Long before Cory Ames started Grow Ensemble, his own digital marketing agency, his interest in the field began with a dream of living on a beach somewhere. “I got interested in doing digital marketing because you can do it from wifi, you can do it in coffee shops. It was very appealing work for me,” he says.
He began to teach himself how to build websites and learned search engine optimization to drive traffic to those websites. A couple years into this learning experience, he connected with his soon-to-be boss, who offered to teach him everything he knew about digital marketing. He took a job as the fourth employee in his marketing agency while a junior at Gonzaga University, balancing both work and school. Eventually, he withdrew from school to work full-time for the agency, which served dental practices all over the US and Canada.
After working every position in the company, his boss, who had moved on to another business, promoted him to CEO. At the age of 22, he was managing 23 full-time employees and a multi-million dollar marketing agency. “It was way over my head,” he says.
He didn’t let that stop him, but instead used that experience to develop both tactical skills and resilience. “That experience just gave me an incredible amount of resilience, but as well, showed me a lot of what I didn’t like about business,” he explains. This glimpse behind the curtain of the business brought with it the first-hand realization that “money does not necessarily equal morality.”
“I just felt very disillusioned with business and marketing and sales in general,” he says.
But he didn’t let the experience totally turn him away from the world of business. Instead, he started to rethink the way business is done. “How can we do this in a better, more ethical, and more socially and communally focused way?” he began to ask.
That led him to launching GrowEnsemble, a digital marketing training and consultancy for social enterprises and social entrepreneurs. He found that he was able to use the skills he learned from marketing to help business owners that genuinely cared about people.
When he first moved to San Antonio, two and a half years ago, he bounced around between coworking spaces, including The Impact Guild briefly after its opening. After trying out a few other places, he hadn’t yet found a culture fit. It took a couple of people in the social entrepreneurship community in San Antonio suggesting he connect with Sarah, the founder of The Impact Guild, to make his way back.
“I actually think the tipping point for me to be like, ‘Okay, I think I’m going to go back to The Impact Guild,’ was one of the Fireside Chats. I think it was Ram Gonzalez, and the conversation was about ethics and gentrification and community development… That is a big question of mine. Can you develop a community without it being to the detriment of the people who currently live there?”
He was encouraged to find a community space that was tackling these hard conversations that are directly affecting our city. Now, he’s getting more involved at The Impact Guild by hosting our first ever Digital Marketing Accelerator. This series of workshops will help social entrepreneurs learn what’s needed to manage and sustain their website and have people find it.