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Michigan Small Business Spotlight Weekly Issue · March 2025
Michigan, Region by Region
This week we're taking you on a tour of the entire state. One independent business from every Michigan region, plus our March Business of the Month. Let's go.
Michigan isn't just one place. It's the UP and the Thumb. It's cherry orchards and assembly lines, lakeside cottages and city corner stores. Every single corner of this state has people who bet on themselves and built something worth knowing about. This week, we found one for each region. These are their stories.
MARCH 2025 · BUSINESS OF THE MONTH
My Bees Nest LLC Flint, MI · Mid-Michigan
In 2017, Jason Bey was injured on the job at a Flint automotive supplier. Nerve damage in his back. A new hire with no protection. He was laid off while he was still healing. Most people would call that rock bottom. Jason called it a turning point.
One afternoon at a farmers market, he noticed a woman selling honey. He was drawn in by the honeycomb on display. He asked if beekeeping could even be done in Michigan. She said yes, handed him her card, and told him to call her husband. That conversation changed everything.
By 2021, Jason had established My Bees Nest LLC out of his home on the north side of Flint, ordered his first two hives, then four more, then seven more. By the end of that first year, he and his bees had produced 150 gallons of honey. He became Flint's first Black beekeeper. He built it from nothing, in a city the rest of the world had written off, one hive at a time.
Founded: 2021 Honey produced in year one: 150 gallons Flavors available: 10+
"Don't give up on yourself." Jason Bey, Founder of My Bees Nest LLC
Today My Bees Nest honey is sold at the Davison Farmers Market, Oliver T's Market in Grand Blanc, and online. Jason's mission is bigger than honey. It's about showing Flint residents that clean communities, healthy environments, and entrepreneurship are possible right where they live. That is exactly what this platform was built to celebrate.
THE REGIONAL ROUNDUP One Business. Every Corner of Michigan. Five regions. Five stories. All independent. All Michigan.
METRO DETROIT / SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN
Breadless Detroit, MI
Marc Howland was tired of "healthy" sandwiches that were still just bread with a side of guilt. So in 2019 he texted his then-fiancée a photo of a lettuce-wrapped sandwich and said: there has to be something better than this. What followed was months of home-kitchen experimentation, a partnership with Chef Ryan Salter, and the discovery that leafy super-greens like collard greens, Swiss chard, turnip greens, and kale could hold a sandwich together better than any bun.
They launched with pop-ups at local gyms in 2019, opened their first brick-and-mortar on East Jefferson in spring 2022, and are now expanding to Rochester Hills. The menu reads like a love letter to greens: "Bird is the Word" (turkey on turnip greens), "Chardi B" (chicken on Swiss chard), "The Garden of Eatin'" (eggplant on collard). Detroit doing Detroit things.
WEST MICHIGAN
We Rock the Spectrum Grand Rapids, MI (Plainfield Township)
Autumn Wilson wasn't looking to start a business. She was looking for a place where her daughter, who has autism, could just play. A place that was safe, sensory-friendly, and genuinely fun. When she couldn't find one, she built one.
We Rock the Spectrum is an inclusive sensory gym designed for kids with autism and other sensory processing differences, though every child is welcome. It opened in Plainfield Township in October 2024 and has already become a destination for families across West Michigan who had nowhere else to go. Autumn's business exists because a mom refused to accept that her daughter had no options. That's a Michigan story.
A mom who couldn't find the right place for her daughter. So she built it herself.
UPPER PENINSULA
Yooptone Music Marquette, MI
Jake Kuhlman didn't open a music store because he saw a market opportunity. He opened it because he plays guitar, banjo, and mandolin and believes that every town, even a town in the UP, deserves a real music shop. Yooptone Music in Marquette is that shop: a full-service instrument store stocked with guitars, folk instruments, and vinyl, run by someone who actually plays the things he sells.
In a region that gets overlooked in a lot of conversations about Michigan business, Yooptone is a reminder that the UP has its own creative economy, its own culture, and its own people building things from scratch. Yooptonians know.
A musician who believed his city deserved a real music store. So he opened one.
NORTHERN LOWER PENINSULA
Stocked Traverse City, MI
If you've ever rented a vacation home in Northern Michigan and spent your first afternoon driving 20 minutes to a grocery store, Broc Crandall built Stocked for you. Traverse City's vacation rental market is one of the strongest in the Midwest, and for years every arriving guest faced the same problem: an empty fridge.
Stocked is a local grocery delivery service focused specifically on the vacation rental market in Northern Michigan. It's hyperlocal, it's practical, and it solves a real problem for the people who visit the region every summer, while keeping the money in the hands of a local operator instead of a national delivery app. Smart business built for the place it serves.
Noticed a gap that millions of Northern Michigan visitors hit every year. And filled it.
MID-MICHIGAN
Harris Family Health Flint, MI
Dr. Aisha Harris grew up in Flint. She left for Georgetown University School of Medicine, completed her residency in Chicago, and had every reason to build her career somewhere else. She came back.
In 2022 she opened Harris Family Health, Flint's first direct primary care clinic, right on North Saginaw Street in downtown. The model is simple: patients pay a flat monthly membership fee and get full access to their doctor, wholesale labs, and wholesale medications. No insurance billing. No copays. No coinsurance. Just a doctor who knows your name and has time to treat you like a person.
Dr. Harris also teaches at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine, chairs the Michigan Academy of Family Physicians advocacy committee, and hosts the Black Family Doctor podcast. She came home to Flint and brought something the city had never had before.
A Flint kid who got out, got her degree, and chose to come back. That's the whole story.
DID YOU KNOW?
99.6% of all businesses in Michigan are small businesses. They employ nearly half of the state's private-sector workforce. Every time you support a local business, you're keeping Michigan money in Michigan hands.
Know a Business That Deserves a Spotlight?
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Submit a Business → https://forms.gle/Q4HirvHgzKn8y1P76
Michigan Small Business Spotlight Troy, Michigan · Celebrating Independent Business
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