About me

Luke Iles is a digital marketing expert who’s building his agency from scratch and showing the process exactly as it happens.

Unpolished, unfiltered and unapologetically real.

He shares every win, loss and lesson in real time to give young people a no-BS blueprint for breaking out of the 9 to 5 and building real freedom.

TIMELINE

Education (If You Can Call It That…)

I told you this would be unfiltered. So here’s a photo of me at age 3 – peak cuteness. It’s all downhill from there.

I went to a local primary school in Bristol, followed by one of the most underfunded secondary schools in the UK (they literally made a TV show about us). After that, local college. No uni. No debt. No regrets.

Grades? Not bad, actually. Above average in school – except for French, which I heroically failed with a U. In college, I got lucky. Covid hit in my second year, so no formal exams. Thanks to teacher-assessed grades, I somehow walked away with Bs in History, English Language, and Law.

Yep, I once thought I’d be a lawyer. Imagine that, me in a suit arguing about parking fines acting like Saul Goodman!
But while school ticked along, I was more focused on making money. I’ve always had that entrepreneurial itch.
In Year 7, I started a car wash “business” with a few mates. We managed to soak my dad’s mate’s garage and gave up instantly. Complete shambles.
Year 8 was different. I started selling sweets and drinks at school. My top investment? 3 Kinder Buenos for £1 at Poundland, flipping them for a 50p profit. Until Poundland betrayed me and raised the prices.

TIMELINE

Education (If You Can Call It That…)

I told you this would be unfiltered. So here’s a photo of me at age 3 – peak cuteness. It’s all downhill from there.

I went to a local primary school in Bristol, followed by one of the most underfunded secondary schools in the UK (they literally made a TV show about us). After that, local college. No uni. No debt. No regrets.

Grades? Not bad, actually. Above average in school – except for French, which I heroically failed with a U. In college, I got lucky. Covid hit in my second year, so no formal exams. Thanks to teacher-assessed grades, I somehow walked away with Bs in History, English Language, and Law.

Yep, I once thought I’d be a lawyer. Imagine that, me in a suit arguing about parking fines acting like Saul Goodman!
But while school ticked along, I was more focused on making money. I’ve always had that entrepreneurial itch.
In Year 7, I started a car wash “business” with a few mates. We managed to soak my dad’s mate’s garage and gave up instantly. Complete shambles.
Year 8 was different. I started selling sweets and drinks at school. My top investment? 3 Kinder Buenos for £1 at Poundland, flipping them for a 50p profit. Until Poundland betrayed me and raised the prices.

Social Media Success

(The Real Start?)

While most kids were messing around on Instagram, me and two mates were busy figuring out how to exploit it. We started football meme pages, multiple accounts, testing what got clicks, what grew fastest and what kept people hooked.

We were 12. Our tactics? Shaky at best. Shoutout for shoutout, follow-for-follow, clickbait galore. Whack the account on private and boom—followers flew in. It was pure chaos… but it worked. Something you could only get away with in the early days of Instagram.

Over the next few years, we turned our love for football into something way bigger. I built my biggest account to 150,000 followers, all while still in school.
And then came the money. The days of flipping sweets were over. Brands started paying us to post ads and we were making hundreds a week, which, for a kid still in school, felt like hitting the jackpot. A fiver used to cover McDonald’s and a bus ride into town. Now we were stacking it just by posting memes.
That’s when I realised there were real opportunities online. So I did what every young hustler does when they start making money…
I launched a clothing brand.

(Spoiler alert: it didn’t go well.)

Social Media Success

(The Real Start?)

While most kids were messing around on Instagram, me and two mates were busy figuring out how to exploit it. We started football meme pages, multiple accounts, testing what got clicks, what grew fastest and what kept people hooked.

We were 12. Our tactics? Shaky at best. Shoutout for shoutout, follow-for-follow, clickbait galore. Whack the account on private and boom—followers flew in. It was pure chaos… but it worked. Something you could only get away with in the early days of Instagram.

