Meet Dayna Steele | Creates Business Rock Stars

We had the good fortune of connecting with Dayna Steele and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Dayna, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I was in rock radio for 20+ years when the rug was pulled out from under me. The station decided not to renew my contract seven weeks before I was due to give birth to my first son. I spent the next couple of years trying television, talk radio, marketing consulting, and crisis communication training. It paid some bills but never caught fire for me. My husband had flown for NASA for years (T-38s, the weightless training aircraft, the shuttle landing trainer, and the 747 shuttle carrier ) and friends/family would call all the time wanting me to go onsite to JSC-Houston to buy t-shirts, patches, that nasty astronaut ice cream no astronaut has ever really eaten, etc. In the late ’90s, the only place to buy these things was at the NASA visitor centers and some museum gift shops. There was no NASA online store. I bought “HTML For Dummies” and also found a banker in Cleveland, Ohio who was moonlighting at night building online shopping carts. Online shopping was still the ‘wild west’ then. I started The Space Store with $2500 in savings, 9 initial products. I sold the company to a NASA contractor in 2000 and became the president of their retail division. That’s the short version of how I went from Hall of Fame rock radio personality to an aerospace executive. I left in 2005 to create Steele Media Services and advice/consult on e-commerce, social media, SEO, media training, and more. I loved working for myself and being in control of my time.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I have two mantras in all I do … “The more you to help to help someone else succeed, the more you will succeed.” I work constantly to do for others and those are the people that come back and help me down the road. It is a formula that NEVER fails. For example, I am offering free one-on-one business coaching for the next few months to help people get through this pandemic and figure out what to do on the other side. It just seemed like the right thing to do. What I did not expect was the connections, relationships and fun I would have doing this. And, “Successful people fail all the time.” Being kicked out of the radio station job was so scary. It was all I had ever done since I was 17. And looking back, it is the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced me to try new things, work a different way, meet new people. Some things worked and others didn’t – but I have learned so much and met so many. Now, I try TOO many new things!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Well, since we are still in a pandemic, first I would make sure that friend had been wearing a mask, social distancing, and staying out of large gatherings, etc. Seriously, I take this very seriously and think we will have to for another six months to a year. With that said, I am immensely proud of my hometown of Houston and my home state of Texas. But I also have a home in Palm Springs, California and we are looking for an apartment in New York City where we invest in a few Broadway shows. When the theatre comes back, be sure to see Come From Away and Tina the Musical. We thank you for that! Really, I am a closet chef and love to cook. My favorite thing to do for family, friends, clients, co-workers, and strangers alike, is getting interesting people around my table that holds 10-12 people and see where the conversations go and how the introductions and relationships pan out in the future. I think everyone is interesting. And, if you ask questions and let people talk about themselves, you will find out the most fascinating facts. I’ll interview CEOs, people sitting next to me on an airplane, Uber drivers, anyone! Everyone has a story and you have no idea how wonderful it ay be unless you ask AND listen!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Charlie the Wonder Husband as I call him. He has always been supportive no matter what I wanted to try. He still gets a little concerned when I wake up at 2 am and start making notes but he’s learned to live with my crazy ideas. My “Steeleworkers” – the loyal legion of fans who were with me through my radio career in Houston and have stayed with me ever since. I can go anywhere in the world and run into a former listener – a bar in Ramstein Germany, a small riverboat cruise in France, standing in a customs line in Panama. I am forever grateful for their support and friendship all over the world. Many have become my first customers and clients in the businesses I have started, read my books, hired me for speeches, and more. Wilene Dunn, a Steeleworker fan who read my first book, asked if she could meet me, and we had lunch. I liked her so much, we started a speech booking business together. People were offering me money to speak and I had no idea how that worked. She was an admin who wanted to eventually own her own business. I said, “Let’s figure it out together.” And we did!

Website: www.daynasteele.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/daynasteele
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/daynasteele
Twitter: www.twitter.com/daynasteele
Facebook: www.facebook.com/therockbusiness
Youtube: www.youtube.com/daynasteele
Other: I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s and chronicled the horrible journey on Facebook with dark humor. It became my support group and therapy. I turned it into a book to help others and give them a laugh along the way, “Surviving Alzheimer’s with Friends, Facebook, and a Really Big Glass of Wine.” We were in the process of turning it into a play, The Woman in the Mirror, when the pandemic hit. So, we turned it into a Zoom table read series at https://bit.ly/TheWomanintheMirror. The live stage production will debut in Houston in November 2021 and then go on tour in the USA. The book is here: https://amzn.to/2X6byTR

Image Credits
Dayna Steele