[the originals] John Daly: Fueled by Good Work and Good Works

By Liese Gardner

I’ve just come crashing out of a closet piled much too high with boxes filled with appliance warranties, bank statements, and tax filings. But there are also boxes of photos, and mementos. Of course what I was looking for was on the very bottom of all this – a box of Special Events magazines from each month I was there.

I was looking for the issue from March 1995 because in it was what I wrote about John Daly and why he was honored with the Gala Award of Excellence that year.

John Daly and his grandson, Austin

Why look up something from 15 years ago? For the past few years, as I’ve listened in on Twitter and Facebook conversations, John’s name would come up. Invariably someone would wonder what he’s been doing. I realized there was an entire events generation who didn’t know John, or other early innovators. They were people who fueled others, who, after four decades in the industry, are still doing great work and who still have much to teach. And, of course, they are still driven by passion.

Here is what I wrote about John then. And it holds up now.

This year the Gala Award of Excellence went to John Daly, a man who takes on whatever he is doing with a vitality and wholeheartedness that only comes from doing what you love.

His longevity in business might be attributed to a sign above his desk that reads, “Big Fun is Serious Business.” While having big fun, he has realized several of his serious goals. As owner of the event design firm, John Daly, Inc., he has created the floral work on the Pope’s altar when he visited Los Angeles Dodger Stadium and the Coliseum. Another dream was realized when Daly moved to Santa Barbara and made his business nationally based.

His basic philosophy is to know his boundaries and work within his level of expertise, which for a man of Daly’s talent is a level that has yet to be found. He lives and works by doing his best and making sure that everything he touches is of the highest quality and ethics.

A self-taught man, he is now turning his attention to the continuing education of others in the industry. He began working in this industry before it was an industry and now that it is a viable business; his goal is to bring a more wide-spread respect to it by teaching everything from professionalism to how to create a budget.

Soon there may come a day when there won’t be a box pleat or floral flourish that hasn’t in some way been influenced by John Daly. But for now it’s safe to say there are many people in this industry who have been positively affected by this energetic messenger of the special event word.

Not much has changed except that today, he’s scaled back the business and tried to work only locally. “I was gone two to three week out of a month for the past 25 years,” he says from his Santa Barbara office. “Now it’s time to move over and let the new guys have a chance. And it’s time for me to have a life other than just events.”

This doesn’t mean that he didn’t love every minute of what he was doing but that his priorities refocused from the people he mentored in the events industry to the youths at risk he is mentoring today.

John donates 20 hours a week to teaching classes in civility and etiquette to young people who have been court ordered to do community service. “Eight hours of this can be my class so they come for three classes, two hours each and the final class is dinner in a restaurant where they put all they have learned to use.”

He also is working with the Santa Barbara County Jail and working with prisoners about to be released. It gives them a leg up on how to look for a job and get back into their community.

“Etiquette has always been a big thing for me,” John says. “There’s a lot of research supporting the fact that if people at risk don’t know how to do something they respond with violence to cover it up, or they get disinterested and make fun of if. I believe this gives them self confidence to face certain situations that may be foreign to them in their lives.”

John has never found himself short on confidence yet ironically it was his confidence — marked by his big, booming voice and high energy level — that actually put him at risk of alienating people during one of the most important times in his career.

It was 1998 and he was producing 10 large World Cup parties in France for Gillette. “This was the pinnacle of my career,” he says. “And it was also the time that I learned such an incredible amount of things not only about design, but about finding integrity in working with other cultures.”

He began to see events as more than pretty parties, but as experiences that take place within a global context of politics and people.

“A perfect example of this on a small scale … I’d go into these warehouses in France and they were filled with antiques. I’d get so excited about the possibilities and start talking louder and faster. I had no idea I was being so American and consumptive, the epitome of the ‘Ugly American.’ Fortunately someone had the good sense to tell me to take it down a notch; that I was alienating people. The perception I was giving was that of a bully.”

The experience also taught him more about financial responsibility. “The bigger the job, the faster you can lose more money. With a large budget, you can begin to think that money can be pulled from ‘here’ to ‘here,’ but you can pull so much money out that by the end you haven’t made anything.”

“I’ve been in this business 45 years now, and seen a lot of people come and go. And I’ve found this to be the secret: To be truly successful, be an artist, but also be a business person.”

What I wrote in 1995 still holds so true. John Daly is a messenger … whether his message is events or social skills, the vision and intent is still the same – to make the world more beautiful one event, or person, at a time.

John can be reached at John Daly Inc., International, www.jdalyinc.com, 805.452.2747, john@jdalyinc.com

 Building a facade around a tent…

 So it looked like this.

 A floating dining table in Florida. John worked with Mona Meretsky from COMCOR on this event.

A ballroom that would change colors throughout the night.