The Long Game of Marketing: John Carroll on Storytelling, Optimism, and Impact

Zach:
John, how are you? It’s good to have you here.

John:
Man, so glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Zach:
Yeah, it’s great to have you.

I think we’ve been talking about this for a year, trying to get you here, and we made it happen. So I appreciate you making the trip.

John:
I appreciate you moving from England over here and teaching closer to home.

I’ve had the pleasure of lecturing across the pond online, but it’s more fun being in person. So I appreciate you.

Zach:
Agreed.

I think last time we did this, it was pre-pandemic. It was a Zoom guest lecture, and my students got so much out of that. I know students will today too, and everybody else who’s watching will get a whole lot out of it.

John:
It was pre-pandemic, so people didn’t know what Zoom was.

Zach:
That’s right. Before Zoom was cool.

We were both trying to figure it out.

Man, it’s so great to have you. Thanks for coming.

Why don’t we start with an introduction? Just introduce yourself and tell us a little about who you are and what you do.

John:
My name is John Carroll. I live in Memphis, Tennessee. I’m from Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

I had been a serial entrepreneur and got into the nonprofit space, and that’s what I do now.

I run a nonprofit in Memphis. We started over 15 years ago, and we try to help the good guys do more good.

But we serve in a different little space.

Most nonprofits are serving a direct need. We come alongside multiple nonprofits and try to get them to work together to solve the needs in our community, and get that collaborative service to really compound in a way that solves it for some people.

So it’s fun work.

Zach:
Yeah, it’s amazing work.

You moved back to Tennessee, and to Memphis specifically, in 2004.

What was it about the city of Memphis that really captured you?

John:
I didn’t move to Memphis for Memphis or against Memphis.

Nowadays, most people in Memphis know me from being in the philanthropy, nonprofit, or taking-care-of-others kind of space.

So a lot of people think I moved to Memphis for that reason, because Memphis had a lot of need.

But that’s not the case.

I’d been living in Dallas for about five years. Me and a couple other guys were looking at this company idea of starting a for-profit business in the coffee space.

This was back in 2004, before all the big coffee craze was across the South.

One of the guys already lived in Memphis, so it made sense for us to come there as a place to actually make and roast coffee and have production. It’s got a great logistics hub.

So it was a business decision to get there.

Honestly, when I moved there, I was young and thought I would do this for a couple of years and then I’d move someplace cool.

But man, I just absolutely fell in love with the city.

Totally unexpected.

I came from a small town. Where I grew up, there was nothing to do, but you knew everybody you were doing nothing with.

It’s a great community, nothing to do.

Then I moved to Dallas, and there was everything to do. You were never alone, but it was the loneliest place I ever lived because you didn’t know anybody.

You never did the same thing twice with anybody. It didn’t feel connected.

But Memphis very quickly became this place where everything you did felt like you were with your neighbors, your fellow church members, your coworkers, or your friends.

It was just hard to be there and not be with people that you knew.

It made you care more about the place, but it also had tons of stuff to do.

It had an NBA team, amazing restaurants, awesome parks, and great places to hang out.

There’s a lot of fun living there.

What I’ve come to say is that one of the great signs of a great community is if you can drink a really great cup of coffee or drink a really great beer, but if your coffee gets cold and your beer gets warm, then you’re in the right spot.

Because what that means is I just ordered a great cup of coffee, but I don’t have time to drink it because people keep walking into the coffee shop saying hi.

Or I’ve just got a really great beer or a really great meal, but the meal gets cold and the beer gets warm because you just keep seeing your friends and hanging out.

Being in the right place, doing high-quality things with high-quality people usually means your food isn’t as good, but your community is amazing.

That’s what happened for me in Memphis.

I just can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Zach:
Man, that’s great.

So you launched City Leadership in 2010.

What was the aha moment where you saw a need there? What drove the founding of that?

John:
I’d been in the for-profit space and then was dabbling in both worlds.

I had a for-profit company that was headquartered in Texas. We were making everything in Memphis, so I was back and forth.

Then I’d gotten into the nonprofit world as well because I had some time and I was engaged in both spaces.

What we found was that the church I was going to had a lot of nonprofit leaders at it.

You’d be having lunch with these guys, or you’d go see what these ladies were doing in different spaces and see their organizations.

You realized these were really big-hearted, amazing people making a lot of impact, but there were some business principles that weren’t being applied to some of the work.

It wasn’t out of negligence or some negative thing where they thought it wasn’t right to do these things.

It was just awareness.

They went to seminary. They didn’t go to business school. Or they’d never been in a for-profit space and didn’t know how to leverage some of those tools or abilities.

In that era, around 2007, 2008, 2009, there was a real surge with websites.

They’re nothing like they are today, but they were going from digital paint pages to something actually active.

It was a lot harder then to get high-quality photos, high-quality video, and make a nice-looking website.

It wasn’t as easy as it is today.

My third grader can take a good photo and probably make a website now. They’ve made it so simple.

So what we thought was, what if we could create a nonprofit that helped other nonprofits?

That was the beginning and the impetus of it.

There are all these leaders out there doing this really good work. What if we can make their work compound and go faster?

Some of it was project-based, but really that was a Trojan horse.

“Hey, we’ll come help you with your website.”

But what we really wanted to do was develop that leader and find ways for that leader to grow, really believing that everything rises and falls on leadership.

That was the real beginning of it.

Man, it’s gotten a little out of control since then.

But the hope was that we could bring business principles to the nonprofit space in a very effective way.

Zach:
So you kind of pivoted away from just offering those websites and toward leadership, focusing more on that.

Congrats on 15 years, by the way. That’s amazing.

How else has it changed? How has the need changed over those 15 years?

John:
Everything’s gotten a lot more complex in the digital space.

One of the biggest issues, specifically around marketing for nonprofits, is that there was a time and a season, especially around web, SEO, and social media, when there were fewer major players.

