MainStreet was founded to enable greater collaboration among business owners and business growth experts, and itself is a manifestation of collaborative thinking and action by a group of dynamic entrepreneurs. The MainStreet executive team have taken vastly different routes to get here, but each has arrived with a storehouse of practical business wisdom, and a burning passion to help small-business owners succeed. We’re here for you…

Murray Smith

Murray Smith helps business owners achieve their potential in business. He currently owns four companies dedicated to business growth. These companies have helped more than 50,000 businesses worldwide. Murray’s experienced in the private and public sectors with 13 companies including, franchising, coaching, publishing, technology, hospitality, retail, media, consumer products, training, energy, e-commerce, software, consulting, and entertainment industries.

As a testament to his abilities, He bought the Indian Motorcycle trademark from bankruptcy (just the name the actual company went bankrupt in 1953), and built it into the second-largest U.S. motorcycle company in the world. Sales exceeded $75 million in the first year with a business value of more than $300 million. Indian Motorcycle was one of the most publicized business stories when Murray was CEO / Chairman.

Recently, Murray authored the book, The Answer, recognized as a Best Seller by the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Amazon for its powerful message. In The Answer Murray shares his wisdom and insights for how to grow your business and improve your lives. Murray is known as a Speaker, Author, Business Advisor and Entrepreneur.


Peter Allemang

Peter Allemang has been focussed on growing businesses for over twenty-five years. Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug while at university, he paid his way through school operating a painting franchise, and found a passion for building business, understanding how to influence customer behaviour, grow revenue, and develop new business opportunities.

He has developed his expertise in selling, marketing, and managing by operating businesses in such diverse fields as sports marketing, television production and distribution, event marketing, licensing, sponsorship, consulting, hospitality, financial services, technology, loyalty, and online marketing.

Through his career as an executive and as a business owner, his companies have connected people’s passions with companies and organizations through sports, music, and special events. He has supported organizations including the National Hockey League, Hockey Hall of Fame, Molson, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Aeroplan, HBC, Choice Hotels, Konica-Minolta, and A&P connect with their clients more deeply and with greater results. He also learned how to use technology to enhance customer loyalty, increase customer spending, and add more to the customer’s lifetime value.

Peter has participated in the growth of five multi-million dollar companies, and the successful acquisition or merger of three of these companies. He co-founded MainStreet with a passion for helping business owners grow and to ensure they learn the critical lessons that can make or break a business. He is responsible for day to day operations of MainStreet.

Jennifer Fender

Jennifer Fender brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the small business community. She has partnered with a number of smaller companies who were either in start-up mode, developing and wanted faster growth or in-trouble. Her insights and wisdom helped turn these businesses around by creating the strategies, communications and sales training that got results.

She has worked with micro-business owners and helped them increase revenues and profits by teaching them to focus on the critical few things that are needed for generating sales and attracting new clients. She is trained and certified in Authentic Selling techniques which are collaborative based communications.

Jennifer also has extensive experience in the corporate world with both inside and outside sales training. She has coached, mentored and led sales teams that have exceeded revenue objectives. She has received recognition for consistently outstanding performance in the fields of personal development, sales, promotional marketing, branding and co-creating intellectual property.

Jennifer is talented, fun to work with and a well seasoned professional. She is responsible for sales and business development at MainStreet.

Anna Gustafson

One of the newborn small businesses on MainStreet is Bubble Wrap Productions, founded when Anna Gustafson joined the team to produce creative content for the online experience. With a 15-year career in the entertainment industry under her belt, Anna has a great eye for the human side of business, which syncs perfectly with MainStreet’s emphasis on concise advice for real business owners.

Anna’s small-business experience began when she was a young deckhand on her family’s fishing boat up and down the coast of British Columbia. It was a real-life education that gave her a profound understanding of profit and loss, sweat equity and strategy. Anna thinks like a small business owner because she is one and as a result she brings a sensibility to the MainStreet client experience that business owners, professionals and entrepreneurs relate to. She is responsible for audio/video production at MainStreet.

Doug Sutherland

At age 17, Doug Sutherland spent most of his time managing a 7-Eleven convenience store while writing software on the only computer system owned by the Scarborough Board of Education – and his unique mixing of equal parts business and technology was forged.

Doug is a product and technology strategist who grew up in the Internet world. Doug has been a principal in start-up companies, a senior executive in international companies, a consultant to small and larger organizations on process, product and technologies, and a sweat equity investor in several earlier-stage companies in Canada and the US. He has served on advisory boards, blogs and tweets passionately, and equally enjoys writing and reviewing business plans, or doing code reviews!

Doug has led merger teams and participated in two going-public initiatives, including the $25M IPO of Dexit Inc. on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Doug followed the digital bread crumbs to MainStreet, where he found the opportunity to help small-business owners acquire best practices knowledge in technology-enabled social and online media solutions. He is a genius at helping brands reach their consumers across online channels, including Web, e-mail, mobile, social, blogs and loyalty. He is responsible for Systems, Technology and Operations at MainStreet.