Jared Laidlaw

Most of my week is spent inside ad accounts for mortgage, insurance and KiwiSaver advisers across New Zealand and Australia. Google, Meta, Microsoft, plus the landing pages, CRM and follow-up behind them.

Over $3 million in ad spend so far. One advice firm we took from four-figure monthly spend to $225,000 a month, profitably.

It started in New York. We moved there in November 2015 and I sent out a hundred-odd job applications. Nobody wanted a Kiwi on a one year J1 visa. I eventually got a job running Google Ads with barely any experience and beat the contractor they already had. Manhattan teaches you fast how expensive it is to run campaigns badly. Every dollar had a zip code, a subway line and a day-part attached to it or it was gone before lunch.

We launched our first agency there in February 2017, then came home and built Orchard.

What I care about is advisers not paying for vanity numbers. A $24 lead that never answers the phone isn’t cheaper than a $55 lead that books a meeting. I’d rather tell someone the maths doesn’t work than take their money.

I write here about what campaigns actually cost in this market, what works, and what we’ve got wrong.

Outside work, basketball. And I still plan my week by hand.