If you knew the basic skills of those kinds of things, you could immediately be as good as, if not better than, most of your for-profit competitors for people’s attention.

Even in the nonprofit space, there was a jump where if you had really good stuff there, then you could really stand out.

You could get a lot of attention onto your mission and attract more volunteers, more donors, and create more care.

Because in the nonprofit space, a lot of times what you’re marketing toward is not the people that you serve.

It’s the people who contribute the resources that allow you to go serve.

Those people are experiencing high-quality advertisements from national and international corporations.

So if you as a nonprofit have any sort of lag or quality degradation there, you’re seen as less than or not as good.

Especially as bigger nonprofits come in with more dollars and more resources, they come in and look really nice.

That attracts people’s attention.

At the beginning, you could keep up with that relatively easily and relatively inexpensively.

But man, the end zone keeps moving further and further away.

The gap between what is possible to do quickly and financially efficiently versus consistently and at the quality level that digital marketing has become is really, really complex.

Today, being able to raise enough money to hire good enough talent, give them enough resources, and give them enough time to create the quality of things that can get people’s attention, it’s not impossible.

But to say it’s complex is probably too simplified of an answer.

Zach:
Speaking of grabbing people’s attention, you guys at City Leadership have developed these campaigns, or even brands, that have become programs in and of themselves, it seems to me as an outsider.

Can you talk us through the progression of developing those and what the work does in each of those different areas?

Choose 901, Teach 901, Serve 901, all of that.

John:
Memphis is in the 901 area code, for those of you who don’t know that.

We’ve really gravitated toward using the 901 nomenclature as a way to unify the community.

901 was the area code for the whole state of Tennessee at one point. It’s been progressively shaved off as more people have come in, and now it really defines that southwest corner of Tennessee.

In our work with individual organizations, getting them to collaborate and work together has been one of the key elements we’ve been able to provide.

So an individual organization that’s serving in after-school programs, housing, jobs, schools, or sports mentorship programs, they don’t have, just like they don’t have a full-time web designer to design their websites, somebody on their staff thinking about how to get all those different programs working together.

If we bring on one awesome full-time web designer, an organization can donate to us and we can give all of them websites for free.

In the same way, what we found over time is that if we could convince those organizations to work together around the same people, you can actually move from just serving a day-to-day need to solving some of those needs through that process.

That’s the real impetus of creating these kinds of things.

To do that, we had to create brands and campaigns that would allow those organizations to sit underneath.

Because it’s really confusing for an individual when they think about participating or caring about that stuff to say, “Hey, here are 20 different names you need to remember, and all these things work together.”

That’s really hard.

So when we say things like Choose 901 or Teach 901, it represents a larger group in that space.

Choose 901 originated as our campaign to help about a dozen organizations that were trying to recruit or retain college graduates to do post-college residency programs in typically social-work scenarios.

Teaching, health-related fields, AmeriCorps, service work, all that kind of thing.

It was a collective campaign to communicate, “Hey, there’s an opportunity for you to invest a season of your life here.”

But we also surrounded that with, “Here are all the ways you’ll have fun here while you do it.”

That was a big millennial issue.

Millennials in general were making a lot of their decisions based on, “Will I enjoy this thing more than I’ll enjoy that thing?”

It’s a different generational conversation around experience.

They’re choosing between two things.

They were the first generation, really, to make a lot of decisions not just between what is safer or less safe, or financially stable or less financially stable.

It’s, “I’m financially stable, so what will I enjoy doing?”

Will I enjoy having sushi or steak?

Will I enjoy having an iPhone or an Android?

They’re making those kinds of conscious decisions.

When they’re thinking about teaching, they’ve already decided they want to teach.

The question becomes, “Where am I going to teach?”

Every city needs teachers.

So, “Will I enjoy being there?” becomes a big piece of it.

That’s become a real calling card for a lot of people in Memphis.

They care about Memphis and can say, “I already choose Memphis. I’m already here.”

It’s become a massive platform.

But recruiting and retaining teachers needed a campaign that was too specific and too big just to hold inside Choose 901.

So we spun off Teach 901.

That’s where we get around 90 schools collaborating to market school jobs.

It’s a really interesting marketing scenario.

If you go to a city like New Orleans or Kansas City where there are a lot of charter schools, there are billboards up and down the streets. They’re running radio ads. There’s a ton of digital and SEO.

Schools are competing against each other to get teachers to swap because they’ve got to fill seats, and there aren’t enough teachers in America to fill the seats.

We say it’s kind of like playing musical chairs.

You have 10 chairs, you have seven people, the music stops, and they just sit wherever they want to.

Every city is struggling with trying to get people to sit in the right spot, and there are seats going open in education.

What’s doubly sad is if you’ve got 50 school networks that all have a full-time marketing person or two and marketing budgets that amplify that competition.

They’re spending all those dollars that are for our school system.

If each school only spent $100,000, you’re talking millions of dollars annually to compete for the same teachers who are going to sit down somewhere anyway.

What we’ve done at Teach 901 is convince all those schools to say, instead of creating competing marketing campaigns, let’s put all the jobs in one spot.

Let’s make it really simple for the teachers.

Let’s make this a teacher town and make the teachers the focus.

As a teacher, if I’m thinking, “I want to teach seventh-grade science,” I really want to look at all my options.

Otherwise, I have to go to 50 different websites just to see if there’s a job.

It creates a lot of confusion.

In marketing, from the business side, we would always say, “A confused mind says no.”

I want to go to the simple spot.

So in a really hard-to-staff area, like any of our 50 largest cities in the United States, if I’m confused and I’m not quite sure where to go, that teacher is more likely to just end up in some other system or a suburb because they’re confused in the marketplace.

Where can it be simple?

Making a collaborative space for that has been really helpful.

We spend about $150,000 a year.

One person donates $100,000 a year to that, and the other $50,000 is generated through donations, people giving us spaces, people contributing a couple hundred dollars, and different things.

