Interview with D’nelle Dowis - CEO at Berry Interesting

Today in the digital world, Digital Marketing and Web development are two important components of creating a strong online presence for businesses, attracting new customers, and growing their brands. Berry Interesting is a leading Digital Marketing and Web Development Consultancy Company in the US that has helped numerous brands to achieve their desired level of success through its expertise and innovative approach. 

In this exclusive interview with D'nelle Throneberry Dowis - Berry Interesting CEO, we invite you to learn more about challenges and opportunities in the Digital Marketing and Web Development market.

Hello D’nelle! Welcome to TechBehemoths. Please tell us about yourself. Your childhood, education, up to professional development, and how did you reach the current stage?

I grew up in a three-generation household and my earliest memories are of watching my parents build and grow a remodelling contracting business. There's no doubt that growing up in the midst of that process made a deep impression on me. There was nothing fancy about their business – no outside funding, no marketing department, no brick-and-mortar offices; My mother handled business operations from our home office while my father managed worksites and subcontractors… marketing was entirely word-of-mouth… and they relied on my maternal grandparents for childcare. As un-fancy as it was, as I grew up it put me in a unique position among my peers. 

Other kids' dads dressed in suits and ties, went into an office at nine, returned home at 5, and took two weeks' vacation once a year. At the time, I idealized that sort of lifestyle. At first, it was that I was jealous that other girls in my scout troop were able to hand their cookie sales sheet to a parent and have it returned to them filled with sales from their parent's coworkers; as I aged, it was that I was jealous that other kids never had to overhear discussions about a lack of health insurance or retirement savings. 

I genuinely thought that - smarty-pants that I was – I'd go off to college (on a scholarship, the only way to pay for it), get a degree, and enter the workforce by getting a “real” job (i.e. one with a steady paycheck, 401(k), and health insurance. The “real world,” however, had different plans for me!  It took me about a year in that first “real” job to realize that I had very little patience for that kind of lifestyle. It bored me to tears, and it was in direct opposition to my love of project-based work, personal autonomy, and high-quality work product. 

Within 18 months of graduating with my BA – while employed as a beat reporter for a small-town newspaper in Tennessee – I founded Berry Interesting. Relying on experiences I'd had in student media at university, years of watching my parents run their own business, a level of a tech-savvy characteristic of elder millennials, and the blissful ignorance that 20-somethings enjoy, I sallied forth and started a C-corporation as a way to organize freelance work that started coming my way from my network. 

Berry Interesting's first client (who also happened to be a world-renowned artist and printmaker, a fact I completely missed in the early stages of our work) approached me with what he saw as a very small ask – to take handwritten pages of his father's World War II memoir and transcribe them into a text document so that copies could easily be made and distributed to his family for the holidays. Ever the overachiever (fresh out of a very well-funded student media organization and employed at a day job in print media), I proposed to him that, instead, we actually turn those pages into a full-color, perfect-bound book, complete with photos from his father's youth and wartime, and self-publish it. 

That project was my first taste of just how effective I could be in the “real world” if I were brave enough to abandon my desire for a “real job” and instead forge my own path professionally. It was also around that time that I was first introduced to WordPress and the power of open-source software. The rest of my story closely tracks the evolution of WordPress as a platform. Berry Interesting has relied heavily on the existence, and free availability, of WordPress to grow and power our business, but at the heart of what we do is a deep desire to help people tell their stories in mindful, meaningful, and strategic ways.

Recently we reached a huge milestone – we hired our amazing “unicorn” developer (who we've worked with on a contract basis for 3 years) as our first full-time non-owner employee! The ways in which this development has expanded our ability to truly care for our existing clients while confidently accepting new ones are still playing out.

It's a very exciting time for me and for Berry Interesting, and I've never been more motivated to bring our approach of long-term relationship-building and a support-first mindset to more businesses, especially those with internal marketing staff. As independently-minded as I always have been (and continue to be!), I believe that it is possible to reach a happy medium between hiring in-house website support staff versus just delegating website-related tasks to the marketing team… so long as that balance is mindfully created!

As the CEO of Berry Interesting, please tell us more about the company, team, and work processes.

