Having sold the Canal Street consultancy to the Burson Marsteller network three years ago, Mr Carroll has now finally decided - it is time to try something new.
"One personal ambition is that I would quite like to win a BAFTA," said Mr Carroll, who lives with his wife and two children in Alderley Edge.
"That might mean investing in some sort of film or TV venture.
"The important thing for me is that I have now displaced myself from this very comfort zone after 18 years. That is the main reason that I have decided to leave now."
A native of Leeds, Mr Carroll first came to Manchester as an undergraduate and returned to the city after gaining first experience of the PR industry at Edson Evers.
"I owe coming back to Manchester to Eric Clapton and the Manchester Evening News," he said. "I was coming to see him play in concert and saw a job for a PR executive at an agency called HQO advertised in the paper."
After HQO, Carroll worked at Didsbury agency Eliot Marshall before establishing Communique in Brown Street, Manchester, in 1986.
Among the agency's first clients was Euro Roof, but he remembers winning his first consumer account - for terry towelling nappies - as one of "three or four seminal moments".
"I was really pleased to have won the account and assumed that it was on the strength of our reputation," he recalls. "In fact, they'd got our name from the Yellow Pages."
He added: "The second seminal moment was when we won the Cooperative Retail Society in 1992 - our first major account. That added 50 per cent to our business overnight."
Boddingtons
The next hallmark moment was winning the Boddingtons account in 1995 - an account which Communique still looks after.
Mr Carroll added: "After 10 years, in 1996, I bought out my sleeping partners. We eventually moved to Canal Street.
"In 1996, I think we thought we'd come into the Premier League. We started to win accounts nationally - Heineken, Aga, Thornton's, even Manchester United. It was a real purple patch." The decision to sell was made in Arnhem before a game as part of the Euro 2000 tournament, Mr Carroll explains.
Now in his late forties, he added: "I had seen a lot of agencies flourish, people working into their late fifties, and what they'd created became an albatross around your neck.
"When I'd started the business in 1986, one of my sleeping partners, Jim Moon, had said: `The most important thing you can do is to plan your exit route and build a brand'. That's what I did."
Mr Carroll says that his favourite PR stunt at Communique was the award-winning Julia Heineken story, in which Julia Carling generated masses of publicity by changing her name to that of a Communique client.
His worst nightmare was the "killer washer dryer" story involving a Communique client.
Developments since the sale have included the establishment of a London office.
Communique's new owners now plan to utilise the brand across Europe.
However, Mr Carroll is unlikely to argue with suggestions that Burson Marsteller has failed to be as ambitious as he would have liked so far - leaving him unchallenged in his role as chief executive.
Mr Carroll's departure coincides with the news that current managing director, Nathalie Bagnall, is also leaving.
"I think there will be an external appointment," Mr Carroll adds. "But Communique can continue. The staff here are good, training has been key, and there are enough safety mechanisms in place to protect the company."
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