Over the next few years, we turned our love for football into something way bigger. I built my biggest account to 150,000 followers, all while still in school.
And then came the money. The days of flipping sweets were over. Brands started paying us to post ads and we were making hundreds a week, which, for a kid still in school, felt like hitting the jackpot. A fiver used to cover McDonald’s and a bus ride into town. Now we were stacking it just by posting memes.
That’s when I realised there were real opportunities online. So I did what every young hustler does when they start making money…
I launched a clothing brand.

(Spoiler alert: it didn’t go well.)

A Failed Clothing Brand

(Told You This Would Be Unfiltered)

Fresh out of school, I was in college when Covid hit. For the first month of lockdown, I lived the unemployed dream, waking up at 11am, lifting some dusty dumbbells, then straight onto the PS4 until 3am with the lads. Repeat. No thoughts, just Pro Clubs.

But after a month, the boredom crept in.
I was still making some money from Instagram (ads were drying up as more people saw the value in Meta ads instead), we even ran a Pro Clubs tournament and raised over £230 for the NHS (shoutout to the winning team who took the rest of the prize pot). But my other side hustle, refereeing football matches, was shut down. I needed cash.
So what does a broke 17-year-old do in lockdown? Gets a job at Home Bargains.
And let me tell you, it was brutal. Easily the worst job I’ve ever had. And I use to referee football games where I had 22 blokes screaming abuse at me every weekend. That’s how bad it was, working in Home Bargains was worse than that!
Endless shifts under flickering lights in lockdown made one thing crystal clear: There’s no way I’m doing the 9 to 5 forever and even worse I hadn’t even started it yet!
So I took my Instagram money and savings from reffing and decided to build a clothing brand. I thought that way, when I finish college in a years time, maybe just maybe I would not have to get a 9 to 5 job!
I hired a top-tier designer, grabbed a Fiverr logo, slapped together a Wix site and started working with manufacturers in China to create football-inspired designer tees I could sell to my 150k football followers.
Fast-forward almost five years to today and I still have 90 out of 100 t-shirts in a box under my bed.
I did sell one to someone in the Netherlands though. So yeah… we were technically global.
As the clothing brand tanked and Instagram started killing off the black-hat tactics we’d been using, the writing was on the wall. I needed a new plan and fast.
The last thing I wanted was to get stuck in a 9 to 5 after I finished college in a years time… so I doubled down on the one thing that was still in my control:

Refereeing.

Something I’d started at 14 and began taking seriously at 16 when I saw it could actually become a career.

Refereeing. Something I’d started at 14 and began taking seriously at 16 when I saw it could actually become a career.

Refereeing Football Matches

(Where I Learned the Hard Way)

What started as a way to make some cash on weekends at 14 turned into what I thought could be a serious career path by the time I was 16. I started climbing the ranks, from grassroots men’s football at Level 7, aiming one day for Level 1 and the Premier League.

Between 16 and 21, I worked my way up to Level 4, reffing semi-pro matches in front of crowds of up to 500 people. I travelled all over the South West, managing games that actually had money riding on them. Proper pressure.
Refereeing taught me more than school ever did.
It drilled in resilience, discipline and real leadership.
You have got to make split-second decisions, back yourself no matter what and hold your ground while 22 players and a few hundred angry supporters question your existence. It pushed me mentally and physically every single week.
I learned how to communicate with confidence, not just with words, but through presence, body language and tone. Respect on the pitch isn’t given, it’s earned. I had to manage teams, calm down managers, direct my assistant refs and keep the game flowing; while being watched, judged and challenged from the first whistle.
It also gave me an early crash course in team management and operations. I’d coordinate with match secretaries, plan travel, brief assistant refs and manage logistics to make sure everyone was on the same page. One mistake? All credibility gone.

My First Real Job

(The Dreaded 9 to 5 Wasn’t That Bad!)

As I mentioned, uni wasn’t for me. I wanted real experience, not lectures. Getting paid to learn while actually doing the work? Sounded like a win-win.

So at 18, fresh out of college and mid-pandemic, I started searching for an apprenticeship. Jobs were tough to come by just after Covid but eventually I landed a project management apprenticeship at a local digital marketing agency.
That changed everything.

Before long, they shifted my role into a digital marketing apprenticeship and gave me some serious responsibility, managing a massive project involving 60 appliance retailer websites, while also handling my own portfolio of SEO clients.

