Hidden Gems: Meet Carolyn Daughters

Today we’d like to introduce you to Carolyn Daughters.

Hi Carolyn, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Eons ago, I started a company called Gower Street. Now, Gower Street is in London, near the University of London campus, the British Museum, and Russell Square. I lived in a Victorian brownstone on Gower Street, just a block from the most glorious three-story Waterstones Bookshop in the history of ever. New books, used books, lifetimes of learning in one stunner of a building.

A few years back, a former professor told me that Waterstones had closed. For a moment, I felt short of breath, as if I had learned of the death of an old friend. I later learned my professor was wrong. A case of mistaken identity.

Gower Street is where I studied Shakespeare and learned to love room-temperature Guinness and ate cereal for breakfast and lunch (and sometimes dinner) and gathered with a dozen others to watch Twin Peaks on Monday nights. It’s where I first experienced the joys of wandering and getting lost, along with the flood of peace that comes from both solitude and a sense of community. It’s where I learned to get my bearings.

Gower Street is named after John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer who wrote poetry in Latin, French, and English. English wasn’t used much in formal writing at the time. John Gower saw possibility, took chances, and helped shape the language. He’s interred in Southwark Cathedral on the South Bank. His tomb can be found in the cathedral’s nave. You can visit him there. I have.

G. K. Chesterton references Gower Street in his book Orthodoxy. He writes, “Nothing can save [the madman] but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast. A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.”

How to break the “circular rut”? Perform “the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.” Sound advice indeed.

Today, my company, Gower Street, does business as CarolynDaughters.com. But my company is and always will be Gower Street at its core. Gower Street was my home, the place where I fell in love. London will always and forever be my first.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Like many of us, I’ve ridden a roller coaster most of my life. Low lows, high highs, and quite a few placid stretches.

As a young child, I felt unsafe at home, school, most everywhere I went. From kindergarten on, I remember being awed into silence by the beauty, strength, and smarts of most of my peers. I got pushed around by a boy as I walked to and from school. I had a yet undiagnosed hearing problem and didn’t understand what was happening in the classroom. I hid in the back row of class and rarely spoke up. In the second grade, I did as my teacher said and stood on a table to hang decorations. I tripped and fell into a boiling crockpot of chili on that same table. (I wish I were kidding. Honest to God, I do.) Later that year, that same teacher realized that I was the only kid in class who couldn’t read.

Strangely, hard work saved me. Wanting something saved me. Fighting for that something saved me. Maybe “saved” is too strong a word. It’s probably more fair to say that the wanting and the fighting and the willingness to work got me on the field instead of peering from the sidelines.

Starting in the fifth grade, I watched my sister before and after school and babysat neighbors’ kids on weekends and some evenings. I worked 30 hours a week at age 15, and by age 17 I worked 20 hours a week at college, edited peers’ papers at night for extra cash, and went from my day job to my night job all summer long.

The roller coaster dips throughout my life have included a difficult childhood, the illness and death of my fiancé, the dissolution of my marriage fifteen years later, and the shocking death of a lifelong friend who suffered a stroke while we traveled in Mexico. On the financial front, I’ve dealt with massive student loans, massive financial instability after my divorce, and massive financial losses during COVID.

What helped me through these showstoppers is the wanting and the fighting and the willingness to work.

I’ve been known to suffer from bouts of crybabyitis. I have a propensity to sulk and feel powerless and stuck. I sometimes get in my own way, and I trip and fall a lot (though hopefully never again into a chili pot). I tend to fixate on what I should and shouldn’t have done, on all that I shouldn’t have said and all that I left unsaid. I can be my harshest critic and my own worst enemy.

Here’s the thing. Elizabeth Gilbert said (or wrote), “I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.” That is no joke.

During my first semester of college, I earned a C in a six-credit calculus class that I myself chose to enroll in for some unbeknownst reason. That semester, I ended up with a 2.86 GPA. I had scrimped and saved and worked exhausting hours to pay for my own schooling, and a 2.86 was what I had to show for it. After a solid hour of sobbing, I picked my sorry self up and swore I would never again get a C (or a B if I could help it).

I’m pretty sure I have few if any, natural talents. Nothing has ever come easy for me. Every single life transformation has resulted from my getting tired of my own bullshit. My every accomplishment, both personal and professional, has been the result of the wanting and the fighting and the willingness to work. (The courage to fail time and again until I get it right hasn’t hurt, either.)

