Women Entrepreneurs: #23 Lindsey Carnett

Since her earliest days, Lindsey Carnett held lofty ambitions. “I wanted to work at Amgen and find the cure for cancer,” she admitted. That was until she realized her talents were better suited for communications. The founder of Camarillo-based agency Marketing Maven Public Relations, Carnett has seen Marketing Maven grow upward each consecutive year since 2012, when the Business Journal profiled her as part of its “30 Under 30” coverage. Six years ago, total annual revenue stood at $746,612. The agency crossed the $1 million mark in 2014. Last year, the firm brought in $2.15 million. For Carnett, 35, who lives and works in Camarillo, there’s no community where she’d rather be. “People are friendly, the weather is perfect, the commute is extremely short,” she said, adding that the region is a terrific feeder of talent to her company, with job candidates applying from California State University – Channel Islands, Ventura College, University of California – Santa Barbara, Pepperdine University and her alma mater, California Lutheran University. “I can still get really great talent and cultivate them and help them grow in my organization,” she said. “A lot of people come through our internship program and they grow to larger roles here.” Loyalty, comradery and positive energy are significant to Carnett, who runs Marketing Maven with the aid of Managing Director Aljolynn Sperber and Vice President of Business Development John Carnett. “He’s been focused on finance and government contracts,” she said of her brother-in-law. “John knows how to navigate that world very, very well. He’s the one looking at 150-page request proposals.” With the company since day one, Sperber encouraged Carnett to launch her business. Their friendship originated on the soccer field at age 13 while growing up in Poulsbo, Wash., a town with a population of 6,000. “I’ve actually played soccer throughout my life,” Carnett said. “I played at Cal Lutheran.” Indeed, she employs many soccer analogies during the conversation. “It feels like scoring a goal for me,” Carnett said. “We work with a lot of large companies, we also work with a lot of entrepreneurs.” This October, Marketing Maven celebrates its nine-year anniversary with a wide portfolio of clients from the health (Natto Pharma, Greenleaf Medical, Nitrosigine), retail (Snuggie Tails, FreshPet,) travel (Norwegian Consulate General, Telluride Ski Resort), financial (Wells Fargo Securities), information and technology (InfoTech, Kingston Technology) and civic sectors (Deputy Sheriff’s Association of Santa Barbara County, USO). Travel Adventure Show, the largest travel industry trade show in America, is another client. Tech talk For Kingston, she went the extra mile with the tech company’s 5-in-1 MobileLite Wireless G2 campaign by staging a road trip in a wrapped van with rock band Green River Ordinance to Austin’s SXSW Music Festival that involved digital influencer “The Gabbie Show.” The stunt won Kingston attention from National Public Radio, Huffington Post and other media. “We’re doing deep dive analysis of brands,” Carnett said. “We use web-crawling technology to do competitive analyses for different companies. That’s becoming more popular as people become more data-obsessed. It’s really actionable, the insights we get – almost a prescription for what the marketing strategy should look like.” Increasingly, technology has come into the fore on both sides of the agency’s desk. “We’ve seen a huge amount of growth in the crypto currency space,” Carnett said. One client, based in the Ukraine, is Crypto Exchange Ranks, “the Dow Jones of the crypto world, to show people how secure the tokens are they are investing. They have real time updated two times per second. It’s a tool for investors but also a tool for crypto currency companies to find out where their exposures are so they can identify them.” In the business sector, Marketing Maven spearheaded research for the rebranding of the Small Business Administration, which rolled out new logos and collateral in April. Handling all these accounts are the agency’s 15 employees, with 13 in the Conejo Valley and two in a New York office that opened in 2005. Carnett considers herself a lifelong learner, constantly re-educating herself and her employees. Four years ago, she enrolled in the Babson College curriculum-guided Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program at Long Beach City College to expand her professional breadth. “I feel like I’m educating every single day,” continued Carnett, who routinely dispatches staffers to conferences and webinars. “We have to be early adopters (of digital advances) so we can advise our clients.” If gender influences her management style, it’s indirect. “I consider myself one of the guys,” Carnett said. “I don’t think that I necessarily quote-unquote ‘lead like a woman, throw like a girl.’” She credits her soccer experience for building her skills to be a “tough but fair leader. I demand results for my client.” – Michael Aushenker