We collaborate all that for all the schools, and now the schools don’t have to spend a marketing dollar.

That can all go back to the classroom.

It’s that kind of ingenuity that is bringing business principles, but it doesn’t create revenue.

People are like, “You should charge people for that.”

If I had 90 school systems and charged them all $5,000, that would make a lot of money, right?

You only have to charge them $1,500 or $1,600 to make $150,000.

But not everybody’s going to do it.

Then you’ve got to charge more than whatever it costs.

Once everybody doesn’t do it, your site doesn’t have all the school listings.

Then those other people have to create competition.

Now the 50 schools that are with me are seeing all those ads going everywhere and they’re saying, “Well, now I need to create ads.”

That’s how it all falls apart.

It’s either free for everybody and really inexpensive, or you start charging something to somebody and everything falls apart.

I’m getting deep into the weeds on that one campaign.

Serve 901 actually predates all of this.

Before I even started City Leadership, when I was in the for-profit space, I started asking people if they wanted to come to town just to do volunteer projects.

We’ll have about a thousand college students come every year and do alternative spring break, summer trips, fall break trips, that kind of stuff.

We’ve got a 114-person bunkhouse in town, and they go volunteer at these same nonprofits that are our clients.

We’ll do about 10,000 hours of community service this year.

Then they’ll tour around, see Memphis, go to the National Civil Rights Museum, eat ribs on Beale Street, and have a good time.

It’s a really great deal.

Give 901 is our corporate giving campaign.

We’ve been around long enough that all our 20-year-olds we’ve been working with are now 30- and 40-year-olds.

They want to keep giving and keep being involved.

So we have a corporate area where your business can volunteer, serve, donate, and contribute toward this work.

Then what I’m probably most excited about is our Choose 901 Alumni campaign.

We’ve got six schools. If you graduate from one of those schools, you become a Choose 901 alum.

Around 450 kids a year spend the next 10 years with us.

We help them persist through their post-secondary education or training, get internships and their first job experiences.

We recruit them back toward Memphis, get them intertwined, and then try to help them navigate getting plugged in socially and becoming community leaders.

We’ve got more than 3,000 alumni now and thousands of students in the pipeline.

About 85% of our alumni are coming from places of poverty.

Helping them not only break that cycle for themselves, but for their family, and become part of the community where they’ve grown up and care about is really meaningful.

We’ve really deemed that as our flagship brand, Choose 901.

They get to carry that mark because they really are the future of our community in a big way.

Zach:
It’s such important work, and it’s been so successful.

Choose 901 specifically just went gangbusters.

It’s part of the identity of Memphis, I think.

What would you say are some of the factors behind the success of that campaign in particular?

John:
I think some of it was the lack of a place to get positive information at the time when we started.

There was a local paper that was online, obviously, and it had a website, but there was a paywall to get into that space.

We hit at a time when people were still trying to figure out social media content and where all that fit.

Memphis is a place where the needs of the city are often part of the headlines.

Those headlines create eyeballs, and those eyeballs get sold, so there’s a lot of value in that in the marketplace.

But for the other 65 or 70% of people who were looking for other information and content, there was a big opportunity.

That was not our intention.

I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “Seven out of 10 people are looking for something positive, so let me create this anti-negative-news thing.”

What I really thought was two things.

One was, if I’m thinking about moving to Memphis and I don’t know anything about Memphis, how do I understand Memphis?

I can’t just put up a website that says, “Hey, you should come teach here. Memphis also has…” and then put a list of everything.

We had to create some sort of story or narrative that made sense of that.

These young adults, 20, 21, 22 years old, weren’t obviously reading the newspaper.

It was very common for them to read digital news.

Videos were complex at the time, and so we just made a video every single week.

What we would do is show people who were doing the programs we were recruiting for enjoying themselves in Memphis.

We’d do a video on the bike lanes.

Or a video of somebody trying different barbecue shops.

Or a video of somebody going to juke joints.

But the person in that video was a Memphis Teacher Residency participant.

That person in the video was working at St. Jude as a nurse.

That person was working as a social worker at Youth Villages.

So we would Trojan-horse that video with the type of person who was there.

Then what ended up happening was not only would someone see that story and say, “Oh, that’s the program I’m wanting to do,” but those programs now had something to say.

“Hey, check out this video that one of our residents is in.”

Even from a recruiting standpoint, you’d end up on a college campus talking to somebody who said, “I’ve never been to Memphis.”

Then they say, “I’m really into cycling.”

“Oh my gosh, you’ve got to watch this video. One of our MTR residents is in it.”

You see that and think, “That guy looks like me.”

That connection was really interesting.

We started talking about all these sorts of places, and Memphians saw that and started seeing themselves in a different light.

At the core, when you break that down, people were asking me for videos about Memphis.

But I was like, “No, no. What we need are stories about Memphians.”

From a marketing perspective, just look at Nike.

Nike never makes ads about their shoes.

It’s always about the athletes.

You’re obsessed with Nike because you’re relating to the athlete’s story.

Even in the Olympics, I’m not obsessed with shot put.

But I’ll watch the Olympics and there’ll be some guy and I’ll be crying because I’m like, “He’s the most amazing person in the world.”

Now I’m totally into shot put and definitely into the Olympics.

I care about the Olympics because I care about this guy.

I hear his story about what he went through.

I’m probably never going to record shot put and watch it every week.

But that whole thing endears me to it and makes me say, “I can’t miss the Olympics.”

When we started doing those kinds of things, it not only made really effective marketing for Memphis, but it helped people appreciate the place.

It’s easy to criticize something that is not human to you.

Even a restaurant.

“This restaurant, corporate America, blah, blah, blah.”

But if you sat down with the owner or an executive, it gets real human really quickly.

Ninety-nine times out of 100, you sit down with somebody and they’re like, “I’m so sorry you had that brand experience. Let me make that right for you.”