Just as the world’s not fair, so too the road’s rarely smooth for any of us. What I have in spades are tenacity, grit, and the ability to rewire when the rewiring’s called for. Time and again, the tools I’ve crafted and cared for throughout my life enable me to transform “I can’t do it” into “I need to get off my butt and figure out how. Now.”

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I own Denver-based CarolynDaughters.com. I provide strategic branding, marketing consulting, and writing instruction for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses and startups, the U.S. Department of Defense at the Pentagon, and U.S. Air Force bases nationwide. I have an uncommon mix of journalism, teaching, and communication skills combined with real-world corporate and government leadership experience.

My company’s four main offerings are as follows:

1. Brand strategy workshops and playbooks: I lead brand strategy workshops and craft strategy playbooks for large corporations, growing businesses, and businesses seeking acquisition. Through a collaborative, outcome-driven process, we nail down their brand identity and tell the best story possible.

2. Chief marketing officer leadership and support: I provide fractional chief marketing officer (CMO) leadership and support to startups, small businesses, and fast-growth companies, enabling organizations to build a strong foundation for long-term growth. Inbound and outbound CMO leadership includes brand strategy, marketing strategy, staff development, site design, SEO, and PR.

3. Persuasive Writing Engine courses: My proprietary Persuasive Writing Engine courses position corporate and government teams to understand the art, science, power, and vast potential of persuasive writing. Attendees practice crafting compelling arguments and gain the tools required to write proposals, business cases, annual reports, grants, employee reviews, and budget requests.

4. Marketing Boot Camp: My six-week Boot Camp empowers small business teams, solopreneurs, virtual assistants, copywriters, and freelancers to identify what makes a brand unique, design sites that convert prospects into customers, and build a prospecting engine. Attendees also learn how to craft content that reinforces credibility, build email lists, and ditch random acts of marketing.

My personal and professional brand is the equivalent of an old-school Land Rover. Real. Rugged. Ready. When I so much as see an old-school Land Rover, my eyes light up and my heartbeat amps up a tick. I’m transported into foreign lands with endless possibility, so much to see and learn, every sight, sound, and idea born anew.

This high-end, utilitarian 4WD off-roader climbs mountains, fords rivers, and pounds through deserts and jungles. It handles bumpy terrain like a pro. Though it has sleek lines, it’s rough around the edges. None of the slick sameness of most cars on the road. And while it has been known to break down now and again, regular maintenance and repair keep it running like a pro.

My Land Rover brand is the real deal. It gets me from point A to point B come hell or high water and takes my passengers wherever they want to go.

We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
My sister Michele and I started our own detective agency when we were kids. Our first order of business: naming the agency. Michele proposed MichCar (a portmanteau of Michele and Carolyn), but I told her that MichCar sounded stupid. So we went with CarMich, which obviously sounded much better.

Our second order of business: collection of dues. Dues were important, as we were sure we would need to fund something or other. After cobbling together three dollars each, we realized that we needed more dues to fund the unidentified necessary things.

Thus, our third order of business: onboarding employees. We invited several neighborhood kids to work at the agency. The employee vetting process went like this: “Do you have three dollars? Fantastic! Welcome to the CarMich Detective Agency.”

The CarMich Detective Agency had a name, employees, and funding. What we didn’t have were clients. We fixed that by pressuring one of our employees, Kelli, to hire us to find money in her house, which she would use to buy snacks at the local 7-Eleven.

To forestall the possibility of non-payment for services rendered, we took Kelli’s one-dollar payment upfront. We then combed through her house in search of bills and coins. After a thorough one-hour search, we turned over the eighty-five cents we found in sofa cushions. Kelli seemed satisfied, but her older sister, Kerri, seemed to think Kelli had gotten a raw deal. Kerri, who was also one of our employees, made such a stink about it that we were forced to fire her.

A few days later, Kerri decided she wanted to rejoin the CarMich Detective Agency. After she handed over three more dollars, we welcomed her back with open arms.

On a related note, I recently started writing a detective story. Back in January, my friend Sarah Harrison and I also launched a podcast called Tea, Tonic, & Toxin (www.teatonicandtoxin.com), where we discuss the best mysteries and detective stories ever written from the nineteenth century onward.

Child detective, detective agency owner, fiction writer, podcaster, and owner of CarolynDaughters.com. Pretty sweet gigs, everyone.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.carolyndaughters.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carodaughters/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carodaughters
• Other: https://www.teatonicandtoxin.com