A reflection on what it means to start before everything is perfect—building with faith, learning in real time, preparing for growth, and allowing people to see the journey before the finished success story.
Influential Woman · Publishing Company
Danielle Dickerson Traylor
Founder, Unashamed Grace Publishing LLC
Chicago, IL
1Year experience
1Article published
Her Story
About Danielle
As Founder of Unashamed Grace Publishing, Danielle Dickerson Traylor oversees the company’s vision, author development, publishing projects, professional partnerships, and growth strategy. She works closely with aspiring and emerging authors to help move their ideas and manuscripts toward publication while building a trusted network of editors, designers, coordinators, and production partners. Through UGP, Danielle is committed to providing authors with both professional publishing support and the confidence to believe their stories are worth telling.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Danielle
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success first to God, and then to resilience, relationships, and my willingness to keep learning. My path has not been linear, but every experience has taught me something I have been able to use in the next season. I have also learned not to be afraid to ask for help, build the right team, and keep moving even when I do not have every answer yet.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
One of the best lessons I have learned is that I do not have to do everything myself. Leadership is not proving that you can carry everything; it is knowing your strengths, building the right team, and trusting qualified people to help bring the vision to life.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Don’t wait until everything is perfect before you start. Learn the business, ask questions, build relationships, protect your work, and be willing to grow as you go. Most importantly, don’t shrink your vision because you are new to the room. You can be teachable and still know that what you bring has value.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
One of the biggest challenges in independent publishing is helping authors understand that publishing a book involves much more than simply writing the manuscript. Editing, design, production, marketing, and distribution all matter. At the same time, that creates a tremendous opportunity for independent publishers to provide education, structure, professional support, and access to resources that many emerging authors would not otherwise have.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Faith, integrity, service, and authenticity are at the center of both my personal life and my work. I believe people should be treated with dignity, that my word should mean something, and that success should never require me to compromise who I am. I also value excellence, accountability, and leaving people better than I found them.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Danielle
Start Before You Feel Ready
How faith, courage, and action taught me to build while I was still becoming
For a long time, I thought being ready meant having everything figured out.
The plan. The money. The confidence. The connections. The right timing. Every answer to every question somebody might ask me.
I’ve learned that sometimes readiness doesn’t look like that at all.
Sometimes you start because you know you’re supposed to.
When I started Unashamed Grace Publishing, I did not have a full team in place. I did not have every system built or every contract written. I certainly did not know everything there was to know about building a publishing company.
What I did have was vision.
I knew there were people carrying books inside of them who needed more than someone to simply print their pages. They needed guidance. They needed structure. They needed someone who could help them take their idea seriously enough to develop it, organize it, and eventually hold the finished book in their hands.
I knew I wanted to help people do that.
So I started.
Starting before I felt completely ready did not mean starting carelessly. There is a difference.
It meant being willing to learn while I built.
I ask questions. I research. I listen to people who know things I don’t know. I compare services, review pricing, interview professionals, build partnerships, and admit when something is outside of my expertise.
And one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that being the founder does not mean I have to be everything.
I do not have to be the editor, designer, formatter, coordinator, marketer, consultant, and production department all at the same time.
For me, leadership is becoming less about proving how much I can carry and more about knowing the vision well enough to recognize who should help carry it.
With the anticipation of growth, I have intentionally begun building relationships with editors, designers, publishing professionals, coordinators, and production partners. UGP is still growing, but I don’t want to wait until the increase comes to start preparing for it.
I want the infrastructure in place.
That is where one of my reminders comes from:
Excellence at the door. Order in the house. Capacity for the increase.
If I am praying for growth, I also have a responsibility to prepare for growth.
Another thing I’ve had to learn is how to be seen while I’m still becoming.
That has not always been easy, but I’ve made the decision to document this journey as I go—the good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly.
Most of us are comfortable showing the finished product. We like the launch, the announcement, the finished book, the polished website, and the success story.
But I also want people to see the construction.
I want there to be a record of what UGP looked like before the team was fully built, before every system was developed, before the opportunities got bigger, and before the vision became what I believe it can become.
One day, when people look at what Unashamed Grace Publishing has grown into, I want them to be able to look back and see where we started.
Because the beginning matters too.
Building a business has also shown me that there will always be another level I haven’t mastered yet. If I wait until I know everything before I move, I could spend my entire life preparing for something I was supposed to already be doing.
My faith has been a major part of learning that.
Faith does not mean I stop doing the work. I still have to plan. I still have to research. I still have to make wise decisions, ask for help, correct mistakes, and sometimes admit that I need to go back and learn something.
But faith has taught me that I do not need certainty about every step before I take the next one.
I’ve discovered that a lot of clarity comes after you move.
You learn because you started.
You meet people because you started.
You discover what needs to change because you started.
You find strengths you didn’t know you had because you started.
And sometimes you discover that something simply does not work.
That is valuable information too.
I am still becoming the founder I see in my mind. Unashamed Grace Publishing is still becoming the company I believe it can be.
There are systems still to build, people still to serve, books still to publish, lessons still to learn, and rooms I have not entered yet.
But I no longer believe I have to become the finished version of myself before I am qualified to begin.
And neither do you.
You can be prepared and still nervous.
You can be gifted and still learning.
You can have vision and still need help.
You can believe God gave you something and still have questions about how it is all going to come together.
Start anyway.
Not recklessly.
Not without wisdom.
Start with what you know. Start with what you have. And be willing to learn what comes next.
Because sometimes the distance between imagination and impact begins with one decision:
Start before you feel ready.
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