No fancy office. No big agency overhead. Just one couple, four dogs, a lot of experience, and a stubborn belief that small business owners deserve better marketing help than they're getting.
In 2024, John was doing freelance design work on the side of his day job. Mostly favors and small projects. Then a friend asked him a question that changed everything.
Do you know how to run digital marketing campaigns and build websites with heavy SEO focus?
The friend who started it all
John said yes. BeyondVivid was launched.
But the real reason it became a real business wasn't the friend who asked. It was a different friend. She was trying to start a baking business and she was drowning. Not in the baking part. She was great at that. She was drowning in the part nobody told her she was signing up for. The logo. The website. The social posts. The flyers. The thousand little brand decisions that have nothing to do with cookies but somehow become your whole job once you open a business.
She'd say "I can't afford to hire it out." And she was right, because the agencies she'd called were quoting her numbers that didn't make sense for a one-person bakery.
John helped her with strategy. With brand consistency. With a logo that actually looked like her. Today she has a brick and mortar store with that logo on the outside of the building. He won't take credit for any of it. She did the hard work. But he's proud of what she's built.
That's when it clicked. There were a lot more of her out there. Small business owners who needed real help and couldn't get it without giving up their whole budget to an agency that didn't actually care about their business.
So BeyondVivid kept growing. From freelance into a real company. From a side thing into the thing.
John & Courtney
John Parkins is the one you'll most likely talk to. He's a graphic designer with 25 years in the print industry, an Army veteran, a former football coach of 20 years, and the kind of person who learned half his skills by deciding "I want to figure out how that works" and then doing it. He builds the websites. He runs the campaigns. He designs the brochures. He answers the phone. There's no account manager standing between you and the person doing the work, because the person doing the work is John.
He also has a 3D printer that he loves and a workshop full of projects, which tells you everything you need to know about how he approaches problems. Tinker, test, adjust, make it work.
Courtney Parkins is the Owner and President of BeyondVivid. By day she's a physician's coordinator at a local hospital. The rest of the time she's running the books, generating ideas, and being John's whole support system. We say she got the President title because women steer the ship and let the men think they're in charge. That's mostly a joke. Mostly.
We've been together since 2016. Married. Deeply in love. The kind of couple who would do anything for each other and usually does.
Before John was a graphic designer, he spent over 10 years as a licensed electrician. The trade taught him plenty about how to think on his feet, how to solve real problems, and how to make things actually work. But the part that stuck with him was the creative side. Taking an open shell of a building, looking at a pile of components, and building something that worked AND looked good doing it. The average person doesn't look at conduit or wiring and think "wow, that's beautiful." Other electricians do. John would stand back at the end of a job and appreciate what he'd just put together.
That was the part he loved. Graphic design could give him that same feeling, plus he'd be doing something he had a real passion for.
So he made the switch. Traded the toolbelt for a design career. And here's the strange part: in those last electrician years, he designed logos for two different companies he worked for. Both logos featured a lightbulb. He didn't plan it. The shape just kept finding its way back to the computer screen.
Years later, when it came time to design the BeyondVivid logo, the lightbulb showed up again. This time it was the obvious choice. The idea, the spark, the moment something clicks for a small business owner. That's the work. That's what we do here.
It also lines up with the tagline.
Where brands shine brighter.
These aren't slogans. They're the reasons this company exists at all, and the reasons we still pick up the phone the way we do.
Not on purpose, usually. But the result is the same. Big agencies sell you a package, take your whole budget, and apply maybe half of it to your actual ad spend. The rest is "fees." Then they hand your account to someone overseas who's talented but isn't going to understand your business the way someone in your corner would. We've seen it. We've been on the wrong end of it. We don't do it.
The cookie-cutter packages. The "tier one, tier two, tier three" pricing pages. The contracts that lock you in for a year before you've seen any results. That works for big agencies running on volume. It doesn't work for small businesses, and it doesn't work for us. Every business is different. Every quote should be too.
Not as a strategy. As a habit. We'd rather see your business succeed and have you tell three friends than squeeze every last dollar out of one project. That's how we've always done it.
And that's okay. We've been doing this long enough to know who we work best with. If you trust the process, communicate honestly, and want a real partner instead of a vendor to argue with, we're going to get along great.
Want to dig into how this plays out in real numbers, real hours, and real contracts? Our FAQ covers the most common questions, including pricing, timelines, and what to expect when you hire us.
We work out of our house in Lima, Ohio. Nothing fancy. Just effective. Working from home is one of the reasons we can save business owners money instead of charging them for a corner office they'll never see.
We have four dogs. They're loud and they're constant and they sometimes show up on Zoom calls.
We have five children and three grandchildren. And of course, those grandbabies are spoiled at every available opportunity.
We love working in our garden beds, spending time with our family, and laughing. We say "it's always an adventure" because something always happens with the two of us that makes us laugh, and at this point we've stopped trying to predict what.
That's the whole picture. Two real people. Four dogs. A house. A garden. A lot of experience.
Cooper, Benny, Jaxy, Ruby
And a belief that you deserve a marketing partner who actually shows up for you.
No high-pressure sales call. No "package" we're going to push you into. Just a real conversation about what you need, where you're stuck, and whether we're a good fit to help. If we are, great. If we're not, we'll point you somewhere that is.
