Our self-taught journey from one local website client to a full-time agency and a growing team

We did not begin with a business plan, investors, or a clear roadmap. We began with a hobby, an unexpected opportunity, and a willingness to learn whatever came next.

We Never Planned to Build an Agency

If someone had told us years ago that we would eventually build a digital marketing company serving more than 100 businesses, manage millions of dollars in advertising, and grow from two people working from home into a four-person team, we probably would not have believed them.

Not because we lacked ambition. It simply was not the plan.

Like many side hustles, ours began almost by accident. There was never a master plan to build a business at all. Dana was simply looking for a way to earn a little extra money from home doing something she enjoyed. Looking back, it’s funny how often the biggest journeys begin with the smallest goals.

Today, McElligott Digital Marketing supports our family, provides careers for four people, and serves more than 100 businesses. We have been doing this full time for about five years and building it for roughly eight to nine years. But before the clients, employees, systems, and recurring revenue, it began with a family conversation and a small amount of website experience.

It Started With a Family Conversation

A family friend was talking with Dana’s father about a side business he operated building websites for local companies, primarily garage door businesses. During that conversation, her father mentioned that Dana had built websites before and knew her way around computers.

That simple introduction created the first real opening.

Dana started helping the family friend build websites for his local clients. At the time, it was not the launch of a grand entrepreneurial plan. It was interesting work that fit naturally with the skills she had developed over the years. She had studied computer science in school, had been building websites as a hobby for a long time, and enjoyed the creative and technical process of turning a blank screen into something useful for a real business.

For a while, that was the work: local websites, practical improvements, and learning through each new project.

Then one of the garage door clients asked a question that changed the direction of everything.

“Do you also manage Google Ads?”

At that point, the honest answer was no. We had not managed Google Ads before, and neither of us could pretend otherwise.

Instead of ending the conversation there, we offered a different answer: we could learn if the client was willing to be our guinea pig.

Thankfully, he was.

Learning Google Ads From the Ground Up

To get started, we enrolled in a Google Ads course on Udemy taught by Isaac Rudansky. As complete beginners, the course gave us a practical foundation for understanding campaign structure, keywords, bidding, ad copy, conversion tracking, and the analytical side of paid search.

The timing was ideal because we were not learning in a vacuum. We could take a lesson from the course and immediately apply it to a real client account. That made every concept more concrete, and it also meant every mistake had to be understood and corrected rather than ignored.

There was no ChatGPT to walk us through a broken tracking setup or summarize a confusing account issue. We relied on the course, Google’s own documentation, YouTube videos, forums, articles, and a great deal of trial and error.

We made mistakes. We tested ideas that did not work. We broke things, fixed them, and slowly became more capable.

As the work expanded, our individual strengths became clearer. Dana remained more interested in websites and the creative side of building an online presence. David became absorbed in the numbers, patterns, and analytical questions inside Google Ads. Why did one keyword convert while another wasted money? Why did one campaign perform well in one market but struggle in another? What could the data tell us that assumptions could not?

That natural division of interests became the foundation of how we worked together. One of us leaned more toward building and content, while the other leaned more toward advertising and analysis. 

That experience also shaped another philosophy we’ve carried with us ever since: we never wanted to sell a service we didn’t understand ourselves.

If we were going to put our name behind something, we believed we should be able to do it ourselves first. That mindset has influenced every new service we’ve added over the years and has helped us maintain the level of quality our clients expect.

The First Few Years Were Slow

We continued working with the family friend for another two or three years. The experience was valuable, but the client base grew slowly. Some years brought only one new client.

Eventually, David asked whether it would be all right to pursue Google Ads work independently outside of the clients already being served together. With his approval, we began trying to create a client base of our own.

That was the point when a useful skill began turning into an actual side hustle.

Building a Reputation One Small Job at a Time

David created profiles on Upwork and Fiverr and started applying for freelance work. The early jobs were not large account-management contracts. Most were smaller technical projects that established trust without requiring a business owner to hand over an entire advertising account to someone with a limited platform history.

Those projects included setting up conversion tracking, troubleshooting account problems, reviewing campaign settings, helping with analytics, and completing other focused tasks.

They were not glamorous, and they did not always pay much. They were still essential.

Every completed project earned another review. Every positive review strengthened the profile rating. Every successful task made it easier for a future client to believe that we could handle something larger.

Over time, the smaller assignments led to more substantial work. A client who initially needed help fixing one tracking issue might later ask for an account review or ongoing management. The platforms gave us access to businesses outside our local area, and each project added practical experience that no course could fully provide.

There is a common temptation when starting a side hustle to wait for the ideal client, the ideal project, or the ideal pay rate. Our experience was different. The small jobs built the proof that eventually helped us win the larger ones.

Working Before Work, After Work, and Everywhere Between

Throughout this period, David was still working a regular full-time job. Calling it a traditional nine-to-five would not be quite accurate. His schedule usually ran from around 4:00 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon.

That meant the side hustle had to fit into the rest of the day.

Client messages were answered during breaks and lunch. Account work happened after the regular workday ended. Weekends became time for campaign optimizations, website projects, proposals, invoicing, and learning whatever the next client needed us to understand.

