Today we’d like to introduce you to Garrett Dailey
Hi Garrett, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’ve spent the last decade working either with, in, or on startups in some capacity.
I was an introverted kid, but when I was young, I decided to get into sales as a way to become better at dealing with people. My first sales job was at a movie store (Suncoast) in the mall, and I went from never having sold anything to being #3 in the multi-state region selling memberships and magazine subscriptions.
From there, I ended up selling $300-$400 hair straighteners on a kiosk outside the movie store in the mall. I never became amazing at this, but I had the realization that I didn’t love pushy, high-pressure sales.
My hometown is a pretty terrible place for an ambitious young person, and the only two ways to get out were the military (which I considered but decided against) and college (which I didn’t want to go to but seemed to be the better pick), so I made a deal with the universe that if I got into college I would never do pushy sales again.
I ended up getting into the Poole College of Management at NCSU in the spring semester with only one other person (it was apparently hard to do), and I finally got out of my hometown.
Unfortunately, I hated school and spent a lot of the three semesters I lasted horribly depressed. I knew it wasn’t the right path, but I had no plan and didn’t know what to do next.
About a week before I failed out of my third semester, some buddies who I used to work at the kiosk with told me they were starting a valet trash company for apartments.
Naturally, I jumped at the chance to do anything at all besides this, so I jumped in, and we ran it for a year. I had some design skill from various hobbies in childhood, but I ended up coming up with the brand and the website, and I really loved the work.
We tried everything, including a coat drive, attending an apartment industry conference, and even hand-delivering dollhouse trash cans full of candy with our business card to our target complexes.
We go nowhere, however THREE YEARS later, our ideal client sent me a message on LinkedIn saying “we’re ready to talk now.”
This taught me that whatever I was going to do, I wanted to find something worth sticking out. Trash, sadly, wasn’t that.
I ended up moving on a whim with my co-founder to Colorado Springs and shortly after, we had a huge falling out. At this point, I resolved that I was going to find a way to have to depend on no one and, as fate would have it, my trainer at the microchip factory I ended up working at suggested I go get a job at the Tesla Gigafactory in Reno.
I applied and got the job, but I was so broke at the time that I could only manage the move if I took my last $200 or so and bought a tent and a sleeping bag.
In the state of Nevada, there’s a lot of land designated BLM (Bureau of Land Management), which basically means it’s unusable for development and you can camp there.
I drove out and ended up living in the desert between Reno and the Gigafactory for a month. This was the best month of my life, although the weather was freezing and windy, so my tent got destroyed twice and I ended up moving in with some people I met at work.
Around this time, I had started writing a philosophy blog that was getting some traction (I had 100k views at the peak), and I built a small following on Twitter that led into creating a small media company of (unpaid) writers, podcasters and microinfluencers.
My first team was able to write an ebook, then they all quit. The second one was better, and we managed to put on a 30+ speaker digital conference, but we monetized poorly and that team quit, too.
Around this time I moved back to Raleigh from Reno in search of more opportunity. I first ended up getting a job working for someone who would turn out to be a con artist who fled Canada, but that didn’t last long before the team I built and I caught on.
We took most of the team and started a new company that was going to do the same kind of marketing, but this was a month before COVID happened, so that was short-lived. I ended up working at the design agency of a guy I went to school with.
Originally, I was hired to design a deck of cards for him, but I realized he needed a lot more help on the internals of the business, and by the end of it, I was Director of Ops, and I hired, trained, and managed designers as well as handled client accounts and delivery. We always had an issue getting people other than the founder to sell, so when I figured out how to do it myself, I realized I could just start my own agency instead of getting paid poverty wages to run someone else’s business.
I founded my first agency, Aion Enterprises, and designed branding and websites for people- primarily startups. Somewhere in the process, I also became Chief of Staff for a Web3 startup (Ideamarket) and got to build them a design & marketing team.
While at Ideamarket, I got to work on my first pitch deck and I helped build the pitch that raised the company $600k. The Web3 market had started to turn and I realized the company was going to need to pivot to extend the runway needed to do so, so I suggested the founder fire me and my teams to let development continue to make the pivot work.