We are a small but mighty team of three full-time employees and a multitude of trusted specialists we contract with on a regular basis.  As employees of a small business, we all wear several hats, but we wear them well! Most of our “watercooler” discussions these days, when we're not discussing client strategy, are about our own growth and how to do it wisely. 

Luckily, we are all “unicorns” in our own rights: I handle project management, marketing, sales, and client account care; Chris manages our social media presence, internal operations, and on-site client services; and Marissa focuses almost entirely on client services, with a dash of product development and process documentation.

We all work asynchronously and remotely, giving us all a lot of independence and flexibility. We very much value our collective mental health and individual work-life balance; we aim to individually work no more than 32 hours per week, 46 weeks per year. The impact that this has on our personal autonomy and creativity really can't be overstated.

In order to support that style of work, we rely heavily on task management and communication/collaboration tools like Teamwork task management, Slack messaging, Google Workspace, and Zapier. As a result, our clients inevitably end up using those tools as well, and we often find ourselves leading by example when our clients are looking to build out their own business processes.  

Berry Interesting specialised in Marketing Services, Website Design and Development among others. In Digital Marketing which directions look promising in the long term, and which are marketing concerns? Why?

We are “all-in” when it comes to WordPress. This year is the 20th anniversary of the platform, and it powers over 30% of all websites! While we do work on other platforms and codebases, we don't see a future in which WordPress isn't a huge part of our work. Its market share, combined with the vibrant, diverse, and global community of users, builders, developers, and creators, makes us fully confident that we can rely on WordPress to support us and our clients as we work to build thriving businesses.

We're also very excited (even more so since Marissa has come on with us full-time) at what the future holds in terms of integrations and automation. The tools that currently exist to streamline workflows, increase our productivity, and overall make our operations more efficient are just the beginning. A website is a central hub for a business of any size to reach its existing and potential customers, but it does not exist in a vacuum. The ever-expanding array of business tools that are easy to integrate into WordPress sites is very exciting for us (even if a little intimidating!), and we love any opportunity to eliminate rote, boring tasks in order to make more room in our – and our clients' – brains for creativity, strategic thinking, and personal time!

However, the topic of automation leads us directly to a particular concern (and personal obsession) of mine, which is how AI will affect our business. Everything from the services we offer to the way we run our own day-to-day operations is up for grabs. We've seen amazing results from integrating ChatGPT and other AI tools into our own work (largely in our content marketing planning and operations).

Relying on ChatGPT to help us outline blog posts, draft social posts, and even reformat data, has resulted in massive productivity gains. My concern is less about AI “taking our jobs” and more about how we, collectively as humanity, choose to treat the gains that can be made by relying on it. The way we use AI right now is how we intend to continue – we treat it like an intern that supports us as we put all of our humanity into the big-picture direction and minute details. The concept of AI-as-intern comes from Chris Lema's recent interview on Jamie Marsland's YouTube channel. Lema's perspective is one that we share.

Digital aside, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention things like climate change, the US approach to health care and firearms regulation, and global political polarization. The impacts on our ability to travel to service clients on-site, on our and our client's wellbeing, and on our communities are regularly front-of-mind.

As business owners, website support specialists, developers, and production managers, we find ourselves needing to adapt to the adverse effects of those things on a day-to-day basis as we keep our focus on client care. As humans, the routine and repetitive nature of being confronted with these challenges absolutely impacts us. We expect to need to adapt personally and professionally to these challenges, and it is our goal to use Berry Interesting the business entity as a buffer to create stability and safety for our employees and our clients.

What are the goals for 2023? What new opportunities do you think are expected in 2023 in terms of business development and digital marketing?

As I speak, we are facing the halfway mark of 2023. The first half of this year has been full of surprises for us. From hiring Marissa in Q2 instead of Q1 2024 to developing a fantastic new Technical Site Assessment service that will enable us to provide both a new service to clients while also elevating the services we already provide to our support clients, this year has already held more than we'd originally anticipated! 

In adapting to the unexpected, we've re-set goals for ourselves for the second half of the year. Our priority is to onboard more clients to our website support packages. Financial analysis of our previous 18 months has shown us unequivocally that not only are our support clients the most profitable relationships we have, but they are also where we are able to provide the most ROI for the clients themselves. 