Or you hear the story about why they did that thing.

Maybe you never wanted to eat chicken fingers, but then you heard the story of this guy and what he went through, and now you’re like, “I love being here because of this person.”

It’s not because of the brand.

I think people fell in love with Memphis in that way.

And I think Memphians re-fell in love with their city because there had been such a big opportunity for stories like that.

Then people were able to equate that with our brand.

They just started saying, “Well, I choose 901.”

They’re 27 and have never lived anywhere else and they’re like, “I don’t have to move here. I’m already doing this.”

Or they’re 47 and they’re in their community.

Or they’re 67 and they’ve been here their whole life.

It was an easy way for them to say, “I care about this place too. I believe in this place.”

The same way somebody would wear their Tennessee sweatshirt here around campus.

It’s funny.

We happen to be recording on a Monday a couple of days after a loss, which was heartbreaking.

But this campus is covered with people smiling, wearing tons of Tennessee gear and looking really happy.

They’re like, “Win or lose, we’re here in this community. I’m proud that I’m still a Tennessean.”

I think that’s what we helped instill in Memphis.

In some ways, initially by accident, because it was really marketing to try to recruit people.

Then people started saying, “Hey, this is me too.”

And we were like, “Oh, wait a second.”

Why are there 150,000 people on our website?

We were just trying to get 300 or 400 people to move here.

The web traffic just kept getting crazier.

What we found was we had really tapped into that other 70%.

Zach:
Can you talk a little bit more about the importance of recruiting people to Memphis?

You’ve spoken about this before, and I think it’s such an important piece of the puzzle.

Why is recruiting graduates specifically to Memphis important from a poverty-alleviation standpoint?

John:
It’s recruiting and retention.

Memphis has a ton of awesome people from every socioeconomic background.

They have a ton of potential for high impact in this space.

But the reality is that Memphis is not one of the five major cities that you would automatically assume you could have a blast in and that there is significant post-college economic opportunity.

For those two things to overlap, there are only a few cities that everybody assumes.

If we asked your classroom to write down five cities, there’d be significant overlap.

Even though Memphis does have those things, people don’t assume it.

The data really backed that up.

When we started, we surveyed a thousand college students at a bunch of colleges within a four- to eight-hour drive of Memphis.

What we found was 12 out of 100 college students thought Memphis was awesome.

Seven or eight out of 100 thought Memphis was not awesome.

And about 81 out of 100 were like, “I don’t know anything about Memphis.”

If you don’t know anything about it, then you’re definitely not sitting around going, “My dream is to move to Memphis.”

Memphis has a large state school, some really great private institutions, and an awesome HBCU.

We’re graduating a lot of talent there.

But obviously there are way more people graduating from other colleges and other places.

You’ve got to be on their radar to recruit that talent in.

That became really important.

Let’s create the content. Let’s create the marketing that allows people to consider this place.

But what really mattered was that, from a social-work scenario, we had philanthropic investment creating 100 opportunities to come teach here, 50 social-work jobs over here, another 50 in healthcare, another 100 AmeriCorps jobs.

We weren’t getting enough quantity or quality of applicants.

So you’re not able to leverage tens of millions of philanthropic dollars because all these positions are going unfilled.

Most of those positions required a college degree.

Recruiting and making sure those 300 or 400 positions were full every year did several things.

One, it maximized those philanthropic dollars.

Two, it maximized the immediate impact of those people serving wherever they were.

That immediately comes back to what you’re saying.

It starts making an impact on poverty and social equality.

That becomes a really big deal, making sure those jobs are actually filled.

Then three, the most likely time you are to move to a new city in America is between the ages of 21 and 27.

That’s where I can mass-market people.

If I can get you at 21 or 22 to make a one- to four-year paid commitment here, then you’re way more likely to live here long term.

I would love to live in a community that every year is continuously upgraded with people who maybe end up being realtors, restaurant owners, accountants, lawyers, or whatever.

People who are willing to invest a season of their life giving back to others and contributing, those are the kinds of people I want as neighbors.

It doesn’t mean they have to spend their whole career serving in that exact role.

But those people really make great community members and socially and economically conscious neighbors.

It doesn’t mean they’re all one political way or another political way.

It’s just a healthy ingredient to have for your community.

On top of that, where we found a really big opportunity was back to this idea that people don’t assume Memphis is a place they want to go.

AutoZone is headquartered in Memphis.

International Paper, Silvamo, ALSAC and St. Jude, FedEx.

They have thousands and thousands of jobs every year for college graduates and people coming out with master’s degrees.

What I found was the people who are coming here to do the teaching and social-work roles have friends who could fill those other roles.

If we don’t market those together, we’re either going to get both of those people or we’re going to get neither one.

Imagine I decide, “I’m going to spend the next two to four years of my life teaching in a high-poverty school and investing in my life before I go to law school.”

You and I are roommates in college, and you’ve decided you’re an engineer and need an engineering job.

We loved going to college and hanging out.

You’ve got an engineering interview in Nashville, Atlanta, or Dallas.

There are teaching opportunities in every one of those cities.

We’re going to say, “Let’s keep the party going.”

If you’re moving to Atlanta, why wouldn’t I just go teach there?

If I can’t convince you to apply for an engineering job in Memphis, we’re probably both going to end up in Atlanta.

But if I can get you a job opportunity as an engineer in Memphis, it’s way easier for me to come here.

That becomes a twofer.

Then once I get you both here that first year, I’m saying, “Post about your stuff. Talk about it socially. Who do you know who needs to come here?”

You’re likely friends with people who would want to hang out with you again.

Invite your friends into town.

All of that’s marketing.

It’s all the interaction where people want to be in that space.

If you’ve got the right social workers, you can make the social impact.

Then they’re also the people most likely to stay over the long haul.

We see that happening all the time.

A lot of my friends who are in their 30s are people we recruited here in their 20s.

They’re still there in Memphis.

