When Greg Daily found himself homeless as a teenager, becoming a successful entrepreneur seemed an impossibility.
Aged 19 back in 2001, for six months he slept wherever he could in Minneapolis.
Short of money and struggling to find long-term employment, Daily couldn’t afford to pay rent. So he had to ask friends and acquaintances if he could sleep on their sofas. On a few occasions he had to make do with a kitchen floor.
Business, though, was in his DNA.
“My grandfather sold brooms out of the back of a van,” he says, recalling riding with him as young boy, as they would travel to sell cleaning equipment.
It taught Daily a lesson from a young age: “Businesses feed families.”
Now 43, his life today is a million miles away from when he had to go to sleep hungry on a friend’s sofa.
Daily is the founder and boss of a Denver-based digital marketing firms called Science in Advertising. Launched in 2019, it serves businesses from members of the Fortune 500 list of the largest US companies, down to “mom-and-pop shops” – small, family-owned retailers.
It helps all these clients manage their online advertising, enabling them to reach additional customers through platforms such as Google, Facebook and Instagram.
Despite the business lessons gained from his grandfather, Daily admits that his family life was “broken” when he was growing up in Denver.
“My parents were divorced when I was young… I was raised by a single mother.”
When he was 10-years-old, his grandfather passed away, leaving his mother struggling to feed four children. To make money she’d sell clothes and jewellery, which Daily says was “a big part of what helped us survive”.
As he reached adulthood, Daily moved around the US, spending six months in Texas with his grandmother, and six months with his father, before falling into couch surfing.
Travelling to Colorado for a construction job, Daily says the moment that changed his life was meeting his wife at a church. Twenty three years later they are still married.
Seeing that she was earning more money and working fewer hours, Daily decided to go back to college in 2008. He jokes that rather than it being “a romantic story” he realised that he needed qualifications to be able to earn more money.