In a way, the pressures that inflation is putting on both businesses and individuals are actually good for us; our support package prices haven't changed in the last 5 years, so our basic service is more affordable than it's ever been. Meanwhile, the value of that basic service has also increased, thanks to Marissa's full-time presence and her ability to automate work we'd previously done by hand. 

Additionally, the labor market being as unpredictable and confusing as it results in another benefit to us. As vendors/partners of outsourced service providers, we are somewhat shielded from rounds of lay-offs and budget cuts. We're able to maintain long-term relationships with our clients and adapt to their budget constraints. The consistency that a relationship with a truly trusted business partner creates for our clients is invaluable, and we benefit from it just as much!

We do expect to see AI continue to disrupt many areas of digital marketing, but we confidently see this as an opportunity to leverage AI for our benefit while also positioning ourselves as a go-to advisory resource for our current and future clients.

Imagine that Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Gates want to work for Berry Interesting. Which one would you choose? Why? 

To be quite frank, that's a kind of Sophie's Choice with none of the options actually in alignment with our business goals or values. Given that we truly value diversity of origin, race, gender, and class, that's a starkly uniform set of options to choose from! We do not value “the grind” in the way that Musk seems to do; we do not value manipulation of the masses for pure profit as Zuckerberg has demonstrated he does; we do not value market capture, the imposition of uniformity, or the mistreatment of employees and contractors as Bezos's business dealings demonstrate that he does. 

So, out of that very uniform (and quite boring) dataset, I'd have to pick Bill Gates. His focus on using his wealth to drive innovation that is (at least, in his opinion) in the interest of humanity as a whole sets him apart from the overwhelmingly toxic nature of the other three men. When hiring him, I'd put him directly in charge of managing all of our pro bono work, first vetting and selecting young WordPress professionals for sponsorships to travel to and speak at conferences around the globe, and then perhaps identifying businesses who could truly use our advice and care but aren't in a position to afford our services as of yet. 

Your hobbies and one of favorite movie

I've always enjoyed container gardening, but when we moved into our current home, we had large raised beds installed in the backyard, and I've since become a total gardening nerd. My current obsession is our strawberry patch (literally the best-tasting strawberries I've ever had!) and the health of our soil. I love the seasonality of the hobby (leaving me to curl up with books during the winter), but more than that I love that I can share it with our two elderly dogs, Cece and Annie.

They are obsessed with our home-grown carrots and demand their share from any harvest. I also think it's kind of cool that my hobby aligns with the metaphors we use in our marketing materials and in our conversations with clients. Website ownership is less about building than it is about ongoing, mindful care, and gardening is a great way to understand the demands of keeping a website functioning well and working on your behalf!

My favorite movie, the one I will always watch until the end, is The Big Lebowski. Absolutely escapist, with an incredibly talented cast, and a story that only the Cohen Brothers could do justice. It never fails to make me laugh, and Jeff Bridges as The Dude reminds me not to take myself, or others, too seriously

If you had the chance to go back in time, what advice would you give to D'nelle Throneberry Dowis from 2013?

Ahhh, that's a great point in time! 2013 D'nelle had just gotten married and finally plunged full-time into operating Berry Interesting. She was terrified, and she could absolutely use advice from 2023 D'nelle. 

I'd tell her to hold that terror and do it anyway. Stop being concerned about perfection and learn to embrace the amazing things that can come from bravely forging ahead despite the weight of imposter syndrome. I'd also tell her to start getting comfortable with asking for and receiving help as soon as possible. Looking back on the last 15 years of business ownership, what's held me back has been a very stubborn inclination to DIY Every. Single. Thing.

I was selling myself short and hindering my ability to truly actualize my personal talents. The moment that I started asking for help, and the more comfortable I got with graciously accepting that help, everything opened up, from client relationships to my own personal health. The act of receiving is a difficult but sacred thing, and I truly wish that 2013 D'nelle had understood that!

Berry Interesting is one of the leading companies on TechBehemoths. If you like this interview and think that D'nelle and her team can help your business don't hesitate to contact them via TechBehemoths or get in touch with D'nelle on LinkedIn.