Small business success stories in Sonoma County

A Santa Rosa cafe that’s become a morning institution. A website design company that infuses a little quirkiness while boosting the power of businesses. A Sebastopol organic coffee maker that scored success two years ago with an expanded coffee bar and now is preparing to launch its first packaged beverage product.

The three companies - Dierk’s Parkside Cafe, Link Creative and Taylor Maid Farms - will be honored Tuesday as part of celebrations across the country marking Small Business Week. Sonoma County’s event, staged by the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce, will feature celebrity chef Guy Fieri.

Since 1963, U.S. presidents have recognized Small Business Week to highlight the contributions of the little guys in the nation’s economy. Small businesses, defined as those with fewer than 500 employees, employ over half of all American workers and create roughly two out of every three new jobs in the U.S. each year, according to the Small Business Administration.

Santa Rosa chamber officials say such companies are the heart of their organization, as well as the key contributors to local schools, faith-based groups and nonprofits. Better than 95 percent of the companies in the Santa Rosa chamber have 50 or fewer employees.

“Small businesses tend to be the backbone of any community,” said Jonathan Coe, the chamber’s president and CEO.

The trio of companies selected by the chamber exemplify the dynamism of small businesses in Sonoma County. Here’s a closer look:

Dierk’s Parkside Cafe

Anyone in the restaurant business can tell you being an owner isn’t easy. The long hours, fickle food trends, some rude customers, unreliable staff and rising prices can take its toll.

Then there is the economy. According to the National Restaurant Association, the restaurant industry is expected a record $709 billion in sales this year. Despite six years of growth, the industry has taken longer than expected to recover from the economic downturn and is still below what is expected during a normal post-recession period.

In other words, you have to love it. And Mark Dierkhising loves it.

Dierkhising, 61, is the executive chef and owner of Dierk’s Parkside Cafe in Santa Rosa’s SOFA neighborhood near Juilliard Park and Dierk’s Midtown Cafe in east Santa Rosa. The two restaurants, which employ a total of 40 workers, are a cap on Dierkhising’s career. He started in the business by working for his parents’ restaurant in St. Joe, Minn., and brought his skills to the North Coast, where he operated restaurants with his siblings and then served as executive chef at Bluewater Bistro at Bodega Bay and Equus at the Fountaingrove Inn.

His philosophy is simple.

“It’s all about having fun and really tasty food,” Dierkhising said. “Our mantra here is to have a successful business that is harmonious and fun and gives staff and customers a value.”

He readily admits his cafe is not a normal kind of breakfast place. It caters to foodies who flock there for his Sonoma duck confit with scrambled eggs with hash browns and warm apples to a smoked salmon hash accompanied with oven-dried tomatoes, green onions, hash browns and eggs topped with Hollandaise. But it also appeals to those who want the basics: pancakes, eggs and bacon.

By targeting breakfast, it also has allowed him to have more of a life. Both of his places are open from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., freeing Dierkhising to get home and spend more time with his wife, Karen, who is a librarian at Sonoma State University. His four children are all grown up, but none so far have joined him in the family business.

While the 16-hour days are a thing of the past now, Dierkhising said he still has to worry about keeping up with food trends, ranging from new breakfast joints to the offerings at Starbuck’s and Peet’s Coffee and Tea. The younger generation, which is not tied to a 9-to-5 existence, eats differently than their parents.

To wit: you can get a burger at 7 a.m. at his midtown location.

“As like any other business, if you are not keeping up with what people want … you can get hurt,” he said. “You can’t rely on your older clientele forever. … You have to have new clientele.”

He is considering opening up a “little bakery” for his customers - not wholesale - at his parkside cafe because “I want to create a couple of things I can’t find in town.” That includes croissants and brioche cinnamon rolls.

And at a time when many of those in his age group are thinking of retiring (“I plan on doing this until they take me out the door”), he is eying a new location in Petaluma, an area that he is extremely bullish on. “It’s staggering. It’s bound to grow,” he said.

Link Creative

If your website was a person, who would it be?

Paul McCartney. Bill Clinton. George Clooney. Geena Davis.

Not Britney Spears.

The question has elicited such responses by clients when asked by the partners of Santa Rosa’s Link Creative.

It’s an example of the creativity that Ron Marcelle and Wayne Ingraham bring to their work in web design. The two partners say they want to avoid the stuffy and stodgy.

“People like the quirkiness,” Ingraham said.