Thrown in the deep end, I learned fast:

Project Management

Client Communication

Presenting SEO results

Content strategy

Managing timelines, finances, and even people

Navigating Google updates and algorithm changes

I was learning SEO, project ops, web strategy and real-world communication all in one go. It was fast, chaotic and intense but I was getting experience it would take years to learn anywhere else.
And no, I didn’t make a single cup of tea. I wasn’t the intern, I was doing actual, meaningful work. That’s something I’ll always be grateful for.
The more I put in, the more I got out. Within a month, I went from not knowing what “SEO” even stood for… to sitting on client calls, presenting strategies and explaining how organic search could grow
their business.
It was a fake it till you make it moment—sink or swim—and I swam hard.
By the six-month mark, I’d learned more than most apprentices do in three years in other companies. I was hooked. SEO became something I genuinely enjoyed. I started picking up bigger clients, taking
on more responsibility and learning everything I could outside of work too.
But I knew one thing from my reffing days:
If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t really grow.
In an agency, you play it safe, white hat SEO, low risk, proven strategies. That’s great… but I wanted to test stuff for myself. So me and a mate launched a bunch of test websites, blogs, exact match
domains and niche service sites, just to see what worked and what didn’t.
Little did I know that would open up a world of opportunity.

Adapting To The SEO World

(Testing, Failing & Winning)

One year into my job, I’d finished my apprenticeship and stepped into a full-time SEO role, managing 20 client accounts plus still handling that massive project from before.

But by this point, most of my real learning came after hours.
In true unfiltered fashion, I saw plenty of failure. Me and a mate launched a travel blog and went all in, testing backlink strategies (from high-quality guest posts to dodgy Fiverr links), content frameworks (AI-optimised mass pages vs. long-form, data-backed authority posts) and everything in between.
We tried it all. Most of it flopped.
We realised the golden days of niche blogging were dying fast. So we pivoted hard.
I dove deep into parasite SEO, Reddit ranking hacks, expired domains, and exact match domain testing. Not theory, actual execution. Late nights and weekends grinding through what worked and what didn’t.
That extra work gave me a huge edge at my day job. I wasn’t just doing SEO, I understood it and knew what worked.
As a result, I started getting better results. And those results got noticed.
Soon, I was handed bigger clients, larger retainers and global brands. I had the freedom to lead strategies and execute high-impact campaigns on my own terms.

Starting My Own Business

(The Beginning)

What I didn’t mention earlier is that about a year before handing in my notice, me and my mate, the same one I built the travel blog with, had a lightbulb moment:
Why not sell the skills we’d been sharpening for years?
So we did exactly that. We were both 21, working full-time 9 to 5s and building a digital marketing agency on the side.
Finding clients was brutal at first. We couldn’t cold call during work hours, so we hit the streets on weekends, literally handing out flyers to open businesses, hoping someone would bite.
We decided to niche into dental marketing. The ticket sizes were high, the margins looked good and we landed some big national clients and dental chains. But after a while, we realised: this wasn’t it.
We weren’t enjoying the day-to-day. So, we scrapped the website, ditched the niche and hit reset.
New plan: Work with a mix of clients, give it a year and figure out who we actually enjoy working with, then niche down based on real experience, not just opportunity.

That's The Journey So Far

Everything I’ve done, from failed side hustles and SEO testing to building a real agency from scratch, has led to this. I’m not here to pretend I’ve made it. I’m here to show you the process while I’m in it. No filters. No fluff. Just the real, messy, behind-the-scenes of building something from nothing.

This brand isn’t about recycled advice or fake success stories, it’s about action over theory, learning through doing and showing young people what’s actually possible when you back yourself.

I’m 22, building my agency in public, learning as I go, and sharing every step of the journey because this is what escaping the 9 to 5 really looks like.

Our Companies

HandL Agency

Founder of HandL Agency –

A results-driven digital marketing agency helping local businesses grow across the UK.

Based in Bristol, HandL Agency specialises in SEO, PPC, Paid Social and Website Design. We create tailored strategies that generate high-quality leads, boost visibility and turn clicks into customers. Whether it’s a start-up or an established brand, we help businesses unlock their full potential online with custom marketing that actually works – no fluff, just results.

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