"We didn’t need to conform to anyone’s standards": a day in the life of Alex Daly

I have built Daly so that I primarily focus on the high-level details that make the company what it is: its culture, new business, marketing, and vision. I find that approaching my role this way – versus overseeing client work – empowers my team to do their best work.

As a fully remote team, the day starts with everyone exchanging cute hellos with each other on Slack before diving into their respective tasks. Mine typically include catching up on proposals, connecting with my brilliant Managing Director & Partner Ally Bruschi about priorities for the day and week across culture and ops things (she keeps me focused, honest, and sane), and new business calls.

When I graduated from college I was on a professional trajectory to becoming a journalist. After working fact checking jobs at various magazines and picking up freelance writing gigs, I realized that journalism wasn’t my path. I had minored in film in college, and decided to give that industry a crack instead, so I took on a production role at a boutique documentary film company, which led me into the world of crowdfunding.

In my role at the documentary firm, I was working as a production manager, managing a team, working on several film projects, and writing lots of grants to raise money for those projects. I found the grant writing process so slow and disheartening, but I wanted to stick with the job because I figured it could eventually lead me to higher positions in film. One day, a film editor told me about a documentary he was working on, and asked if I knew anything about Kickstarter (he had eyed my grant writing skills). This was 2012, and my short answer was: pretty much nothing.

While I didn’t know what crowdfunding was or how it worked, I told him I was game to help, and learned everything on the fly, from building the campaign page to Googling how to write a press release. We launched, and by the last day of the 30-day campaign, we had surpassed our goal by over 60 percent.

I received a lot of press around my crowdfunding agency, and it attracted the attention of a literary agent. When I agreed to publish a book on the subject, I gave myself a wild timeline: deliver a manuscript in 6 months, while also running my company. When The Crowdsourceress was published, I was thrilled, but it was also a blur. I can happily look back with a lot more acknowledgement and pride now than at the time.

Around 2018 – four years after officially launching my crowdfunding agency – crowdfunding clients began asking me for ongoing PR support to help sustain that awareness and impact that my team and I had helped create for them through their campaign.

I was interested in PR as a next potential path and extension of the work I was already doing, but quickly realized that, to take on PR, we would need to modernize and broaden it to include all areas that touched the world of communications. So, we envisioned an approach that was far quicker, flexible, and more intimate when it came to comms—that’s how Daly was born.

As a founder of a bustling agency, we are often confronted with challenges that we need to handle with speed, agility, and empathy. This is where Daly’s four core values come in – urgency, transparency, intimacy, and pivoting. By leaning into these four values when faced with challenges or obstacles, my team and I can always chart a course that serves us and our clients best.

One example that will always stay with me happened during a time that severely disrupted most people and companies worldwide. Within a year of officially launching Daly in 2019, we were seeing rapid success, with high-profile clients like Penguin Random House, Pentagram, and Tinder; then the pandemic hit, and our budgets were slashed, contracts were terminated – we've all heard it before! The future seemed bleak.

Building my team into what it is today. As I shared in the previous question, we launched Daly in earnest in 2019, grew quickly, and then when catastrophe hit, we had to rebuild. It allowed us to rethink what kind of agency we wanted to be – focused foremost on culture. Daly has blossomed into a wonderful, warm place that radiates a lot of joy.

Much like publishing my book, that time of my life was a bit foggy. I was managing too many crowdfunding campaigns without the right support system or company culture, and was feeling burnt out. It took me some time to submerge from that moment to have a deeper level of appreciation.

Still, I recall something very special at the time. When I made the Forbes list, I was already thinking about the next thing – new project, new challenge, new obstacle to overcome. I remember my mom telling me to pause and celebrate this win. We threw a party at my office, and I was surrounded by family, friends, colleagues, clients all celebrating this win, together. It was a lovely moment!

We’ve been lucky enough to work with some incredible designers and agencies at Daly. While a lot of progress has been made, there is still so much more to be done when it comes to inclusivity – and we find that the best work happens when these commitments come from within an organization.

A great example of a design company that has held themselves accountable and led the conversation on this front is the incredible team at SYLVAIN. Each year, they publish an Impact Assessment, including reports like Accountability Frameworks through which any consultancy can orient itself around progress, while also taking stock of their own performance to-date.

Absolutely! I was diagnosed late in life, and both my perfectionist tendencies and obsessions got in the way of a lot, early on in my career. But what has impacted my career even more is the therapy I have been in for the past 5 years to treat my OCD. It has opened up my mind significantly, made me more self aware, and empathic – both in my personal life, and as a professional and founder, too.

Monday.com, Google Drive, Slack.

I have a few! Headspace, IDEO, Discord, Delta.

PR is an ever-changing landscape – with the most dramatic changes having unfolded since 2020. The most effective PR approach today is one that is both holistic and niche, and requires nimble, creative, media-obsessed comms folks who can think outside the box. Most agencies are really lacking in that department, and need to take a more proactive, modern approach to succeed.

Keep going.