive.

They engineer it.

These were the skills and leadership qualities that helped take Ashley from collecting refuse, to founding a seven-figure agency in a matter of years.

The Trademark That Cost Him His Job (and Built His Agency)

After Rise at Seven, Ashley joined IPG Media Brands, hired specifically to build out a proposition he had been developing publicly for some time: Search Everywhere. The idea, that search is becoming a multi-platform, social-first, intent-led discipline rather than a keyword optimisation exercise, had been taking shape across his LinkedIn content, blog posts, and speaking work long before he arrived.

Then came the fork in the road.

Recognising the commercial value of what he had built, Ashley trademarked Search Everywhere overnight to protect it. The next morning, he was called into an HR meeting and given an ultimatum: hand over the trademark or face termination.

He kept the trademark.

There was no gardening leave clause. His employer paid him out and let him go. And so on the same day his employment ended, Ashley and Sam started building Deviation, funded, in part, by the termination package from the company that had just fired him.

The lesson here is not simply about intellectual property, though the IP piece matters enormously and Ashley’s advice on protecting your ideas is worth the episode alone. The deeper lesson is about the compounding value of building a point of view in public before you need it.

Ashley had been writing, speaking, and developing Search Everywhere for years before anyone tried to claim it. The receipts existed. The thought leadership existed. When the moment came, he was protected not just legally but intellectually, because the idea had always, demonstrably, been his.

For any founder or senior professional reading this: your ideas are an asset. Document them. Date them. Share them. The market rewards those who build a perspective, not just a portfolio.

How Deviation Grew to Seven Figures Without Cold Outreach

When Josh asked Ashley how Deviation grew so quickly, the answer was deliberately unglamorous.

They got lucky with their first three clients, luck, in this case, meaning they were ready when the opportunity arrived. Matty Martin from Represent reached out having seen Ashley’s Search Everywhere content on LinkedIn. Pure Gym followed. A ‘large gym brand in Birmingham’ (Ashley’s words) followed that.

Two of those three early projects were free.

There is a lesson in that which most agencies resist learning. The case study is worth more than the invoice at the beginning. If you can get your work in front of a brand that your next prospect will recognise and respect, the cost of doing it for free, or nearly free, is dwarfed by what it unlocks.

Ashley and Sam were systematic about this.

They identified the proof points they needed, found the brands that could provide them, and invested early at the expense of short-term revenue.

From there, the growth engine was thought leadership and events. No cold outreach. No spray-and-pray email sequences. Just consistent, specific, credible content about a concept they owned, backed by speaking at Brighton SEO, writing for Search Engine Land and SEMrush, and running their own events.

The result: inbound leads from brands that already trusted the Search Everywhere framework before they had ever spoken to Ashley or Sam. That is what category ownership looks like in practice.

On Hiring: The Mistake Most Agencies Make Too Late

Ashley is candid about Deviation’s hiring journey. They made errors, not of character but of timing and tier. Hiring an exec when they needed a strategist. Hiring a strategist when they needed an exec. These are recoverable mistakes when growth is strong enough to absorb them, and Ashley acknowledges they were fortunate on that front.

The more significant mistake, by his own admission, was waiting too long to hire an account manager. When Deviation went from four to eight people in a short period, the operational load, all of which sat with Sam, became unsustainable. A hire that should have happened two months earlier was finally made the day of the Agency Growth Club recording.

This is one of the most common patterns we see in scaling agencies.

The people who are good at winning and delivering the work are rarely the same people who are good at managing its flow. As headcount grows, the gap between those two functions widens, and if no one is hired to bridge it, the founders end up paying the price in capacity, quality, and eventually, retention.

The agencies that get this right hire into the operational layer before they feel the pain, not after.

What This Means for the People You Hire

Ashley’s story is, among other things, a story about what raw potential looks like when it is not filtered through conventional credentials.

He did not have the background. He did not have the network. He had curiosity, hunger, and an instinct for creating his own opportunity. Those qualities are not listed on a CV. They are not surfaced by a standard interview process.

They require the kind of assessment that goes beyond what someone has done to how they think, what they do when no one is watching, and whether their trajectory suggests they are accelerating or plateauing.

For the full episode with Ashley and Josh, find the link below: