Colorado

Rafael Small loves technology and he loves cars. So when his frustration with business trip car rentals reached a tipping point in 2019, he founded CarGari, a peer-to-peer car rental platform. “It was the best way for me to disrupt the status quo, and create a better process for renting vehicles,” he explains. CarGari–”gari” means “car” in Swahili–matches private Presenters (car owners interested in renting their personal cars via the platform) with Receivers (anyone interested in a cost-effective car rental). CarGari handles the vetting, insurance, and payments. Renters save money and get fast, convenient service, while owners earn income from cars that might otherwise sit idle. “I work with a lot of first-time minority entrepreneurs who put a vehicle on the platform to create an additional revenue stream. I like being able to provide that opportunity because it’s a part of giving back,” Rafael says.

CarGari will soon be expanding from the Denver metro area into Kansas City, Phoenix, and Chicago. Rafael uses AI-powered Performance Max campaigns to get the word out. “Google Ads are integral to CarGari for awareness of my services and my brand,” he says. With Google Analytics 4, Rafael can check website visit data and see which of his keywords and bidding strategies are working: “The dashboard is user-friendly and the data is accessible. Understanding how and where traffic is entering the platform, I can adjust my strategy.” Up next? Rafael hopes to partner with domestic violence shelters to provide cars to those in need. And he’s planning to scale to 18 more cities across the country in the next two years. With a 30 percent rise in rentals–47 percent of them from repeat renters–and 13 percent more Presenter sign-ups year over year, Rafael has a clear road ahead.

While teaching piano at University of Northern Colorado, Aaron Garner saw some students fall behind while others raced ahead. He dreamed of finding a way to inspire individuals to learn at their own pace. So in 2008, he and his wife, Heidi, created Piano Marvel. Their subscription-based software assesses each student’s current level and then helps them set and reach their goals, with the help of a massive library of 29,000 songs of all genres. The Garners manage their successfully growing business with free tools from Google Workspace. “We love that we can share files, spreadsheets, documents, videos, and so much more via Google Drive,” says Heidi. And they communicate and market their business with email campaigns using Gmail. Today, Piano Marvel has grown into a thriving business, with over 17,000 active subscribers with a premium account and over 310,000 free trial accounts. It’s also a family affair, says Heidi: “Our kids grew up with Piano Marvel, so they're all pianists.”

Joel Shifflet, Heidi’s cousin and Piano Marvel’s VP, uses Google Analytics to track growth trends and traffic to the Piano Marvel website from all over the globe. YouTube is where Aaron shares instructional videos and interviews, and where students share their performances with each other and the over 6,000 people who subscribe to the company’s channel. Staying rooted is central to Piano Marvel’s mission, which is why Aaron still teaches group piano classes in Colorado. Piano Marvel also gives back to children from underserved communities by offering free student subscriptions through groups like the Itiah Angels for Learning in Haiti and Club Vallarta in Mexico. “I absolutely love this part of our company,” says Heidi. “We've had the ability to give back and pay back now. It's been amazing…and we love making it possible for everyone to learn to play the piano and have the gift of music in their lives.”

Sometimes, you just need to get a grip. And when Colorado climbers Kevin Brown and Keah Kalantari found themselves slipping off difficult rock climbs, they took the chalk they were using into a laboratory and discovered it was mostly cheap filler. “We wanted to help athletes everywhere accomplish more. We believe that no one should be held back by bad grip,” says Keah. So Kevin and Keah sourced a supply of high-quality, pharmaceutical-grade magnesium carbonate and founded Friction Labs in 2013. From their humble e-commerce beginnings selling just a few dollars of merchandise per month, today Friction Labs sells their grip products to climbers, weightlifters, and other athletes in 1,000+ retail locations in more than 25 countries worldwide. And along the way, they’ve been using Google products to help them reach new heights.

From the beginning, Kevin and Keah have used free Google Workspace tools like Sheets and Docs to manage their operations without breaking the bank on expensive business software. And during the pandemic, Google Analytics helped them uncover a growing demand for ways to make gyms safer for athletes, leading to their introduction of a new hand-sanitizing hygienic liquid chalk. “When you’re a small business, you’ve got to be scrappy. Google gives us cost-effective ways to do that,” Kevin says. Today, Friction Labs is enjoying 25-percent annual sales growth, and they’re using that money to help introduce hundreds of underserved kids to climbing at gyms across the country. Over 500,000 athletes have trusted Friction Labs products to date–or as Kevin and Keah like to put it, one million hands. “Starting a small business is one of the last great adventures that exist in the world,” Kevin says. And coming from two guys who climb mountains for fun, that’s really saying something.

Based in Westminster, Colorado, Mark and Fay Plaza began sharing their homemade granola with family and friends, and in 2008, decided to sell some at a local bazaar. It was a hit. The key, says Fay, is simplicity: “Our original nut granola only has six ingredients, and you can understand them all.” Requests started coming in, and they were soon selling Olde Man Granola at farmers markets. After their son, Trevor, left the Marines in 2012 and joined the business, he ramped up production and got the granola into regional and national grocery stores. A few years later, he revamped the website and started advertising through social media and Google Ads. Trevor tracked conversions and monitored traffic with Google Analytics, which helped him fine-tune the user flow and see which ads were most effective. In 2019, revenue increased 30 percent year-over-year (YoY).

As a food manufacturer, Olde Man Granola was considered an essential business and spared major disruption when COVID-19 hit. “We’re very fortunate that we’ve been able to keep producing for stores and customers,” says Trevor. In fact, online sales have even increased—they’ve leaned in to Google Ads and have seen a monthly return on ad spend of 1.56 times and online sales have surged 109 percent YoY. Google Workspace tools have been especially helpful recently. Trevor often works from home, so Google Calendar and Sheets keeps everyone organized and makes collaborating with distributors easy. The team uses Google Meet to communicate in a safe, convenient way. “Our strategy is to be slow and steady, not stretch ourselves too thin, and just keep going,” Trevor explains. Olde Man Granola has now shipped to all 50 states, and produces around 13,000 pounds of granola a month. They’ve just added two more employees to their team. It seems that simplicity has paid off not just for their recipes, but for their business plan as well.