A lot of them aren’t in the original role, organization, or even the same field.

But they’re Memphians now, and they live with the same kind of heart.

Maybe they came in with a roommate or friend who’s in the for-profit space.

That really helps those things go.

If your local companies don’t have all their jobs filled, they’re going to send those jobs to another city.

They’re going to put those jobs in Dallas or Houston or somewhere else where it’s easier to find enough engineers or whatever they need.

Then those dollars stay in that community.

If you don’t have job opportunities here, when you help kids get out of poverty and they get degrees and opportunities, they end up having to move to Dallas too because the job moved there because you couldn’t fill it here.

Then they’re not buying a house in this community, spending dollars in restaurants, needing your services, needing a new roof, whatever those things are.

You continue that whole perpetual life cycle.

It all works hand in hand.

You’ve got to serve people to help them get out of poverty, but you’ve got to meet the economic need now so there is still an opportunity there later.

And you’re keeping all those dollars and tax dollars in that space.

Zach:
Apart from people actually moving to Memphis as a big part of your recruitment efforts, what are some of the other metrics that you guys are measuring related to those campaigns?

Choose 901, Give 901, Teach 901.

John:
We’re always looking for eyeballs on our websites and where there’s growth and traffic.

Where does traffic come from?

Why does it come from that?

What are the response rates to those different kinds of things?

Those are all really interesting pieces.

New users, subscribers, unsubscribes.

A lot of our content is something you’re subscribing to because you’re looking at moving here.

So it’s trying to figure out, do you keep people interested?

Maybe I subscribed because I was looking for a job and now I’ve got a job.

I don’t know if I need the same content anymore.

So where does that flow?

But our big thing right now is trying to see how long we can get you to actually watch a video.

Everything is video now.

Seeing the longevity of that is a really big deal.

Then we continuously watch geography.

Where are the hotbeds of people looking at different kinds of stuff?

We’ve found over time that some kids from Memphis will end up at some random school that we don’t know very well, and they end up being very pro-Memphis.

There might be nobody at that college campus for a whole year who’s ever been on your website.

Then the next year there’s 12.

The next year there’s 50.

All of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, there’s a little something right there.”

And you think, what does 50 people mean?

Fifty people could mean 15 or 20 people moving into your city.

I promise you there’s not a mayor of one of the 50 largest cities in the country who, if you said, “There are 20 people who want to move to my city,” wouldn’t say, “Where? Who do I talk to? How do I call them?”

People are really interested in where that happens.

That’s some really fun stuff to watch.

Zach:
I think we need a Vol 901.

That’s your next campaign.

All the Vols need to just come back to the 901.

John:
We send a lot of them up here.

It’s a great place, and I’m a big Vols fan.

Zach:
As these campaigns have matured over time, how have you shifted in terms of targeting new audiences?

John:
Our biggest shift has been keeping the people that we recruit and retain, and having the right thing to allow them to matriculate with us into their next season of life.

Even for me, I started all this stuff when I was 32. Now I’m 48.

So some of it is just keeping up with where people are heading.

On the other side, it’s trying to keep up with the culture of how people are experiencing these things.

Some cultures want to be more formal.

Some people want to be more relaxed.

Some people want to be more sarcastic.

Some people want to be more trendy.

That’s been the hardest thing, probably more than anything.

Having enough diversity internally to relate to all the different sorts of particulars.

From a marketing perspective, what’s really complex is hitting all those different age groups with the right vocabulary, the right style, the right momentum.

The stuff I can get 18- to 26-year-olds to watch, you cannot get 30- and 40-year-olds to watch.

And I need my 30- and 40-year-olds to be highly engaged because they become mentors, volunteers, servers, and donors toward the mission of what we’re doing.

They want to be connected to our stuff.

But if I post stuff that 40- and 50-year-olds are really into, I will lose the audience of 20-year-olds that they want to help.

That becomes really complex.

People will be like, “Man, I don’t know why you posted that.”

And I’ll be like, “Because it’s not for you. I promise you.”

From a marketing standpoint, you’re trying to educate them in a way, but you don’t want to disenfranchise them because they like their Choose 901 bumper sticker.

They like their shirt.

They like being part of what’s hip and cool.

It’s funny.

The 50- to 60-year-olds, because their kids are usually the ones we’re targeting, often feel the most comfortable with whatever is on the edge because they’ve been experiencing it firsthand.

They follow their own kids’ social media.

They’ll be the first to be like, “Yes, skibidi,” or whatever.

They jump into all that stuff.

They may not use it the right way, but they’ll feel totally okay liking it, commenting, and laughing.

Whereas there’s this generation gap in the middle that’s kind of funny.

Their kids are too young to be into what’s cool right now, and they’re still using the old stuff.

That part’s really hard.

But it’s fun. It’s interesting.

We say it’s chess, not checkers.

It’s way more complex and way harder than for-profit.

It’s a completely different deal.

Zach:
That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about.

You’ve had your hand in the business world and you’ve worked in nonprofit for a long time.

What are the key differences you’ve seen in developing a truly purpose-built brand?

A lot of businesses talk about purpose but don’t walk it out.

So what are some of those key differences?

John:
The key difference is, in marketing for a for-profit, you look at markets.

I’d look at a market and say, “What does it take for mass marketing to be effective? How big is that audience group? Can I afford to market my product to a mass market?”

Can I financially afford to reach enough people?

And if I reach enough people, do they have access to my product in a way that allows them to respond?

When we did this stuff, we used to look at mass marketing as roughly 0.3% effective.

Whatever you’re doing in mass, if you gave a thousand people the opportunity to buy your product, three should buy it.

Then that scales to 10,000, 100,000, a million, whatever.

If your marketing isn’t working, either your marketing isn’t good or you aren’t aiming toward your target audience.

Then can you financially repeat that?

Does the margin on your product, your cost of goods sold, and the amount of money you make create a flywheel that allows you to perpetuate that?

