Welcome to SQUIRE! Our goal is to help local businesses become Confident, Prominent, and Influential by partnering with them to build exceptional websites, help define brand identity, and implement tools that save time!
At the core of our philosophy is one simple truth: Your success is our success. This conviction guides our entire business structure, placing customer success, satisfaction, and long-term partnerships as our highest priority! In the same way a Knight relies on their Squire as their trusted companion, we strive to become that indispensable, valued extension of your team. As your business achieves greater success and your needs naturally expand, you can rely on us to grow, adapt, and ride alongside your evolving needs. Focusing on Quality over Quantity allows us to deliberately bypass the high-pressure, transactional ‘sell, sell, sell’ approach, ensuring you never feel rushed, undervalued, or left to face the journey alone. We are the support system you can depend on, ready for the Adventure ahead.
Since 2016, I’ve had a front-row seat to the digital hurdles local businesses face. I have filled a lot of roles in my time, such as Graphics Designer, Web Developer, Project Manager, and Sales Engineer across over 150 websites. Allowing me to learn the process from the first line of code to years of ongoing support and partnerships. As an entrepreneur myself, working alongside local owners turned a professional interest into a genuine passion!
Now I am excited to announce that I launched SQUIRE to do things differently! I spent the last few months deconstructing standard agency practices to build a new model that prioritizes businesses here in the Twin Cities.
Here are 5 ways SQUIRE is changing the game:
Most agencies rely on high-volume “churn and burn” models, where you build websites as fast as possible to get to the next lead. This leaves business owners feeling rushed and misunderstood. At SQUIRE, we’ve flipped the script by lowering the barrier to entry with accessible price brackets and splitting payments in two, allowing us to focus on long-term partnerships, not just fast-paced transactions. When you grow, we grow. This core philosophy ended up causing a large ripple effect in how we approach our work!
Now that we’ve moved away from a “customer acquisition” mindset toward a “customer retention” model, we have refined our processes to specifically meet the needs of our Twin Cities and South Metro entrepreneurial communities.
You aren’t a template, so why should your website be? We believe the secret sauce to a high-performing website is a genuine connection. Because we are local, we prioritize meeting in person over a cup of coffee to truly get to know you, though we are always happy to connect online if that fits your schedule better. By taking the time to understand who you are, how you work, and what success means to you, we can grow to be better partners. This alignment allows us to build websites that complement your unique needs and create tools that fit into your workflow, saving you time and headaches. Ultimately, this all leads to fewer revisions, better website features, and a final product that truly hits it out of the park!
Through our work with new entrepreneurs, we realized that many businesses need more than just a website. To help bridge this gap, we’ve developed two foundational deliverables, included standard with every build, to ensure we start on the right foot.
The Adventure Map: Usually, detailed wireframes and project workflows are hidden behind extra fees. We’ve changed that by combining your Wireframe, Scope of Work (SOW), and Project Milestones into one cohesive Adventure Map. By providing this up-front, we eliminate guesswork and set crystal-clear expectations for your project’s journey. It’s an invaluable tool for effective communication and is now a standard part of our process!
The Adventure Compass: Many businesses haven’t had the chance to fully nail down their visual identity. To solve this, we created the Adventure Compass, a hybrid Style and Brand Guide. Included in every build, the Compass ensures we design with confidence and consistency. It also serves as our North Star, keeping your digital presence true to your mission and aesthetic as you grow both on your website and throughout other online content.
Technology moves fast, and we refuse to fall behind. We’ve spent months testing, deconstructing, and restacking the latest tools to ensure we are building both websites and partnerships that last!
For example, during this process, we actually migrated our hosting infrastructure three different times, at our own expense. It is almost embarrassing to admit, but finding servers that met our high standards for speed, stability, and security turned out to be harder than expected. Building on a shaky server is like building a house on sand, which is a sure fire way to let our customers down. That is why we put in the extra work to ensure your foundation is rock solid, even circling back to provide free upgrades to all of our existing partners because we believe in doing right by people!
