This article originally appeared in Canvas Rebel Magazine and can be found here.

Kennan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?

We love helping our clients look and feel as premium and personal on their first impression, as they already are to their best repeat customers.

We met one of our very first website clients while touring her wedding venue on her ranch. Darlene at Strawberry Pines had transformed a 100-year-old barn into a beautiful space for people to celebrate some of their most meaningful moments and the property also boasted three unique homes for guests to stay during their special event — weddings, family reunions, baby showers, and corporate retreats. Though she was attracting clients, she found that her brand and her website was holding her back. She still was attracting DIY brides and needed to fill more calendar dates with couples ready to invest in her $10K+ packages. Marcus and I gave her business a complete makeover. With a wine-bottle worthy logo, a brand new website featuring quality images and video from real weddings at the Pines, and with social media management — she was now able to increase her prices and fill more dates! We also created an elegant brochure highlighting the three unique homes and fully renovated 100-year-old barn on the property — showcasing this premier stay-over retreat in Texas as truly one-of-a-kind.

“From rebranding, to rebuilding our website, to helping our business thrive in the world of social media marketing — their expertise and dedication is the best investment our business has made,” said Darlene Henry, owner.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My husband Marcus as been involved with media in some capacity since he was a teenager. When he was 16, his grandma gave him some money thinking he’d put it toward his first car, and instead he bought his first video camera! He has been passionate about creating ever since. He later worked at Apple Inc. and as media director at Grand Parkway Baptist Church before we opened Marken Media Co. in 2017.

I grew up in Devine, Texas a small town south of San Antonio. I studied mass communication/journalism at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor (Go CRU!) and later worked as lead associate editor at Katy Magazine in the Houston area, and as a grant reporter for Children’s Emergency Relief International. In 2015, I became a full-time mom but had the desire to continue writing and editing, so I kept a few freelance projects going.

Then in 2017, after leaving the big city of Houston and back to my hometown, we launched Marken Media Co. and became entrepreneurs ourselves! We love helping small businesses grow. We see ourselves as the creative marketing dream team for the business owner who doesn’t have time to do it all. You’re not alone. We’re the creatives in your corner!

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

We started our business in 2017 in a spare bedroom in our home. We met clients there. I held our first few workshops at our dining room table. In 2018, we began leasing our commercial space in downtown Devine, painted the #devinecolorwall, and invited the community in! We share our office space — offering coworking memberships (with super fast internet), party rental space, and workshops and events.

We raised capital from the community by creating a video series highlighting great people in our town called “The Sign Says Devine” (on YouTube) where we essentially sold ad spots.

We also had help from community partners, who got their business names painted on our Texas mural wall inside our office for their support of our vision.

We started with what we had.
We spent money out of our own savings to build out our space while doing most of the labor ourselves. We shopped at thrift stores, Facebook marketplace, and combined all our finds with our own mid century modern style to bring a truly unique-to-our-area look. We have run our business debt free.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Marcus and I had always had freelance of some kind on the side of our real jobs. While he worked at Apple and doing media for our church, I had worked full-time on the editorial team at a magazine. Early in our marriage, in 2011 we attended a several weeks long course about how to handle money called Financial Peace University. We were introduced to the Dave Ramsey plan for paying off debt and living debt free.

Freelance was an easy way for us to earn extra income while continuing to pay off debt as we worked on the Dave Ramsey “debt snowball.” We had a car loan, old medical bills, and college loans — it took us about four years to pay it off. During that time, we saw freelance as fun “side gigs.” Marcus would take design work and video opportunities and I’d take on writing or editing projects. Sometimes, our clients and gigs would overlap, his client would need a writer, or my client would need a designer. We enjoyed working together and seeing a vision come to life. In 2015, when our firstborn came, I left my full-time job to stay home with my son but continued to build up freelance.

In 2017, after having our second son, we moved back near my family in our small town just south of San Antonio, and we saw an opportunity to try to start our own business. We’re both reluctant entrepreneurs! Neither of us had ever had the guts, but it became something we couldn’t stop thinking about. We felt like God was putting us in a corner where we couldn’t NOT give it a try. I am so glad we took those first steps of faith in 2017. Freelance had become our way of getting the “boat close to the dock” before we took the step into entrepreneurship — even though we’d never planned on it!

I think some of the key milestones were the steps that others didn’t see, or know about. Years before we started Marken Media Co., we were listening to podcasts, reading books or watching documentaries that both inspired and taught us. We attended business and design workshops/events. We were always learning and growing in our craft.

When we first started, we knew what our monthly income needed to be in order to meet our family’s basic needs. At the beginning, we took any and every kind of work. We designed flyers, we scanned photos, we even videoed a wedding. We took whatever work we could find and did our best to figure out a fair market price for our services.

We were scrappy, we sent out email newsletters with updates about our family and our recent projects. We were active on social media. We attended every networking and area chamber event we could. We engaged in our communities.

In 2022, we joined a marketing agency mastery group led by a top-notch coach. We pivoted our business to focus on the most profitable offerings, we stopped taking retainers, we stopped doing less profitable work and focused on what we do best — helping Texas business owners with DIY websites to build websites showcasing them as the premium and personal brands they are.