Focus on the Family is seeking a “next-gen” president/CEO to replace the nearly 65-year-old Jim Daly, who for two decades has put a friendlier face on the influential conservative ministry founded by James Dobson, who died last August.
The search was announced July 9 by FaithSearch Partners and reported a week later by The Christian Post. Focus, which marks its 50th anniversary next March, hopes to complete the search in 12 to 18 months.
FaithSearch said it seeks candidates with “incredible skills and talents in public/media communication, relationship-building, fundraising, strategic planning and administration.”
James Dobson
Daly hopes this process will go more smoothly than his own troubled transition from Dobson, who angrily left Focus in 2010, taking major donors with him to his new, competing ministry just down the road.
That botched transition made things harder for Daly, tarnished the ministry’s image and hammered its finances. Such a failure “diminishes our witness,” said Daly, who determined to do better when it was his turn to step aside.
Focus created a transition plan for Dobson after his 1990 heart attack and 1998 stroke. In 1999, the ministry announced its “10-Year Plan for Leadership Succession” that sought to replace Dobson with two successors — one to oversee operations and one to serve as the public face and radio host.
By year 10, Dobson wasn’t ready to leave his influential platform. The succession process turned from cooperative to combative after he made new demands on the Focus board, which were rejected.
Next, he “went rogue,” as one former Focus executive put it. Dobson and Focus radio engineers met for a secret weekend recording session in which he falsely told listeners he was being forced out. “The board of directors voted privately … to ask for my resignation,” he claimed.
He further shocked Focus leaders and parachurch experts by founding a new competing ministry (James Dobson Family Institute) and broadcast (“Family Talk with James Dobson”), funded by major donors he’d lured away from Focus.
Roster of Focus on the Family podcasts
Daly leaves Focus stronger financially than when Dobson left, but the ministry never regained the audience it reached while led by its bestselling celebrity founder. In the Dobson era, Focus broadcasts and media reached 5 million people a day. In the Daly era it’s closer to five million a week.
Focus’s peak came in 2008, when it had revenue of $145 million and employed 1,200 people. Revenue fell the next eight years, bottoming out at $86.5 million in 2016, and causing waves of layoffs.
Dobson became increasingly involved in the GOP, spent more time in Washington, D.C., than in Colorado, and stepped away from his leadership roles while remaining the face and voice of the ministry. Daly was named Focus CEO in 2004 and installed as president and CEO in 2005 but toiled under the founder’s shadow until 2010.
Daly helped engineer a financial comeback. Focus had revenue of $138 million in 2025, down from $143 million in 2024. It currently has about 750 employees.
Now he’s ready to pass the torch.
“It’s good to get new faces, new energy, younger leadership in to speak to the 30-, 40-somethings now about what they’re facing with marriage and parenting,” he said.
Daly’s successor should enjoy benefits Daly lacked: “There is no crisis. … We’re not under any kind of situation of moral collapse. … Finances are good. … If I were coming in as the next leader, it’s the kind of situation I’d want to walk into, where things are going well.”
Although a political conservative, Daly is no Dobson clone. His rough family background of “chaos, strife and dysfunction” — including the divorce and death of his parents, and years spent in the foster care system — was “the antithesis” of Dobson’s “Hallmark Hall of Fame television presentation.”
Daly has worked to “refocus” Focus by dialing down culture war language and focusing on families with resources couples, parents and children need.
Instead of attacking the nation’s first openly gay governor, Daly hailed Colorado’s Jared Polis as a good leader and worked with his administration to promote a cause dear to Daly’s heart: Finding parents for foster kids.
He took Focus resources into the digital age. He loosened up the employee dress code. While many cheered his changes, some longtime Focus supporters ridiculed him, accused him of “surrender” and “compromise” and walking away.
ReFocus, Daly’s 2012 book, gored many of Dobson’s sacred cows without naming the Focus founder. “God loves our ‘enemies’ just as much as he loves you and me,” he wrote. He called out “unhappy Christians” who “grumble your way along life’s road” and “work to redeem the culture with a somber, morose and even anxious spirit.”
But some say the changes Daly brought were more style than substance. Focus’ in-house public policy division, Daily Citizen, maintains Dobson’s activist spirit.
“The gospel is nonpartisan,” Daly wrote. But under his leadership Focus continued its partisan support for the GOP. Daly hailed Donald Trump as the “most pro-life president” of his lifetime, then criticized Trump for going soft on abortion and IVF.
The Focus on the Family website promotes work in multiple areas, including marriage, parenting, faith, culture and pro-life issues. Daly hosts a daily broadcast, and Focus hosts a series of 22 podcasts.
Focus currently partners with the Colson Center to promote an educational video series on the death of truth in America while at the same time promoting and praising Donald Trump and those who support his lack of truth-telling.
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