We also upgraded our “tool belt” with industry leading tools, allowing us to build stronger, communicate more clearly, and deliver more solutions than ever before! There are a lot of cool new tools we are using, and I am excited to cover them in more detail in future blog posts!
Web development is full of jargon and technical “noise” that can feel overwhelming. We believe it is important for you to know what you’re buying, see what decisions we are making along the way, and understand how the website is benefiting your business!
With this in mind, we’ve established a simplified communication process throughout our partnership that keeps you in the loop without getting lost in the technical weeds. No anxieties, no gatekeeping, just clear, approachable communication!
*And if you do want to geek out on the technical details, we are always excited to talk shop!
The typical website build has three payment stages:
The first payment is due before we start the Build, and covers 50% of the Build quote. At this stage, we will have our Adventure Map and Compass created so that we know how much the build will cost and what the build includes.
The second payment is due before we launch the Build, and covers 50% of the Build quote. At this stage, the Build will be completed and ready to go live, but we want to close out the Build quote before officially launching.
The third payment is also due before we launch the Build, but this payment covers your first month of your selected Monthly Adventure Plan. This payment covers the costs needed to host your website and kicks off all of your ongoing Monthly Adventure Plan deliverables.
After your website is live, it is normal for ongoing adjustments to be needed. This is where support tickets come in! Whenever you need some text changed, an image added, a blog post posted, etc. All you need to do is email your request to our support email.
Support tickets cover work that can be completed in 30min or less, which will get you farther than you might expect! Tasks that take longer will typically fall under something like an added feature or small project and do not count as support tickets. Examples of this could be something like a redesign, adding a new complicated form, or creating new pages.
Admittedly, without developer knowledge, it can be a little hard to determine what counts as a support ticket and what doesn’t. We totally understand this, so if you ever have a task, need, or idea, just email it in, and we can take a look! Do not worry, if a request is bigger than a support ticket, we will explain everything to you and get approvals to avoid any billing surprises…we dont do those here!
Included as a baseline in our Monthly Adventure Plans is New Domain Acquisition! This means if you do not already have a domain (www.YourWebsiteDomain.com), we will provide you with some available options and acquire the domain that you select.
With that being said, we do put a limit of $30 on these new domain acquisitions, which will cover most domain options. If there is a premium domain that you would like that goes over the $30 included budget, then we can just talk about an added cost to cover the additional funds needed.
At SQUIRE, we purchase and manage domains through GoDaddy’s platform and do need any existing domains for websites we build transferred to our account so that we can properly set up our CDN.
If you get a new idea that you would like to add to the build, just let us know, and we can talk things over! The two main factors are when this new idea is added and how much time is needed to create this new idea.
If we are still building the website, this new idea will likely be outside of the project scope, but we can see how we are doing on time, or explore options to expand the quote if needed!
If your new website is already live, send in a support ticket, and we can take a look! We may be able to add the new idea within the support ticket time, or we can talk about turning this into a small project and quote how much this addition would cost.
This is a tricky topic! We will never lock you out of the website if this is something that is important to you. But with that being said, as partners that genuinely care about your success, we highly recommend leaving the edits to us. With nearly a decade of experience, I have worked with many clients who want backend access and end up accidentally introducing errors and, in some cases, crashing the website. There have only been two instances that I can remember where customers making their own edits worked out well.
With that being said, if this is important to you, we might be able to find a middle ground! It is possible for us to create accounts and rope off some areas of the website to help add guide rails in hopes of avoiding issues down the road.
If this is important to you, let’s talk about what you need to succeed, and we can figure out the best approach! Thanks
The internet is a big space, and websites can go in so many different directions! If you have a need, idea, or question, please do not hesitate to reach out and ask. We love hearing about your ideas and can see if there is anything we can do to help you reach your goals!
Let’s craft our digital adventure together!