The Szejbach entrepreneurial gene

Babs Young, Cub Reporter, was having breakfast at Sonny’s one day and followed her nose to a hot tip.  Chris and Sonny’s daughter Cori was showing every sign of following in the family’s entrepreneurial footsteps.  Babs provided some mysterious visuals and left it to me to fill in the details. 

Meet Cori (Szejbach) Balentine. She and her husband Brad just moved their home-based printing business, Cobra Printing, into the Schoolhouse Gifts building in Torch Lake Village. They do custom screen printing and embroidery for mom-and-pop businesses and community organizations around the region. Logo ball caps, wine glasses imprinted with the names of the bride and groom, coffee mugs and car decals, Torch Lake sweatshirts–if you can imagine it they can create it, and they have no minimum order. “We’ll make one of something if you want us to,” says Cori. “We understand what it’s like to be a small seasonal business like my mom and dad’s.”  She digs through her files and pulls out embroidery samples to show me.  “We haven’t done any advertising at all so far.  It’s all been word of mouth.”

Cori will be at the Schoolhouse on Tuesdays and Fridays all summer, selling gifts in the front, turning out print jobs in the back. Her clients call on her cellphone and email their logos and design ideas. Her office is a milk crate filled with manila envelopes, the classic Very Small Business filing system. Her printing equipment is set up in the back, next to a playroom for her daughter Addie. There’s a fenced back yard, so the family dogs come along, too. “This sure beats the basement workshop at our house,” Cori laughs as she looks around the light-filled gift shop.

Let's show her how we print shirts

Printing is a sideline for the Balentines—Cori is an RN at Munson and Brad has a Frito Lay route in Leelanau County. They thought it would be something Brad would work on during the winter when his delivery route is slow. Ironically, they discovered that demand for their service goes up in the summer just like everything else in northern Michigan. That’s OK. They’re young and energetic and they’re building something of their own. “I think having your own business is in my family’s genes,” says Cori.

Ah yes. That brings me to another Szejbach story.

Tom Vranich scooped me in the pages of the Elk Rapids News last week. He reported that Matt and Lisa Claflin had released the world’s very first known Petoskey Stone Puzzle, and that it was for sale that very day at Sonny’s Torch Lake Market and other fine emporia. I do not mind being scooped on matters of Elk Rapids politics or Whitewater Township shenanigans, but Lisa is another Szejbach daughter. Being bested at my own favorite breakfast table is unbearable. So here, in case you missed that corner of the ERN last week, is the infamous puzzle, which is quite nice. It’s made in the U.S. and printed in soy inks on recycled cardboard and the picture speaks to everyone who’s ever walked Grand Traverse Bay. I cannot imagine why no one ever made one of these before, but now Matt and Lisa and their Puzzles That Rock LLC have a lock on the genre, and good on them.