On Thursday, April 18th, Portage's Woodland Park was packed with businesses and community members alike as the 10th Annual Portage Community Business Night event gave attendees the chance to connect with many of the businesses and organizations serving Northwest Indiana.
We visited with many of the businesses that had booths set up to relay some information about wht they do, and we asked them to share a bit about their organization and why they love the annual PCBN event!
Click here for photos from the event!
“We have a Rittenhouse in Portage, but we also have one in Valpo, so with the presence in Portage, it’s a lot of Portage people in the Portage community coming together and being able to showcase your business to the community. Also it’s nice having the Valpo community here as well to represent Porter County as a whole. It’s nice to network and get to know other businesses in town as well. We’re trying to promote our events. We have wellness events. We have speaking events for Alzheimer’s and dementia, so really trying to get that information out to the people in Portage is important to us.”
-Judy Kukelka, Rittenhouse
“We start in October the year before. We’ve had pretty much our same committee for the last five years. They’re awesome. This event runs so smooth; I’d bet we have one of the best committees at the chamber. This is the 10th year, I started it 10 years ago. It’s grown from 200-300 at the event to over 1,000 at the event now. I think everybody from Portage and the surrounding areas should come to this event. You get to sample some of the best food in the area and you get to sample some of the best vendors in the area. It’s spring, get out and mingle with the people, this is a great event. Where else are you going to do this?”
-Mike Lovings, Lovings Heating and Cooling (not pictured)
“It just allows us to expand our brand to people that don’t take time as they’re driving by to seek us out. It just gives us exposureThe attendance has gone way up. They’ve really got the community engaged. A lot of it has been the action of the committee that they pull from the different businesses and then we’ve done a lot more advertising, trying to figure out the best way to get in front of the residents. PortageLife helps out tremendously, we do a monthly mailer, word of mouth and signage; it works. It’s a combination of a lot of different things.”
-Neil McLaughlin, Minuteman Press
“The reason we attend the chamber event is because Purdue North Central’s biggest schools that attend our campus are Portage, Chesterton, Valpo, La Porte and Michigan City, so this is a great market for us to come and meet people and just let people know what degrees we offer at PNC. It’s a win, win because we get to meet people that are interested in an education at Purdue, and we get to meet people from the community. It’s grown tremendously over the eight years we’ve been coming.”
-Leslie Plesac, Purdue North Central
“We have a lot of our customers that we do business with come out to this. It is good exposure for the dealership and it lets people know that we’re out here. We do a lot of support in Portage for different events.”
-Paul Pumroy, Arnell Chevy-Kia (not pictured)
“Porter-Starke always likes to be out in the community to share our message of health, balance and hope and also just to understand all of the other businesses and what they offer to the local community. We’ve been here pretty much every year. It’s definitely grown in terms of the number of people and the vendors over the years.”
-Elliott Miller, Porter Starke
“It’s a really great opportunity to just meet a lot of people in Portage. There are a lot of businesses that come out, a lot of people in the community come out, just exchanging services or looking for services. We get to promote a lot of different health screenings and we’re doing blood pressures tonight, just helping people stay on track with that is good.”
-Jane Powers, St. Mary Medical Center
“PCBN is Portage. It lets everybody in the community know they’re neighbors, they’re friends and who they are. We’re Midwest Family, we want to be everybody’s family member. We’re always here. We’ve been supporting this event for years.”
-John Peterson, Midwest Family Credit Union CEO (not pictured)
“Porter is participating in this event for many reasons. We’re doing a blood pressure screen to keep our community members healthy, we’re spreading information about a new program at the hospital, health at work, which is in regard to health and wellness to have our companies well. We have a few other informational booths, we have our sleep apnea program, we have several other informational booths, our women’s health and highlighting our Portage facility and our surgery center and our inpatient rehab clinic. We’ve been involved for many years because it is valuable in getting information out to our community.”
-Laurie Wehner-Evans, Porter Memorial Hospital