When Josh Sample founded Drive Social Media at 25 years old, he wasn’t trying to build another advertising agency. He was trying to fix something he thought was broken.

Businesses were spending thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars on marketing and being handed reports filled with impressions, clicks, likes and engagement. The numbers looked impressive, but one question was surprisingly difficult to answer: Did any of it actually make the business money?

That question would help turn a small St. Louis startup into a national digital marketing agency, shape a new approach to marketing accountability and, more than a decade later, help earn Sample a place among the St. Louis Business Journal’s 2026 40 Under 40 honorees.

The recognition comes at an interesting point in Sample’s story. He stepped away from Drive’s day-to-day operations in 2024 to focus on new ventures, leaving the company he started to the leadership team that had grown up alongside it. For an entrepreneur who spent more than a decade building his first company, that transition brought a different definition of success.

“Drive was like my baby,” Sample said. “You spend years raising it, worrying about it, teaching it everything you know. Eventually, if you’ve done your job, you have to let it go out into the world without you.”

Today, Sample remains connected to the company he founded, including through his role on the board, but he is no longer involved in its daily operations. Every few months, he’ll visit an office or hear from an employee who wants to meet “the guy who built this place.”

Those moments have given him something founders rarely get while they’re still in the middle of building: the chance to see what remains after they step away.

Betting on Where Marketing Was Going

In Drive’s early days, social media marketing looked very different. Brands chased followers, agencies celebrated engagement and organic reach was king. Sample saw something else coming.

In 2014, he made the decision to move Drive away from an organic model and toward paid, targeted social advertising built around measurable business outcomes. At the time, it wasn’t the obvious move. It was expensive, it required changing the direction of a young company, and it happened before much of the industry recognized where social advertising was headed.

Sample’s belief was simple: Businesses shouldn’t judge marketing by how much attention it generated. They should judge it by what happened next – Did the phone ring? Did a lead become a customer? Did it generate revenue? That philosophy became Drive’s foundation.

What began in a small downtown St. Louis apartment grew into an agency serving businesses across the country, with a team spanning multiple markets and a history of national recognition, including appearances on the Inc. 5000 and Inc. 500 and honors from Adweek and the St. Louis Business Journal.

For Sample, those milestones carried particular significance because he knew there would eventually come a point when his next chapter would take him beyond the company. “Entrepreneurs talk a lot about starting companies. We don’t talk nearly as much about what it feels like to step away from one,” Sample said. “For years, Drive was the thing I woke up thinking about and went to bed thinking about. Stepping down in 2024 was probably a little like sending your kid off to college. You’re still there. You still care. But you’re not supposed to call every night and tell them how to live.”

From Marketing Metrics to Business Intelligence

One of the lasting products of Sample’s time building Drive was Marketing Milk, the proprietary analytics platform developed to connect marketing activity with what happens inside a business. The platform was designed around the same frustration that led Sample to start Drive in the first place. Instead of stopping the story at vanity metrics, Marketing Milk was built to follow the trail to customers, transactions and revenue.

The idea reflected Sample’s belief that marketing shouldn’t require a leap of faith. Business owners should understand what they’re spending and what their marketing investment is producing (or not producing).

Technology has changed dramatically since Drive’s earliest days. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the industry again. Platforms have evolved, attribution has become more sophisticated and the tools available to marketers today would have been nearly unimaginable when Sample started the company.

But the question behind it all hasn’t changed much: Is this actually working?

Building a Company, and the People Inside It

Ask Sample about Drive’s growth, however, and the conversation rarely stays focused on revenue for long. One of the most visible fingerprints of his leadership is the number of people who have built careers alongside the company.

Drive has made developing and promoting talent from within a defining part of its culture. Employees who entered the organization in junior and mid-level roles have gone on to lead major areas of the business.

That didn’t happen accidentally. Sample personally invested time in recurring leadership and professional development sessions, and worked with employees on strategic thinking, entrepreneurship, accountability and leadership. The goal wasn’t simply to create better managers. It’s to give talented people the tools, confidence and opportunity to grow far beyond the roles they started in.

For Sample, the true measure of leadership is how many others you empower to lead. And that belief in giving people the opportunity to make an impact doesn’t stop at Drive’s doors.

An Impact That Continued Beyond the Business

That focus on creating opportunities extended beyond careers inside Drive. During Sample’s time leading the organization, the company established Drive Gives Back, giving employees paid time away from work to volunteer with community causes they personally care about.

Rather than choosing a single corporate cause, the initiative put that choice into employees’ hands. One person might spend the day supporting a school, and another might beautify a neighborhood or join a pack walk with the APA Adoption Center.

The philosophy reflected something Sample came to believe as the company grew: A business’s impact isn’t limited to the products it sells or the revenue it generates. It also shows up in what the people connected to that business go on to do.

The Founder After the Company

For years, Sample had a list of things he hoped to accomplish with his first company before turning more of his attention toward whatever came next. Being recognized among St. Louis’ 40 Under 40 was one of them.

That, in part, is what makes the timing of the honor meaningful. Sample isn’t receiving the recognition while sitting behind the CEO’s desk at Drive or overseeing its day-to-day operations. He’s receiving it after stepping away, and with enough distance to look back at what he created like a proud parent.

The company is still there, the people are still building it, and the ideas that shaped it are still being carried forward. And Sample has moved into the next stage of his entrepreneurial career, pursuing new ventures while remaining connected to the company that started it all. More than a decade after founding Drive Social Media at 25, the St. Louis Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 recognition puts a punctuation mark on that chapter.

After spending much of his twenties and thirties building, growing and eventually learning to let go of his first baby, Sample is starting an entirely new adventure: the birth of his first real child, a baby girl. There’s something poetic about the way these milestones overlap. As one chapter of his life comes full circle, his most important is just beginning.

The St. Louis Business Journal will recognize Sample and the other members of its 2026 40 Under 40 class on November 5, 2026, at FanDuel Sports Network Live! in St. Louis.