You may have seen Ingraham on the big screen, in a brief Link Creative ad that runs in local cinemas before the regular feature. That’s him as a “SALE” sign spinner on a wide-open country road with nary a car in sight. “Dancing like a goofball,” his LinkedIn page puts it.

Ingraham helped found Link Creative in 2002, and teamed up with Marcelle in 2011. The partners, who both graduated from Novato High School in 1998, employ two other workers.

Marcelle and Ingraham have a method in their atypical approach. Once a client has picked the person who embodies the qualities of their website, he or she needs to explain the selection. When that happens, the partners start to learn about the company and the ways the website could aid the business.

Many companies see websites as merely a brochure for clients, but it can be much more, Marcelle said.

For example, a company that sells before-the-movie ads used to have its associates return to the office after a sale to produce a contract and then return it to the client. But Link Creative added features to the website so the associate could complete the contract online in one meeting with the client.

“That saved them tons of hours and resources,” Ingraham said. “And they absolutely loved it.”

Another example is the site the partners created for Ving Direct, a Santa Rosa company that helps wineries build direct-to-consumer sales. Link Creative helped build a website that gives clients direct access to a dashboard with all sorts of analytics about sales and wine club members.

The partners said each day brings fresh challenges. They regularly need to learn the intricacies of new clients’ companies and related business sectors. They keep track of new website technologies and they must take on the many tasks that come with running their own business.

“It pulls that creativity out of so many different sides of your brain,” Marcelle said.

One more atypical aspect of the web design company is its own website: a single page that includes email and phone details and says simply “We’re currently only accepting select work.”

Eventually the partners plan to expand their own site. If they do, they said, the person who would best embody the site might be Teddy Roosevelt or actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

But the current, bare-bones site still encourages inquiries. Once potential clients learn of Link Creative’s limited availability, some seem even more interested in setting up a meeting, the two men said.

With such results from a single page, Marcelle joked, “maybe it will never go away.”

Taylor Maid Farms

Taylor Maid Farms entered a new era two years ago when it moved to The Barlow center in Sebastopol.

The company has been roasting organic coffee for wholesale since 1993 and operated a tiny coffee bar at its former location on Keating Avenue.

But since opening its new roasting facility with a spacious and inviting coffee bar in 2013, Taylor Maid Farms has grown to 43 employees from 18.

Even after nearly two years, the coffee bar revenues are still growing by 50 percent a year in the former apple packing district, now remade with a range of food-related companies based there. Taylor Maid Farm’s wholesale coffee sales are increasing by 7 percent a year and the company’s annual revenues total more than $3 million.

Next on the horizon is to become a producer of packaged coffee drinks.

“That’s our future: ready-to-drink,” said General Manager Rob Daly, using an industry term for pre-mixed beverages.

At his direction, a barista filled a glass from a tap similar to those used for draft beer. Out came a dark “nitrogenated draft coffee” topped with a creamy foam.

“It actually gets a head like a Guinness,” Daly said of the Irish dry stout.

Nitrogen cold brews are fast becoming popular among coffee aficionados, Daly said. Taylor Maid Farms released its first such beverage on tap late last month and hopes to start putting the beverage in a can for sale next year.

When it does, the company expects to see overall revenues increase 20 percent a year.

“That’s what the ready-to-drink product will do for us,” Daly said.

Also in 2013, Taylor Maid Farms opened a second coffee bar in Copperfield Book’s new San Rafael store. The company seeks to open coffee bars at three more locations over the next three years, Daly said.

The production team roasts coffee beans in 50-pound batches. Their efforts add up to 350,000 pounds sold each year, including to locals who keep refilling the brand’s 10-ounce steel cans.

Taylor Maid Farms is the only coffee company that began as an all-organic brand, said Daly, standing near 160-pound bags of beans from Columbia, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Customers expect its products to be made available in as environmentally-friendly a way as possible.

To do that and to look for new product opportunities means “none of us are complacent,” Daly said of the employees.

He spoke with pride of the coffee bar section where patrons can work on laptops with free Wi-Fi in a quiet upstairs loft, sit outside beneath a tall patio roof or gaze from inside through windows into the roasting facility.

“We really wanted to bring community in,” Daly said.

Staff Writer Robert Digitale can be reached at 521-5285 or robert.digi?tale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit. Staff Writer Bill Swindell can be reached at 521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemo?crat.com. On Twitter @BillSwindell.