PPB July 2021

In 2010, McDaniel started leading the business. Immediately following a recession year, Giftpreneurs’ faced a major challenge when its main client, the U.S. Postal Service, was forced to disband its promotional products program to salvage costs. “What my aunt and uncle had created under Giftpreneurs essentially disappeared overnight,” says McDaniel. He recalls a conversation he had with his aunt and uncle about the future of the business. “Because I had recently landed a few new accounts, I said I would hate to be working another job and someone wants to place a large order and have to say, ‘Sorry, I don’t do that anymore,’” says McDaniel. “We decided tomove back to home offices, cut overhead and that’s when I sort of took over from a business development side. I’m just been voraciously adding new clients, cold-calling and rebuilding from losing the one main client we had.” McDaniel alsomade the decision to change the forward-facing company name to One World Promo in 2010. McDaniel says that even though the business had been operating since 1992, he felt like he was working at a startup. “I had a long leash to fail and to do stuff that did end up working out,” he says. “I was lucky because of the volume we had done with the postal service, but it’s not like I had to build the rapport with vendors. I had a good foundation of vendor support, terms and pricing, but had no clients. So, it really became about howmany people can we call in a day or howmany packages can we drop off.” But whenMcDaniel’s uncle died six years ago, his leadership role changed. “Having a business mentor who I could check decisions with went away,” he says. “I had to trust myself and my decisions a little bit more and lean on what I had learned over the years. I was definitely fortunate enough to be 24 or 25 [years old] during the first recession and getting tomake some leadership decisions in the industry. When my uncle passed away, I was 32, just having my first kid, so there was a lot of life things happening at one time.” McDaniel first focused on improving business practices, and intentional growth became his main goal. “A lot of it was modernizing the way we did stuff, centralizing howwe process orders andmaking things as simple as possible,” says McDaniel. “We were starting at a point where you’d get an order and you’d print it out to keep track of it, so it was a lot of trying to break the mold of old habits and utilize software to streamline things.” Although he was reshaping the business, McDaniel says the company culture was something that didn’t need changing. “My aunt and uncle’s legacy of a high-service level was such an important part that I didn’t really have to change anything from a culture standpoint,” he says. “I think it was mainly a shift of having a business as solopreneurs and growing a business, versus just trying to generate income monthly.” But when COVID-19 hit, McDaniel lost 95 percent of his revenue in the first three months. “You realize in the pandemic that you can’t call someone up and ask them to buy something because maybe they have lost a family member or a job,” he says. “So, we’ve been really leaning into the humanness in thinking there is somuchmore important stuff going on than promo. Yet, we still believe in the service we provide, so we would be doing our clients a From left are One World Promo employees Candice Brouillette, Kristina Hughes and Taylor Tameifuna. | JULY 2021 | 81 CONNECT