Dana was also helping where she could, while balancing family responsibilities and eventually caring for our newborn son.

For years, there was no clear boundary between the job, the side hustle, and home life. One provided the stable paycheck. The other represented the possibility of building something that belonged to us.

The business grew, but it grew in stolen pieces of time.

Then 2020 Nearly Reset Everything

By the beginning of 2020, we believe we had roughly 15 to 25 recurring Google Ads management clients. After years of slow growth, the business finally had real momentum.

Then, around March 2020, much of the country shut down.

Businesses did not know how long closures would last, whether customers would continue spending, or how much cash they might need to conserve. Advertising was one of the first expenses many companies paused because no one knew what the next few weeks or months would look like.

Within a short period, we lost nearly the entire recurring client base we had built. Only two or three of the original garage door clients remained.

It was discouraging, but it was also understandable. Those clients were facing an unknown situation and making the decisions they believed would give their businesses the best chance to survive.

In practical terms, we had to start again.

We had built the business once. The shutdown forced us to prove we could build it again.

The Second Build Happened Faster

As restrictions eased and businesses began trying to reach customers again, demand for digital advertising returned quickly. Many companies were eager to get in front of people, rebuild their pipelines, and adapt to customers who were spending more time online.

The experience we had gained during the first few years made the rebuild faster. We already knew how to find work, how to evaluate accounts, how to communicate with clients, and how to produce results without pretending every campaign would be easy.

From the period following the shutdown through roughly September 2021, we rebuilt the business to a healthy base of around 35 recurring clients.

At that point, the income from the side hustle could replace the main-job income for both of us. The business also had very little overhead. We worked from home, did not have expensive office space, and had not yet built the larger collection of software, staff, and operational expenses that would come later.

For the first time, leaving traditional employment no longer felt like an abstract dream. It had become a realistic decision.

The Opportunity We Could Not Accept Yet

Around the same period, a larger agency became interested in having us take over the management of some of its advertising accounts.

It was exactly the kind of opportunity we had hoped the side hustle might eventually create. It also exposed the biggest limitation in the way we were operating.

David was still working full time. Dana was stretched thin helping with the business while caring for our new baby. We had no employees and limited capacity. Accepting a large group of new accounts while continuing exactly as we were would have risked the quality of our work, our health, or both.

The full-time job that had once provided security was now preventing us from accepting the opportunity in front of us.

Betting on Ourselves

By then, the side hustle was earning roughly twice what David’s regular job paid, even though it was still being operated around a full-time work schedule.

Our son was about one year old, and being home more during those early years mattered. The possibility of building a flexible family business was no longer only about money. It was also about time and the kind of life we wanted to create.

The regular job had provided stability, but after five years it had also become exhausting. David had started there as a temporary employee before being hired full time, repairing handheld scanners used by Walmart and other major retailers. Overtime was all too common, the commute was about 30 minutes each way, and annual raises were generally only a few percent.

No matter how hard he worked, there was a limit to how much the job could change our financial future.

The business was different. Every new client, referral, and skill created more opportunity. Instead of hoping for a small annual raise, we could realistically double our income in a year if we continued producing results and growing the client base.

For the first time, effort and income felt directly connected.

Leaving was still frightening. We had recently seen how quickly recurring clients could disappear, but we had also rebuilt the business to around 35 clients, kept expenses low, and reached a point where the risk was supported by real numbers.

The agency opportunity was already in front of us, but we could not fully step into it while David was still working full time. Delaying his departure by another two weeks risked losing the momentum and capacity the opportunity required.

So David quit his job on the spot.

There was no two-week transition and no carefully preserved path back if the business failed. After five years with the company, leaving that way meant the old job would not be available as a fallback.

It truly was a bet on the business, our abilities, and ourselves.

The job had given us security while we built. The business offered something different: flexibility, ownership, and room to grow beyond a ceiling someone else controlled.

For the first time, the work was no longer squeezed into breaks, evenings, and weekends. It became the main focus.

Turning a Side Hustle Into a Real Company

Going full time did not instantly remove every challenge, but it changed what was possible. We could accept more work, respond faster, improve our systems, and spend our best hours on the business instead of giving it whatever energy remained at the end of the day.

One client became ten. Ten became thirty-five. Thirty-five eventually became more than one hundred businesses receiving some combination of Google Ads management, SEO, website services, hosting, reporting, or related support.

The service list expanded because clients kept presenting new problems. We learned search engine optimization, local marketing, website hosting, analytics, reporting, automation, and custom solutions as the need arose. Just as Google Ads had begun with one client asking whether we could learn, many later services began with the same basic willingness to figure something out.

The company remained a two-person operation for years before we began hiring. Today, the team has grown to four people, allowing us to serve more clients while dividing responsibilities based on each person’s strengths.

The business now generates revenue in the mid six-figure annual range, but that number does not tell the whole story. The more meaningful milestones are that it supports our family, employs other people, gives us control over our time, and allows us to build long-term relationships with businesses across the country.

Helping Clients Came Before Maximizing Revenue

One thing we realized early on was that we genuinely enjoyed helping small business owners.

