Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes.
DJ Carroll has always had the will of a founder, and with it came a variety of ways to get where he is today as the CEO of Carroll Media Corp.
I spoke with him recently to talk about the steady success that his client marketing firm has been experiencing since he founded it in 2016, going from a bootstrapped operation based out of the Louisville metro area to having more than 20 freelancers in several countries in a matter of years.
“It’s pretty unique,” Carroll said with a chuckle, when talking about his company’s arrangement.
According to the firm’s site, it has more than 200 clients, 125 million total impressions and an overall increase in traffic of 237% for its clientele, most of whom are insurance agents. It offers two main verticals: static digital ads and video ads for social media platforms.
The company was picked as an Endeavor Scale-Up participant in 2022. The firm wouldn't share a figure for revenue but as of a recent date, said that was up 76% year-to-date, while having a 92% increase of new customers in 2023. It has approximately 150 clients on a monthly subscription basis. But that does not take into consideration some other products such as ringless voicemails where clients can drop messages into clients’ phones.
‘You might have something here’
Carroll first started getting interested in the digital marketing space in 2013 when he first started running Facebook ads for a power washing business that spun off from a business he created as a senior at Carroll County High School (see below).
In 2016, Carroll felt comfortable in the Facebook ad realm, having devoted a large portion of his resources on that pursuit. That same year, he was grabbing a coffee with his insurance agent, Mark Smith, who works for State Farm out of Carrrollton, Kentucky. More than an agent, Smith was a mentor of Carroll’s who met with him at least twice a month.
Carroll approached him with the idea of having Smith use the Facebook ad platform for his business, with the promise that Carroll would run some ads for him at the cost of $500.
Within a month Smith told him: “I don't need to see any numbers or anything. … DJ, I’ve never had people more engaged with my brand on any other form of advertising. … I think you might have something here.”
It would take another four-plus months before Carroll would land his second client out of Illinois. By 2020, Carroll had more than 50 customers a month across the country, all of whom were State Farm agents.
“I knew that if I could make our systems and software work for State Farm agents then every other insurance agent in the U.S. would be able to use us,” he said, “because it just got less and less compliance-stricken as we went down the line.”
Most recently, Carroll Media Corp., whose clientele is still 85-90% insurance agents, became the official media partner for Big I Kentucky, the state association for independent agents in the commonwealth.
From big city to small town
Carroll Media Corp. did have a traditional 4,000-square-foot office location in Middletown before Covid eventually turned into a completely virtual company — yet one with a majority of its six full-time employees in the Louisville metro area.
Carroll himself does most of his work from his farm in Smithfield, Kentucky, a town 30 minutes up the road from where his Kentucky journey in Carrollton began.
He had moved with his mother from Indianapolis, going from a school of approximately 4,000 students to 400.
“That was a culture shock and a half,” Carroll said.
At one point, he envisioned himself as a chemical engineer, given his love of math and science — but then he started a lawn mowing and landscaping business in 2007 in his senior year of high school. That eventually grew into other verticals, such as power washing.
He started the company with $300. Within three years, he had broken the $100,000 mark in revenue, before eventually selling the service in 2015. He held on to the power washing side of the operation.
“I quickly learned that sales was a trait that they didn’t teach in school that was very beneficial to have for an entrepreneur,” said Carroll.
At one point, Carroll was in an accounting class at Jefferson County Community & Technical College’s (JCTC) Carrollton campus. He was working on debits and credits, when he had an idea: “I could hire this teacher to do my QuickBooks stuff, and I can go wash a house and make $400. Why am I sitting here?”
That is exactly what he did, later paying his instructor $300 for her to set him up on QuickBooks. He made $400 from washing a house and netted $100.
From that point forward, he never looked back at a traditional college classroom setting, but he did keep learning. At age 20, he hired his first sales coach, who charged $6,000 — but he did not have a credit limit of that much on his credit card. So instead he worked out a deal where he could write him post-dated checks for $1000 a month, which were sent to him at one time.
“That was like my first foray into hiring a non-traditional educator to teach me… I’ve made millions of dollars because of that guy teaching me how to sell at such an early age,” said Carroll, who recently turned 35.
It should be noted that Caroll has more than 100,000 subscribers on his “Coach Carroll” YouTube account. He is in the process of creating an AI-powered “coach” bot using the material from his videos, which will eventually be available behind a paywall.
Looking ahead, Carroll and his firm will look to continue to expand the amount of clients it has, while launching a series of sites that are geared to the professions of their three largest groups. That began on June 30 with the launch of modernmarketing4agents.com. It will be followed by a similar site for lawyers in 2024 and contractors in 2025.
“What we realized is when you try to be a QuickBooks and say, ‘Oh, we help any small business, it’s hard to speak directly to the customers’ wants and needs, because every industry is a little different,” Carroll said. “They all have their own little quirks.”
