Coworkers start website to serve Mount Pleasant small businesses
Small businesses in Mount Pleasant will have a leg up if they need help with marketing their product.
Two coworkers at the Multiband Corporation have teamed together to launch BrainBerryMarketing.com, a website to market local small businesses.
Petoskey senior John Richter and 2005 CMU alumnus Kessler Valentin are the two behind the website.
“Me and (Kessler) had been throwing around the idea, that a small business would be able to have their own marketing department,” Richter said. “We want to make sure local businesses would be able to capitalize on what we have to offer, as opposed to larger corporations.”
The website will offer affordable services to local business owners, such as social media management, website development, customer acquisition and more.
Richter said BrainBerry would mainly be serving businesses in the downtown area or on Mission Street.
“Our target is smaller businesses that wouldn’t have the means to hire their own marketing department,” he said.
Valentin works as a graphic designer at Multiband, a corporation providing DIRECTV and internet solutions to customers. There he met Richter, and later the idea for the business arose.
“It was John’s idea,” Valentin said. “He’s always had a bunch of cool ideas; we thought we’d give this one a shot.”
Valentin said the website is pretty much completed.
Richter has firsthand experience of a business struggling to afford marketing and advertising services when he sold art and furniture in Petoskey growing up.
“That shop would pay an arm and a leg to get advertising,” Richter said. “That was my major decision to want to go into marketing.”
Overall, both Richter and Valentin are looking forward to the website and its services to Mount Pleasant businesses.
“It’s a little bit exciting for us both,” Richter said. “We’re starting something that I don’t think has been done before in this area.”