It’s science and reach.

You’re playing the game.

You’re either not good at your margin, your ad, or aiming toward your target demographic.

In the nonprofit space, we have to serve everybody.

We have to serve every personality.

You can’t just rely on a 0.3% return.

You’re serving every Memphian, and they’re totally different financially, politically, racially, socially, economically, age-wise, demographically, and in their preferences.

You have to serve all of them.

Then you’re talking about something they’re all associated with but experience differently.

It’s like if I was holding a coin between us.

You’re saying, “This coin has a head on it.”

I’m saying, “No, it’s got a building on it.”

We’re both talking about the same coin.

Imagine that with Memphis, but with a bunch of different sides.

It’s really complex.

Then in the for-profit space, the better you are, the more money you make, and then you can actually get better.

It’s really hard for another organization to catch up and penetrate that market.

In the nonprofit space, the better you are, the more demand you create for your services.

That means you have to raise more money.

Then you could end up failing people because you’ve created more demand than you can serve.

Then you break the service trust of people.

You end up perpetually hitting people up for money.

They’re like, “I just gave you $50,000. Why do you need $50,000 more?”

And I’m like, “Because that $50,000 was so effective that now we have 100 more people needing our services. I’ve got to hire somebody else.”

And costs go up.

In the for-profit space, if costs go up, the product price goes up a quarter or a dollar.

In the nonprofit space, if a donor gives you $50,000 five years in a row and you go back and say, “Hey, inflation means that $50,000 is really only $40,000 now. I need $60,000 from you,” they’re like, “Are you so ungrateful? I’m giving you $50,000.”

It’s a really big deal.

But every year that $50,000 is no longer enough.

Even if they said, “I’m going to give you $50,000 forever,” next year I have to get another three or four grand from someone else just to make that $50,000 the same.

That’s not counting if I’m actually a good steward of it and create more demand.

So what we do is try to help people understand the difference between ROI, return on investment, and what we call ROG, return on generosity.

We bring some of those business principles into it and let people see that when you invest here, you create returns and create opportunities for more investment.

It’s the same with ROI.

People say, “I want to buy more of that stock because it creates returns.”

We want people saying, “I want to be more charitable here. I want to get more into this space because it creates a better return on my generosity.”

Zach:
A big part of what you do is marketing Memphis.

But you also recruit a lot of people to Memphis for roles in your organization and other organizations.

A lot of folks listening to this will be about to graduate, getting into marketing, wanting to do an internship, that kind of stuff.

What do you look for?

What makes somebody really stand out in an interview process or in a portfolio when they’re looking for a marketing role?

John:
Man, great question.

Teachability. Hunger.

Curiosity is a really big piece of that.

One of the things I try to tell a lot of people, especially when they’re 18, 19, 20, 21 years old, is you’re just embarking on the decade where you’re really figuring out who you are and what you want to do.

They think school was that whole space.

School just gave them the tools to now figure themselves out.

If you’re doing an internship with us, you’ll probably have a conversation with me at some point before we hire you.

I say this to everybody.

Interns are the only people on our staff who have the exact same job description as me, which is to make everyone else on our team successful.

I’m responsible at the end of the day for everything.

You’re not responsible for everything, but your job is the same as mine.

I come to work every single day and think, “How do I make these other 20 people super successful at their jobs?”

That’s exactly what an intern gets to do.

Interns are like, “I don’t want to be an intern. I want to be a CEO one day. I want to be an executive.”

Well, then you should go do as many internships as possible.

Go to work and be as proactive and activated as possible.

Think, “My whole job is to make everyone else successful.”

If you can fall in love with making everyone else successful in a proactive way, not just reactively, you’re embarking on the skill sets you need to be a CEO.

That’s a really big component.

One thing I’d say too is, if you need to get paid a lot to do an internship, you’re going to limit the opportunities you could have, especially in the nonprofit space.

If your goal is just to make money, then you’re missing out on making the connections and getting the experience.

I’d challenge you to live in a way the other nine months of the year where you can save some money so you can pursue the opportunity, whether it’s in Memphis, England, San Francisco, or wherever.

Being able to afford rent or getting out there shouldn’t become a barrier to getting access to that network and experience.

If I met somebody who said, “I just want to learn. Put me wherever,” we’re going to give them opportunity.

Hopefully they show up every day with that same attitude and energy.

Usually interns come in a little timid, a little shy.

By the time they come out of their shell, it’s two weeks left in their internship.

Most interns have a lot of regret.

They’re like, “Golly, I wish I’d just done that at the beginning.”

I was just talking to a young lady from TCU who reached out to me about interning with us next summer.

She has another opportunity where they do one big project for the whole summer.

But she wants to be in digital marketing, digital communication, all that.

I just don’t know anybody who’s doing one big project at your age.

Nobody’s going to trust you with one enormous project in your 20s unless you’re a phenom.

In your 20s, you’re going to spend most of your time doing one big project an hour.

You need to go to a place, whether you come here or go somewhere else, where you can do as many reps as possible.

Somebody’s going to actually give you something and some real responsibility.

We want to give you some rope, not enough rope to hang yourself or ruin our organization, but enough rope where you’re actually out there doing it.

And you want to do it as many times as possible.

If you’re going to do an internship where you get to post once a week, don’t go do that.

You can already post socially on your own.

Create your own fake Instagram account and learn how to do that faster.

Get someplace where you can really contribute.

Then keep coming to every meeting and raising your hand.

“I’ll do that. I’ll do that. I’ll do that.”

Wherever you can get the job, just keep pushing yourself and pursuing responsibility.

Responsibility is the thing you’ll have in your job.

Sometimes your generation says, “I’m not raising my hand. I don’t want that responsibility. I’m getting paid the same either way.”

At some point you aren’t going to get paid more if you’re not willing to take on responsibility.

Build those reps where you can take it on and not be scared.

Keep raising your hand.

