Wisconsin

In 2006, Brian Brinkman, Steve James, and Jeff Coon left their corporate marketing jobs and used their shared passion for storytelling and design to launch Stream Creative. An integrated marketing and creative agency, Stream Creative serves a range of industries–from manufacturing to cybersecurity to healthcare. The team helps their clients boost brand awareness, drive revenue growth, and strengthen customer relationships. “We want to be the megaphone for them,” Jeff says. “This isn’t smoke and mirrors, we just need people to know their authentic stories.” With a roll-up-your-sleeves mindset, the team works hard to get to know each business, delivering fresh content, digital advertising, website development, and more to help their clients grow.

For years, Stream Creative has used Google Ads not just to grow its own business, but to help clients hit their growth targets and connect with customers. “For businesses with limited budgets, Ads offer an agile way to enter the market and scale up as they grow,” says Brian. Now they’re also integrating generative AI tools into their workflows. “AI is helping us get to our final products faster, while still maintaining high quality of work.” Brian explains. One recent example: the team used Gemini Notebook to help a client with a research-intensive project. “The tool helped us identify useful excerpts and track sources, which saved us hours,” he says. With revenue up 21 percent and their client base growing 13 percent year-over-year, Stream Creative uses Gemini for Workspace to support the team with drafting, brainstorming, and summarizing–helping boost efficiency and scale client impact. “AI gets the team thinking differently in terms of how to empower themselves and our clients to do new things,” says Steve. Adds Brian, “AI is helping us spend more time on strategy and relationship-building, so we can do more of what we do best.”

“I’m a bed bug influencer,” Josh “Erdye” Erdman admits. He’s the president and founder of Erdye’s Pest Control, and has become something of a celebrity in the world of vermin. It’s a result of his most popular YouTube video–viewed 4,000 times a day at its peak–where he infested his own bed with bed bugs to demonstrate his confidence in his detection and heat treatment methods. Now he gets phone calls from around the world, and was even invited to Paris to consult on their 2023 bed bug outbreak. Originally in property management, Josh made the switch to pest control in 2012, when he got tired of unreliable companies and knew he could do it better. Headquartered in Green Bay, Erdye’s has added four more locations, a now-famous bed bug detecting dog named Curly, and 12 human employees who conduct around 16,000 services a year to help nearly 4,000 clients rid their homes and businesses of unwanted guests.

Erdye’s handles all kinds of insects and critters–even catching a runaway emu once–and knows clients need quick solutions. "If you come home and there’s a raccoon in your house, you grab your phone, search pest control, and the first guy who shows up gets the job,” he says. That’s where Google tools have proven essential: “They account for 95 to 98 percent of our leads.” The reviews on Erdye’s Google Business Profile are as helpful as “word of mouth” for recommendations, and their Google Ads ROI averages 700 percent. Josh also uses Google Analytics to track website performance and figure out how to use ad spend efficiently. Revenue is projected to increase 37 percent this year, but helping people is the real bonus. Employees are part of a profit-sharing plan, and Erdye’s donates to food pantries, the Wounded Warrior Project, and animal shelters. As for Josh’s customers, “We want to fix their problem,” he says. “They’re like family and we like to put their minds at ease.”

Lilo Allen and Tiffany Miller know a thing or two about transformation. Started by these two women business owners, Bronzeville Collective MKE is a shop that sells the handcrafted goods and art of over 25 Black, Brown, queer, and ally creators. “We are one of the few retail spaces in the city that celebrates not only Black culture, but the culture and history of the historic neighborhood that we share our name with,” says Lilo. During segregation, Bronzeville was the only place in Milwaukee where people of color could have their own businesses. “At one point it had the most Black-owned businesses per capita in the country and was a financial foothold in Milwaukee. So that's the legacy that we're building on,” she adds. Through their mission to honor and revitalize the area, they’ve brought a creative new concept to town, while also helping small businesses and artists gain visibility and sell their work. With so many vendors and moving parts, Lilo credits Google Sheets with helping her keep track of inventory, sales, and payout amounts. “I use Google Sheets constantly,” she says, “I can’t think of another program I’d use to monitor all the money that’s going in and out.”

In 2020, growth was both a blessing and a challenge for the Bronzeville Collective MKE with fluctuating business regulations due to COVID-19. As luck would have it, their e-commerce website launched on the day Milwaukee’s mandated shutdown began. And while they experienced an uptick in online sales, now that the space has reopened they’ve had to make changes in response to the pandemic. “Our Business Profile on Google has been so beneficial in helping customers know our exact location , safety precautions, and new hours. Being able to get that information out immediately has been great,” she adds. Lilo believes there’s a Bronzeville in every community across the country and hopes to be able to expand the concept to new spaces, helping more businesses and artisans prosper along the way.

Wisconsin Cheese Mart has been on Old World Third Street in Milwaukee since 1938. The old German enclave is still home to a few other food shops, and President Ken McNulty values their neighbors. Their storefront is the heart of the business, helping build their mailing list and attracting tourists from all over the world—during the summer, it can draw up to 2,000 visitors per day. But what’s really grown the company is their online presence. When the McNultys bought the business in 2003, they used the power of the web to transform Wisconsin Cheese Mart from a small, local shop to a national cheese retailer. “Today, we have single-digit growth in the store, but we’re averaging 35 percent annual growth for online sales,” Ken remarks.

Ken’s business philosophy epitomizes the digital age. “We constantly change, depending on what our customers are demanding,” he says. Google tools have been essential to taking the pulse of those demands. They use Google Analytics to better understand what their customers want and identify where they’re losing people in the purchase flow. “That’s huge for us,” Ken shares. “We’re always looking to improve the customer’s experience, so it’s very beneficial to be able to see where the pain points are.” And AdWords, Google’s advertising program, helps them get in front of consumers searching for their products. “AdWords makes up over 40 percent of our web traffic,” he says. In their day-to-day operations, Ken calls their Google usage “pretty much all-encompassing.” They communicate with teammates and customers over Gmail, create menus on Google Docs, and manage their files in Google Drive. “Our team operates out of three different locations. These tools help us collaborate easily from everywhere,” he explains.

Thanks to their online success, Wisconsin Cheese Mart continues to have a positive impact on the local community. Ken credits their online growth for their ability to create more jobs and pay higher wages, noting that “small businesses like ours employ a lot of people.” The company also hosts tasting events and, in general, maintains a space for people to learn about and enjoy the state’s flagship product. They hope to expand their website to include more food products—“We’re pretty good at the perishable part,” Ken notes—and are proud to promote Wisconsin cheese to people all over the world.