Samuel, co-founder of What Advertising, joins Sunny Ray to trace an unlikely path from Scotland to the US paid ads industry. Raised partly in Uzbekistan and Turkey while his parents did humanitarian work, Samuel later studied a joint engineering and computer systems degree at the University of Strathclyde before pivoting to entrepreneurship, starting with a medical practice website business called Three Before. Love brought him to America: he followed a woman he met through a mutual friend on Skype, funding his early days in Yakima, Washington by selling bottles of Scotch whisky from his suitcase, including one worth roughly 600 dollars. That leap led him into digital marketing and eventually Google Ads, which he now considers the gold standard for service based businesses. He and his wife built What Advertising in 2020, keeping their team deliberately small and high trust. Samuel discusses how AI tools like Performance Max and a custom Replit built client dashboard have transformed operations, while insisting coordinated people, not technology alone, remain the real differentiator. He closes on how meditation, yoga nidra, and mindful cooking shape his approach to business and life.
A Scot who sold whisky from his duffel bag to survive in America now runs a Google Ads agency built on trust and mindfulness.
What's your superpower and what do you do at What Advertising?
I run an advertising company with my wife, who I co-founded it with. We're both serial entrepreneurs and started What Advertising in 2020. We focus on high-quality advertising mostly for service based businesses, with a bit of e-commerce too, running Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Meta Ads. If a client is a good fit for advertising as a traffic source, we consistently get great quality leads that turn into real business and revenue.
You grew up in Scotland, correct?
To a degree. A lot of my childhood was actually spent in Central Asia, in Turkey for about a year and then Uzbekistan from ages 4 to 9, where my parents did humanitarian work. That upbringing left me obsessed with poverty alleviation. Around age 9 or 10 I moved back to Scotland and did high school and university there.
What did you study at Strathclyde and how did that experience shape you?
I've always been engineering minded, so I pursued a joint degree in electronic and electrical engineering plus computer information systems, which was incredibly tough. It gave me insight into everything from circuit board programming to high level software. Toward the end I realized full-time engineering and software development weren't for me, so I got into entrepreneurial circles and took a hard turn into business right after graduating.
What drew you to the world of entrepreneurship so early?
I always liked disconnecting income from time. At 15 I was fixing laptops at school and for a church, charging per computer while running several malware scans in parallel. I realized my effective rate was around 60 pounds an hour and that there were smarter ways to provide value while also extracting fair value for myself from the market. That idea really got under my skin.
You landed in America with a duffel bag full of whisky. Tell me that story and what made you leave Scotland.
Love, honestly. I met my wife through her brother on a Skype call and we hit it off. When I decided to visit the US I packed my bag with as many bottles of whisky as possible to sell, starting with a Dewar's 30 year blend that went for about 600 dollars. That money let me rent a room and stay with her while I found my footing, eventually leading me into digital marketing.
What was it specifically about Google Ads that clicked for you over other types of marketing?
Out of everything I was doing in digital marketing, Google Ads gave the most tangible, reliable results. It's still the gold standard for most businesses, especially service based ones, because nowhere else can someone say exactly what they need and get matched with relevant, highly rated options immediately. Google rewards relevancy in both organic and ad results, creating a real win-win between businesses and customers.
How is the space of Google Ads changing as a function of these LLMs?
It's like Formula 1: every top team has access to similar budgets and technology, but coordination and team strategy separate first place from fourth. We keep a small, high trust team so clients always talk to the same people. AI has let us manage far more accounts, like dozens of charter school clients, but I still believe people and coordination are the real differentiator, not the tools alone.
How does the spiritual side, mindset, yoga, and meditation, show up in how you run your business?
Meditation teaches observation of your thoughts and emotional states, and practices like yoga nidra put you in touch with your body's rest and restoration system. Cooking is another meditative practice for me, paying close attention to process the way a chef would. Those lessons about mindful attention carry directly into business, including how we integrate AI, often producing breakthroughs that don't look productive in the moment.
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