I had been thinking about a startup idea for a creator-0wned social media platform for few years, and having seen firsthand how the process worked, figured now was a great time to take a shot. (It wasn’t; the market started imploding over the lifespan of this company, i.e. Spring to Fall of 2022.)
I was able to design a mocked-up app and a deck, and my cofounder and I were able to get letters of intent from enough content creators to be persuasive to VCs. One of my advisors, Brian Schuster, helped us get meetings with 5 VCs.
The first time I pitched, I got to slide three and the investor said, “can you just skip to the end?” (This is as bad as it could go.)
The fifth time, I got an offer. The terms were terrible and he wanted us to do a bunch of stuff that wasn’t in the roadmap and, frankly, made no sense, so I declined it.
Then Elon bought Twitter, and the idea of trying to keep going with a social media company in an imploding market with the richest man alive as a competitor sounded less appealing.
I went back to running my agency full time, but I added pitch narrative & deck development as a service because I figured I had some natural talent with it, and if I was going to try a startup in the future, then I’d practice by helping enough people raise until I was the best in the world at it.
My advisor, Brian, and I ended up working together in a few other capacities, and eventually we teamed up to create Lucid, my current company. Aion was confusing and hard to pitch, so this was kind of a rebrand and a repositioning that was much needed, but it was also sort of the same company as before.
We ended up doing a lot of decks and helping people raise millions, but Brian recently left the company after a little over a year. I realized that the company would be best served by focusing hard on only being the pitch company, and that brings us to today, where I exclusively help founders tell their company’s story in a way that’s clear, concise, and compelling so that they can get funded more easily.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
No, honestly the whole thing was wildly painful and difficult. I’ve had multiple entire teams quit on me, almost everything I did failed, and I’ve even been dumped (for reasons I theorize were at least in part related to the business not doing well. C’est la vie.)
However, I love the work and probably wouldn’t be able to get a normal job at this point. Plus, my bizarre set of experiences and the skills I built along the way have seemingly led to me being unreasonably good at understanding a variety of businesses and the way to tell their stories better.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
A lot of founders struggle to get their start-up funded because they don’t know how to pitch it. I help founders pitch with clarity so they can close their round.
I’ve had the honor and privelege to work with some of the coolest (and most complicated) companies in my career, from guys who use quantum algorithms to help Airbus and other build airplanes faster, cheaper, and safer to Gold-medal winning athletes and people raising nearly $200MM to create a health-focused community development.
People who know me would probably say that I’m really good at helping simplify and explain even the most complicated things in the world (one of my current clients is an Oxford molecular biologist, and, let me tell you first-hand, molecular biology is the most complicated thing in the world I’ve ever heard about), and hopefully that I’m extremely dedicated and will go the extra ten miles to make sure they’re happy and successful.
My favorite achievement to date was with a company founded by the guy who built the sales team for a certain company in the ‘Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For’ so well that they hit $1B faster than anyone ever.
On paper, there was no reason they should have had difficulty raising money. They had over $4M in bootstrapped revenue with a product, distribution, happy customers, and a huge, growing market. Plus, he’s one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met, if not one of the best in the world.
However, the problem was specifically the pitch. I helped them simplify it and make it compelling to investors, and they went from getting no interest to their first call-back before we even finished the whole process.
Now, they’re in due dilligence with like 8 different firms, one of whom said the coolest thing ever: “we don’t normally do this, but we’re going to expedite the dilligence process for you.”
That was the first time I had a perfect storm where the only issue was the pitch, so it really validated that what I was doing was important and made the difference between getting a round closed or getting blown off by VCs.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
VC is in a weird spot, but it was probably over-inflated over the last decade. The future of startups is likely going to be small, agile companies that can leverage AI to copy things that huge companies do and make them cheaper, so I expect something of a shift from huge tech companies to myriad small players and indie hackers.
For the companies that still need to go the traditional venture route, it’s going to be even more important to be able to tell a compelling story, because VCs are much more picky and guarded than they were in the era of zero-interest rate money. The times are changing, and the bar is higher than it used to be.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.pitchlucid.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gcdailey/