Most of our clients weren’t giant corporations with unlimited budgets. They were family businesses trying to make payroll, grow their reputation, and provide for their own families.

If someone needed a phone number updated on their website, a landing page adjusted, conversion tracking fixed, or a quick question answered, we rarely looked at it as another invoice.

If it took five minutes and genuinely helped their business, we simply did it.

Could we have charged for every small request?

Probably.

Would we have made more money in the short term?

Maybe.

But we believed long-term relationships were worth more than squeezing every possible dollar out of our clients.

That philosophy earned something far more valuable than another invoice.

It earned trust.

Many of our clients stayed with us for years, referred friends, and became some of our biggest advocates.

Looking back, I honestly believe that mindset grew our business more than any advertising strategy ever did.

What Being Self-Taught Really Means

Calling ourselves self-taught does not mean we learned everything alone. Neither of us had degrees in marketing, advertising, or business.

Dana had taken a few computer science classes in high school and, over the years, had built a handful of simple websites using Adobe Dreamweaver and HTML. I had started college for electronics, but never finished my degree.

That’s the extent of our formal education related to what we do today..

We learned from Isaac Rudansky’s course, Google’s documentation, videos, forums, articles, clients, mistakes, data, changing algorithms, and one another. We also learned from every difficult account and every uncomfortable conversation.

Education gave us a starting point. Experience gave us judgment.

The digital marketing industry changes too quickly for anyone to declare that they are finished learning. Platforms change their rules. Search behavior changes. Tracking becomes more complicated. Artificial intelligence creates new tools and new expectations. What worked three years ago may need to be reconsidered today.

The willingness to continue learning is not a detail of our story. It is one of the main reasons the business still exists.

Our Journey at a Glance

Period	Milestone
Early 2000s	Dana built websites as a hobby and developed an early interest in web design and computer science.
Around 2016	A family friend invited Dana to help build websites for local garage door companies.
2017	A client asked whether we could manage Google Ads. We agreed to learn and began with a Udemy course taught by Isaac Rudansky.
2018	David began pursuing independent work through Upwork and Fiverr, starting with tracking setup, troubleshooting, account reviews, and other smaller projects.
2018 onward	Small freelance jobs produced reviews and ratings that gradually led to larger, recurring Google Ads management accounts.
2018 to early 2020	The business grew during breaks, evenings, and weekends while David continued working an early-morning full-time job.
Early 2020	The client base reached approximately 15 to 25 recurring ad-management clients.
Spring 2020	The shutdown reduced the client base to only two or three original garage door clients.
2020 to September 2021	We rebuilt to roughly 35 recurring clients as businesses renewed their focus on digital advertising.
2021	A larger agency offered additional account work, making it clear that the full-time job had become a constraint on growth.
2021	David left traditional employment and committed to the business full time, partly to create more time at home with our young son.
Today	McElligott Digital Marketing is a four-person team serving more than 100 businesses and generating mid six-figure annual revenue.

The Lessons We Would Pass On

• You do not need to know everything before you begin. Our entire Google Ads career began because we were willing to say, honestly, that we did not know yet but were willing to learn.

• Small jobs can build a large reputation. The early tracking and troubleshooting projects on Upwork and Fiverr were not distractions. They created the reviews, confidence, and proof needed to win bigger work.

• Growth is rarely a straight line. We reached a meaningful recurring client base and then lost almost all of it in 2020. The setback did not erase what we had learned, and that knowledge made the second build faster.

• A side hustle should prove itself before it replaces security. We did not leave a full-time job after one good month. We waited until the recurring income, low expenses, and available opportunities made the risk reasonable.

• Capacity matters as much as demand. A major opportunity can still be the wrong opportunity if accepting it would harm your clients, your family, or the quality of your work.

• Consistency is more important than a dramatic launch. Our business was built through years of lunch breaks, evenings, weekends, small projects, and repeated improvements.

• Learning never stops. The platforms, tools, and rules continue to change. Staying useful requires humility, curiosity, and a willingness to adapt.

Why We Are Sharing This Story

We are not sharing this because our path is the only way to build a side hustle or because every person who takes a course and opens an Upwork profile will create a six-figure business.

We are sharing it because success stories are often reduced to the most impressive ending. The years of uncertainty, small jobs, lost clients, long workdays, and difficult decisions disappear from the summary.

Our story was not an overnight success. It was a hobby that became an opportunity, an opportunity that became a side hustle, and a side hustle that survived long enough to become a company.

That is also why we helped create the Side Hustle Crew. We remember what it feels like to stand at the beginning without a perfect plan. We know the difference between advice that sounds good online and the practical realities of building something while working another job, raising a family, and learning as you go.

We cannot promise that every side hustle will become a full-time business. We can promise that you do not have to see the entire path before taking the first useful step.

Sometimes the turning point is not knowing the answer. It is being willing to learn it.

For us, that moment came when one local business owner asked whether we managed Google Ads.

We did not.

But we said we could learn.

Everything that came after began there.

David McElligott is a co-founder of Side Hustle Crew and co-owner of McElligott Digital Marketing, a digital marketing agency he built alongside his wife, Dana.