Keep taking responsibility.

Volunteer in your organizations at school.

Practice on your own stuff.

Post on your own LinkedIn three times a week right now while you’re in school about stuff that you’re learning.

Build those reps.

Edit your own videos.

If you don’t want your friends to see it, create your own fake TikTok or Instagram account and make it private.

Keep making content that you would share for something else.

Nobody’s stopping you.

I could make a commercial right now for any brand in the world.

There’s enough content on the internet where I could make a voiceover and do whatever.

If you’re thinking, “Man, if they would just hire me,” just go ahead and do it.

Who’s stopping you?

If you’re saying, “I wish I could make videos like that every single week,” do it right now.

If you showed up at my office with 12 videos you made over the last 12 weeks that you would have put on TikTok for 12 different brands, and showed me how you understood it, they don’t have to be perfect.

If I just saw that effort, I’d say, “Yep, I want that person.”

I’d go out and raise money for that person.

I’d be convincing you to come work for me.

That’s the type of person who would have a really hard time not being employed.

We’d be begging them.

Zach:
Hit the ground running.

Don’t waste time on an internship.

Week one. Lots of reps.

Get the material out.

Take jobs and get as many reps as possible.

And don’t wait until somebody asks you. Just go ahead and do it on your own.

You touched on it there too, but I wanted to ask you about your leadership style and what you see as good leadership.

You’ve talked about maximizing the gifts of the people around you.

Talk to me about your leadership style and what you see as good leadership.

John:
I define leadership as taking initiative for the benefit of others.

There’s some language out there where everybody’s a leader and all kinds of stuff.

That’s not true.

You can exhibit leadership in certain scenarios, and you have to be your own self-leader.

But being a leader in a community or group is a different part of the puzzle.

One of the things I really push is that I want you to know yourself really well.

Then I want to understand what you know about yourself, and I want to experience you.

And I want you to know me really well.

I want you to know, “Here are my gifts and here are my weaknesses.”

Man, I move fast.

I have a lot of ideas.

But that creates other weaknesses.

I want you to have grace for that, and I want to have grace for your stuff.

Ultimately, what I’ve found is the more we can know each other, and the more we know that we know each other, I know that sounds weird, but those are two different things, then that builds a lot of trust.

We say in our office all the time, “Trust equals efficiency.”

In our game, time is what we’re buying.

I’m raising money to buy people’s time to invest it into our community.

Time is the most valuable commodity we’ve got.

Trust becomes a multiplier of that time.

The more we know each other and the more connected we are, the more trust that creates.

That’s really the key component I’ve found.

There are a bunch of different ways to do it, but that’s the core of it.

Zach:
I would imagine 22-year-old me, or even 40-something-year-old me, looking at what you’ve built, this amazing organization and all the effort you’ve put in, all these hugely impactful campaigns.

For a 22-year-old out there who’s thinking, “How can I ever do something so impactful?” what advice would you give them?

John:
Some people might look at what we’re doing and think, “Oh, that’s a tiny little deal.”

Even if you look at our socials and numbers, a couple hundred thousand people on Instagram, when you get localized, the density rate would be the equivalent of having tens of millions nationally if you looked at it as a ratio of population.

But one of the things I’d tell you is, if you want to make a much bigger impact, go do it.

Don’t be afraid.

Go try it.

There’s a leadership maxim that’s been said a couple of different ways by different people over the years.

What we say is people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year, and people underestimate what they can accomplish in five years, or definitely in 10 years.

The reality is people look at this and think, “There’s no way I could do that in a year.”

Right.

You cannot.

You cannot do what took us 15 years in a year.

You just can’t do it.

It doesn’t matter if your social media got bigger or whatever.

You cannot have the community influence, the impact, change all those lives, and build all that in a year.

That’s impossible.

That is only the product of really long compounding interest.

For the people who think they’re going to overshoot all of that, yeah, it’s going to take a while.

I’d challenge you, whatever your big goals and dreams are, start laying them out over five-, 10-, or 15-year horizons.

Think about it as compounding.

You add, you add, you add, you add, you add.

Then all of a sudden it goes to multiplication.

In years six, seven, eight, nine, and 10, and then years 11 through 15, that’s when it really starts to go.

Trader Joe’s is a good example.

Twenty years in, they had something like 13 stores.

Thirty-five years in, they had around a hundred.

Now they’ve got hundreds.

That multiplier effect really goes.

It’s not that most people this young underestimate what they can do in five or 10 years.

They don’t even estimate.

They only think, “Can I be that today? Can I be that tomorrow? Could I be that by the time I graduate?”

That’s just the wrong way to look at it.

Zach:
One thing I’ve noticed in spending time with you over the years is your positivity switch is always on.

Your optimism switch is always on.

I’ve never seen you have a moment where you weren’t super positive.

What’s the secret to that?

And what role has that played in your success?

John:
We say around the office all the time, “What’s the best that can happen?”

That’s a totally different mindset than, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

It’s not even, “How bad could this possibly go?”

It’s, “What’s the best?”

If we tried this and a bunch of people really liked it and they moved here, that’s awesome.

Then we should try it.

If the best that could happen is your mom sees it, well, let’s try something else.

I love my mom, right?

But that’s not the goal.

When I moved to Memphis, I really liked the place.

But a lot of Memphians I met, I always say I never learned anything bad about Memphis until I moved to Memphis and met Memphians.

They were the first ones telling me something negative about it.

I was like, “Why? Everybody lives here.”

They were the first and quickest to dog Memphis.

But what’s funny is if someone outside of Memphis ever talked bad about it, they were the first ones to defend it.

I call it the big-brother thing.

You can talk bad about your brother.

“My brother’s this. My brother’s that.”

But if I talk about him, you’re like, “What’d you say about my brother?”

That’s the way Memphians really are.

What I realized is they love this place, but they felt like they were only talking about the criticism.

