Everything about SG360° President and CEO Edward (Ed) Carroll’s professional history has put him exactly where he’s supposed to be: plotting the growth of a multi-faceted marketing services firm through a rapidly evolving industry. The foresight to know when change is imminent and the steady hand to steer the course are skills acquired during his 10-year stint in the United States Navy, followed by decades of wide-ranging banking industry experience and corporate governance.

Ed credits the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received his Bachelor of Resource Management, with conditioning him to remain calm and focused, even in the midst of adversity. After his service, he spent years in the banking industry—while earning his Master of Finance from the University of Chicago—which gave him the opportunity to observe how companies in a wide range of verticals operated. He realized that, “Over time, pattern recognition leads to fundamental insights into the common challenges businesses of all stripes face.” That insight delivers what Ed calls “a compelling vision of the future,” that he relies on to evolve SG360° to best serves clients.

“As a long-time leader in the direct mail space, our traditional role had been as a price-based product provider. But our partners’ needs are constantly changing. In late 2021, I took a long look at the industry and understood we needed to evolve. We needed to expand the scope of our operations, adding performance-based solutions to help our partners improve their marketing results,” Ed explains.

In 2022, he began that journey by building a massive in-house data stack, adding new data science and creative expertise to leverage that data, and significantly expanding digital print capabilities to super-charge direct mail personalization to increase engagement.

A key part of those efforts was finding and nurturing the right people. “Obviously, a strong balance sheet is critical to success,” Ed observes. “But it’s also about everything that’s not on the balance sheet. Successful companies have one set of well-articulated behaviors that foster a common culture across all areas. You need people who are focused and who can act in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity—people who can hold strategic and tactical thoughts in their heads at the same time.”

Ed is a Certified Public Accountant and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. A voracious reader, he stays on top of current events with The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. In his spare time, Ed enjoys reading biographies of U.S. presidents (16 down… 31 to go—so far) and regular walks with his wife of over 30 years.