Josh Sample is the founder and Operating Partner of Drive Social Media. Sample is an entrepreneur, author, and speaker who has contributed to such publications as Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and NHL.com, among countless others.

Sample started his first business, a midwest promotions company in the mid-2000’s, at the age of 19. In 2011, Josh started Drive Social Media, which initially was a creative-focused agency with an emphasis on saving small business owner’s time by managing daily organic posts for their companies.

As time went on, Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm underwent drastic changes and began prioritizing paid media over organic content in 2014. It was at this point that Sample felt he needed to make a radical change to the agency’s business model and pivot to a 100% paid strategy for Drive’s partners.

An unpopular decision at the time, Drive lost half their staff due to employees not believing in the new vision for the company. Sample partnered with entrepreneur Andrew Foley to acquire the funding needed to support a new strategy and implement a workforce that believed in the power of paid social media.

Drive grew at a steady, if not unremarkable pace for the next few years until Drive opened a new office in Nashville, TN in 2016 and gained it’s first franchise partner, Orangetheory Fitness, in late 2017. The influx of business allowed Drive to double-down on it’s growth strategy and the company experienced a meteoric boom in revenue, reaching the $20MM mark by the end of the decade in 2020.

Since then Drive has continued to grow at an annual rate of over 25% year-over-year. The company now has offices in Nashville, TN, Miami, FL, Atlanta, GA, and Tampa FL, with their headquarters in St. Louis, MO. Drive currently boasts over 225 total employees and over 3,000 individual partners.