Scarry Numbers

Duncan Scarry/37/ Fort Myers

When he was 26, Duncan Scarry quit his job as a graphic designer at a large advertising firm and wrote a business plan for an advertising company that would target auto dealers.

He had two customers and a premise: “Car dealers always make money.”

“We took it to Wachovia Bank,” Scarry recalls. The bankers politely turned away the recently unemployed but ambitious young man who came to them for an unsecured $50,000 loan.

A week later, coincidentally, Wachovia sent Scarry credit cards on which he could borrow as much as $15,000. He dug into savings, too. “I took a bunch of money earmarked for my wife's wedding ring,” he smiles. “We didn't make a lot of money in the beginning.”

Now 11 years later, the two Fort Myers-based agencies Scarry owns — Moore & Scarry Advertising and Haystak Digital Marketing — will post $95 million in billings, a 90% increase from the prior year. The combined firms have 125 employees.

“We've had no problem making money in this space,” says Scarry, now 37.

Part of the reason for the phenomenal growth has been the early adoption of Internet advertising, which rival firms were slow to adopt. “Seventeen percent of our sales are mobile right now,” Scarry says.

The growth has been so rapid that it seemed overwhelming because the staff couldn't handle all the work they were winning at first, upsetting customers who had to wait. “We almost went out of business by being successful,” Scarry says.

But Scarry plowed ahead and let his firm grow as quickly as it could. “You don't always get the opportunity to grow,” he says. “There's an element of winning that takes precedence over money.”

Scarry, who bought out his partner Darren Moore in 2006, says the combined companies now have more than 1,000 customers around the country. “A lot of what we do is inventory-based Internet marketing,” Scarry says. “What dealers market online is critical.”

In addition, auto dealer advertising doesn't vary greatly from one market to another, so Scarry's staff doesn't have to reinvent a new campaign for every customer. “It's all replicable,” he says.

The companies are based in Fort Myers, but about 25 employees are in Denver and Chicago to be closer to customers in the West and Midwest. “It makes good sense to have people in different regions,” Scarry says.

Technology is the key to productivity. “We spend more money on software than we do people,” Scarry says.

The advertising firms' downtown Fort Myers offices look more like a California tech firm than a traditional advertising agency. There's a ping-pong table in the break room, a video-game room and spontaneous Nerf-gun wars can erupt at any time.

Scarry says he isn't sure where he got his entrepreneurial drive because he says he grew up the son of a hippy college professor. “I really don't like losing,” he says. And, he adds, “I was always the troublemaker.”

While Scarry focuses now exclusively on auto dealers, he says there may be opportunities to provide the same services in other industries. Law is one of those potential fields, and prospective clients could be law firms that specialize in divorce, personal injury and DUI defense. Medical could also be lucrative, he says.

Sounds like trouble for the competition.