Once you get them talking about all the positive stuff, what you realize is pessimism pushes people away.

There’s no collaboration and no multiplication if people aren’t coming together.

Optimism really draws people in.

You see it at Neyland Stadium.

If we’re winning games, you can’t get a seat and those seats are expensive.

If we started the season 0 and 4, you couldn’t give those tickets away.

Nobody’s coming in to fill the stadium.

Optimism is a really powerful thing as you move through anything.

For me, I’ve always kind of been that way and not allowed myself to be defined by something not working out.

I don’t even call it failure.

You’re just trying stuff.

You’re trying, trying, trying, trying, and then something is going to work.

Failure is such a bad word for it.

You can’t do anything without trying it and not being successful until it is successful.

People who are successful on their first try, I would not trust them to run anything significant.

Most things take 40, 50, 60 attempts to make something work right.

Zach:
You’ve got to get the reps in.

John:
Yeah.

You’ve got to believe that it’s worth the effort.

There are so many optimistic people who are successful because they’re willing to put in the hard work to get over the point where it turns into success.

An overnight success is the hard work of failing for 10 years.

It’s always overnight to everyone else.

They don’t realize how hard you’ve been working on it for a decade.

Zach:
I think positivity would be the first word if I had to choose two words to describe you.

The other one would be purpose.

You seem to just absolutely know in your core what your purpose is.

How did you find that out?

And what would you recommend other people do to figure out, “What is my purpose? What is my sense of direction? How can I find that?”

John:
Part of that is connected to my faith.

I grew up in the South, and everybody who grows up in the South is supposedly a Christian.

For me, that wasn’t what I was really looking at in my life.

But as I got older and started to realize what really mattered to people, I realized I really enjoyed the feeling I got when I helped other people.

Later in my life, in my 20s, I really connected that to a different piece of my faith.

I had always thought my faith was connected to, “I need to be perfect because Jesus was perfect.”

It was really hard for me to connect to my faith in that space because I knew clearly that I was not perfect.

Later, I realized, “No, no. I attempt to love my neighbor as I love myself.”

So I needed to love myself some and realize it’s okay for me not to be perfect.

That helped me love myself.

Then I realized nobody’s perfect.

My expectation can’t be that I’m waiting for other people in my life to earn my love through their perfection.

I’m going to be really lonely, because no one’s perfect.

I know deep down I’m not perfect.

Once I realized I had to accept my lack of perfection, I could immediately accept everybody else’s.

Then I was like, “Well, let’s just have fun doing life together.”

Then it became, “How do I make as many things in this world better than they can be?”

That became my purpose.

I want to do things really, really well because I enjoy that.

I enjoy living in that way, and I want other people to share in that because I think they’ll enjoy it.

Then it was trying to figure out how to scale that out.

To bring that back, if we use a war analogy, there are a lot of hills with battles going on.

I realized my gifts and strengths were in saying, “If I focus on a local community and work on helping kids get out of poverty, that’s a battle hill I can get up and climb every single day.”

There are other things that are super meaningful.

Trying to cure cancer or other really important things.

I don’t have the skill sets for that.

If I tried to climb that hill, I would be useless.

And I wouldn’t have the energy for it.

Understanding who I am, understanding my wiring and my gifting, allowed me to tie that macro purpose into my personal wiring and gifts.

You’ll find me up on that hill every single day.

Zach:
What hill will you be on?

What do you have cooking for the next few months and the next few years?

How do you see City Leadership growing from here?

John:
Man, we’re really trying to scale video.

We’re launching Choose 901 TV on YouTube.

We’re launching Kids 901 TV, which is a big secret, but I don’t think many people in Memphis are necessarily going to see this before I get that out in the next couple of months.

We’re really trying to get more video content.

We’re trying to go video-first and then pull all the text and other content out of that space.

We’re also trying to scale our alumni program.

We’re in conversations with the University of Memphis.

They have their own public school system that they manage underneath the university called University Schools.

So we’d bring on another thousand K-12 students and another hundred graduates a year.

That would be another big piece of the puzzle.

Those are the immediate things.

But in the long term, man, I’m just really hoping to put myself out of business.

That would be my dream.

There’s a tipping point where enough Memphians live every single day taking initiative for the benefit of others in a way where you don’t need a catalytic response or a catalytic creator for it anymore.

There’s just so much happening in so many different ways, and there’s enough momentum, that I’m not needed.

That would be my dream.

If 10 years from now I could tell you I’m unemployed and need to come ask if you’ve got a job for me, or some of your students want to hire me to do something, that would be awesome.

Zach:
What’s your greatest need right now as an organization?

John:
Man, we need people to come visit Memphis.

Come check it out.

Come experience it for yourself.

Tell other people about your positive experiences of it.

If you are a Memphian, have people come and share it and check us out.

Then I’d just challenge people to come invest a season.

Come intern for a summer.

Come spend a year or two of your career there.

You will not regret it.

I’m not asking anybody to come spend the rest of their life there, but they might end up wanting to do that, like me.

If you just come invest a season, whether you’re 22 and want to spend a year or two, or you’re 65 and retiring and don’t know where you’re going to invest a season of your life, we have a lot of frontline opportunities.

If you want to make a difference for a while and experience what that’s like, Memphis is a good place to do it.

That’d be my biggest thing.

I’ll take as many of those people as possible.

You can call me directly and I’ll help you figure it out.

Zach:
That’s great.

Where can people find out more about you and the work that you’re doing?

John:
CityLeadership.org is our website.

Choose901.com is our big thing.

Either one of those, and you can find all our other campaigns.

You can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, all those kinds of things.

I’m JohnCarroll77, John, J-O-H-N C-A-R-R-O-L-L 77, on almost every platform.

Zach:
John, thank you so much for coming, man.

I really appreciate it.

I know my students will get a lot out of this, and anybody else who’s watching will too.

So thank you so much.

John:
Thanks for having me.

Appreciate y’all.