Alex Daly: How to Scale from Solo Entrepreneur to Thriving Team
The future is bright for Alex Daly and her company Daly. Images of Alex by Julia Hembree
Last year, when we interviewed designer Hamish Smyth, we accidentally connected with one of our new favorite people–his wife Alex Daly. She founded and runs Daly, a modern comms consultancy whose past and present clients include Art Blocks, Freitag, Pentagram, Penguin Random House, and more. The business evolved from Daly’s work as “The Crowdsourceress”, the go-to expert who helped people raise money on Kickstarter. She would help clients tell their stories to fundraise and then, once they got off the ground, noticed a real need to continue to tell their story. Enter Daly and her 12-person team: They’ve grown from one client in 2019 to 20 today.
Full disclosure: We’ve worked with team Daly on a number of stories over the past year, and we can confidently say they are fantastic and nail the real story every time. (If you’ve never worked with PR people, you might not know how bad it can be–in a previous career chapter, we once kept getting pitched for a magazine well after it had closed.) So we sat down with Daly–also a new mom to baby Jules– to hear how she built her company, scaled her skills across a team, and navigated losing more than half of their clients during the pandemic to become the thriving business they are today.
The Daly brand is on point.
Did you always aspire to open a business?
Both my parents were entrepreneurs. My dad owned a software company, and my mom owned a marketing company. And so to me owning your own business was normal. I would go to their offices after school and camp out in the conference room and do homework. There were the sounds of phones, the coffee machine and people running around. That was a natural thing. When I graduated from college, it was organic for me to become an entrepreneur because I felt like that's what people always did.
Who was client number one?
The Joan Didion documentary. I came from a world of documentaries and, working in the documentary space, you’re always trying to chase funding. In 2014, I was approached by Joan Didion's niece Annabelle, to help raise money for the documentary on Kickstarter. We launched that campaign and it was funded within 24 hours. When the campaign ended, they had secured the funding for it, but they couldn’t stop talking to the community they had built, so we worked together on social media and press during the launch of the film in theaters.
“We all bring non-traditional experience to the comms table and we apply that to how we can pitch stories.”
Between client one and 20, what was your most challenging moment building the business?
In January 2020, we officially launched the company and leased this beautiful office space in Soho for a year. Then the pandemic happened and I got a call every day from clients either terminating our contract or significantly lowering our retainer. We lost 70% of our business and had to pivot.
At that point, we had moved from crowdfunding campaigns to a comms consultancy, so I had said no more crowdfunding campaigns. But crowdfunding started growing again during the pandemic because people lost their jobs. As people took on side projects, we got this influx of crowdfunding campaigns and that sustained the company. We stayed the course and didn’t have to let anyone go. We were very resilient. That’s what you had to do during the pandemic–get creative and be really, really freaking resilient. We started 2021 with three people and by the end of the year tripled in size.
What's Daly’s secret sauce?
Our team members have a diverse professional backgrounds and we apply that diversity to storytelling. My background is in documentary film. I was a writer and a fundraiser. We have somebody on the team that has worked in film production. We have somebody that worked as a journalist and writer, another a graphic designer, another a corporate strategist. We all bring non-traditional experience to the comms table and we apply that to how we can pitch stories.
You have a good reputation in the industry, so people came to you for your services. What was it like to scale your skills into a business and team of people?
My name is on the door, literally. And with my crowdfunding business, I had a nickname in the industry, “The Crowdsourceress”, and I wrote the book, The Crowdsourceress. My work was tied to my identity. People came to me and said they wanted to work with the Crowdsourceress, and I had a hard time untangling those two things. When we evolved the crowdfunding agency into this comms consultancy Daly, my biggest question was: How can I grow this into a sustainable company that's not just me all the time?
I worked with an amazing business consultant, Holly Howard. She asked me about our culture, org chart, and values. And I didn’t know any of those things. I had to build the foundation in order to build the company.
It can feel like your personal and work life are intimately intertwined, and I had to learn how to not try to be in control of everything that was happening. With letting go comes trust. If you're building a team and building an organization, you have to hire people that you trust that can carry on the work.
“How I have approached growing Daly sustainably is how I quickly approached being a mom—I built a team.”
Everyone wants to get their story out into the world. What’s one key principle everyone should keep in mind when trying to do that?
People don't think enough about who is on the receiving end of the pitch. Why are they interested in this? Why does it matter to them? Why should they care about it?
You not only tell the stories of your clients, you also have your own house publication, the smart and aptly-titled The Daly News. Why create your own digital publication?
It started with the question of: What is comms today? Because media, like the world, is changing rapidly and constantly. How do you make a statement about who you are? If we're a PR company that's constantly pitching stories about the people that hire us, what are the stories that we're interested in telling? And if we want to be a modern comms consultancy, what does our own media company look like?
We started by interviewing friends of the brand and that morphed into, Who in the world is doing interesting things and how can we highlight them? The Daly News lets us put our words out into the world and distinguish ourselves.
What have you learned about building a business, while building a business?
Everything is culture. Culture is the identity of a company, and you need to know your identity and values. Our four values are urgency, intimacy, transparency, and pivoting. We use them in everything from how we communicate internally to how we talk about ourselves on our website to how we decide which clients we want to take on.
How do you manage your time now to give the time you need to both Jules and your business? Where have you made changes and where have you made sacrifices?
Right after I had Jules, I was tired, attempting to breastfeed, still healing physically, and trying to figure it all out by myself. But it’s interesting because, how I have approached growing Daly sustainably is how I quickly approached being a mom—I built a team. I split caretaking with my husband Hamish. I found a group of women that I could turn to for counsel through difficult moments—my mother and a couple other like-minded moms. We hired our amazing nanny, Shoba, who looks after Jules during the day. I healthily transitioned back to work with the support of my teammates.
Because of this, I luckily haven’t had to make many sacrifices because I have built this community around me. And along the way, Jules has had such wonderful access to all types of people who love him; it doesn’t have to just be me alone.
If you could go back a few years and give your younger self some guidance about starting a business, what would you say?
Build the foundation first. It might seem excessive to create a set of values or an operations manual for a team of one, but if you want to grow, you need those principles to start.
Invest in a lawyer and accountant. It will save you later on.
Don’t work with assholes. It’s a waste of your time and emotional energy.
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