When Daniel Lacey came to Brigham Young University, he joined a family legacy of athletes and expected his college experience to be centered on playing football. But when an injury ended his playing career, Lacey redirected his time and energy toward business and marketing—a pivot that would eventually land him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. From there, Lacey has continued to learn through failures and triumphs.
Lacey says getting cut from the football team after his injury was a turning point that prompted a question: “What is my identity?” At that crossroads, his brother-in-law encouraged him to look into the newly formed strategy program at the BYU Marriott School of Business. “The strategy program was when the world of business really opened up to me,” Lacey says. “I came to BYU all in on sports and then found a completely new direction.”
While a student in the strategy program, Lacey and one of his teammates, Connor Noe, were eating at an empty pizza parlor between classes when they had an idea: “I bet we could get people in here and I bet that they would pay us to do that,” Lacey remembers thinking. The next day, the two dressed in suits and presented their marketing plan to the owner—who wrote them a check on the spot. “My teammate and I looked at each other because we didn’t think we’d get that far,” Lacey recalls. After making their first deal, Lacey and his teammate-turned-business-partner were able to take on more local clients and maintain their digital marketing agency through college.
After graduating, Lacey met the founders of Pura at a home show, where they were selling the first batch of their smart home fragrance devices. “I just pestered them about needing marketing,” he says. After doing some work for free, Lacey was eventually hired as the startup’s first employee, working for equity rather than for a salary.
“It was incredible to work alongside some great minds and experience this crazy growth with a lot of lessons,” he says. In the five years he worked at Pura, Lacey says the company grew from “essentially zero dollars” in sales to $180 million in revenue. During that time, he was also named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. “It was the right time, right place, and incredible people,” Lacey says.
Lacey, determined to continue embracing new changes, left Pura to start his own company. “I was still at the right stage in life to take a big risk,” he says. So, he set out to create a tech company within the service industry for people wanting to outsource household chores.
As his company grew, it morphed into a portfolio of service companies, Lacey says, sidelining the tech arm that he had originally hoped to develop. “Starting a company and having failures was a big learning experience,” he says. Lacey still operates a few of the service companies but has since made another career shift away from his own company.
Now, Lacey is once again working as a first employee at another startup—Perk Energy hired him as their chief marketing officer. “The impactful moments in my life have usually been about taking a big leap: joining Pura without pay, starting a business, and just figuring things out and learning along the way,” he says.
Looking back, Lacey says every venture required support from others, and those years in team sports taught him to value relationships and work with others toward a common goal. While Lacey says he wants to get back into recreational sports, he continues his family’s athletic legacy by watching his four-year-old play. “My biggest accomplishment is my family—my wife, my kids,” Lacey says. “That’s what matters most to me.”
