About OneCity Digital

I spent twenty years in nonprofit work before I built my first website. The job came down to telling a story that lands with people who weren't planning to listen — which turns out to be the same job marketing does. I left in 2017 looking for work that wasn't a normal 9-to-5, posted in a small business Facebook group offering to build two websites for free, and ended up with my first two clients. The company that owns OneCity Digital is still called BigBigStory — which tells you what I think marketing actually is.

My grandfather was a builder. I grew up around the work and the people who did it. So when remodelers and custom home builders started showing up as clients, I stayed in that lane. I like the craftsmanship, I like the math (six-figure projects to homeowners with long memories), and I like the fact that most remodelers have no idea how close they are to ranking — their competitors usually aren't doing much, and a few things done right will win the market.

The thing I believe about marketing, more than any other thing: if you confuse people, you lose people. You can drive all the traffic in the world to a website that doesn't speak clearly, and nothing happens. The remodeler I'm proudest of had a client tell them, after we rebuilt their site, "your website spoke directly to me." That's the whole job.

The Lead-Flow System is what we call the work, but the work itself isn't complicated: we fix the technical foundation, build the pages that rank for the searches your buyers actually use, and stack authority signals over time. Most of what wins in this market is doing standard things consistently — which most agencies don't.

I work out of Richmond, VA. Three boys in high school, a dog, married twenty years, and I referee youth soccer on weekends.

— Matt Carroll, Founder, OneCity Digital