About Us
Let's talk shop.
The Way Up
Andy Jones started UpEngine in 2018, after a decade in the service industry, mostly cleaning windows. He’s also run an epoxy floor company, sold garage doors, and even done chandelier cleaning. He knows what it feels like to be overwhelmed, to feel desperate when business is slow, and to search for a better work-life balance. Starting UpEngine was really about going back to his roots to help other business owners.
Andy went to school for digital publishing, and design is still the part of UpEngine he enjoys most. Web design is actually what pulled him into window cleaning: he built a site for his brother, realized getting a local business to rank wasn’t all that complicated, and built one for himself. Sites for friends followed, and when he sold his cleaning business in 2017, he already knew exactly what he’d do next.
The reason for starting UpEngine was simple: he’d watched a lot of people sell marketing to service businesses without ever having run one, and he understood the owner’s side of that conversation better than most web designers ever will — the money burned on lead generation companies, the late nights, and running actual trucks, crews, and payroll.
Today UpEngine is a small team working with all sorts of local businesses, from window cleaners to landscapers, helping them reach the people already looking for them.
Andy, cleaning windows — 2012
Level Up Culture
Our core principles.
Creativity
We think outside the box. The obvious answer is usually the one your competitor already used, so we look for the angle nobody in your market has taken yet.
Supporting Good Companies
Hungry, responsive, and good to their own people. We do our best work for owners who are already doing theirs right.
Creating Value
A ranking is not the win. A booked job is. We build toward the result, not the report.
Honesty
Is something not working? Did we mess up? Is it a brand issue or an operations issue? We will let you know what is possible for your business in its current state. We set expectations we can actually hit, and we own it when we do not.
Keepin Up
How people find a local business keeps changing, Google, AI answers, social, all of it. We track the shifts and keep the strategy current.
HOVER TO PAUSE
Local businesses should be easy to find and impossible to confuse with anyone else.
We built the thing we wanted back when we were the ones buying it. Websites that earn their keep, honest takes on software, and a straight answer about what you actually need.
Built by local business owners.
Storytellers first
Before we are marketers or developers, we are storytellers. Every local business has one, and it is almost never the one on the website. It is the reason you started, the thing you refuse to cut corners on, the job nobody else would take.
We tell a business’s story through their brand. Not a tagline bolted on at the end, but the thing the whole site is built around: the words, the photos, the order the pages come in, what you lead with and what you leave out.
It is also the practical difference between a site that ranks and a site that gets called. Search can put you in front of somebody. Only the story tells them why you and not the three other names on the same screen.
Got a software question?
Tell us what you're considering and we'll give you our honest read, no upsells, no referral kickbacks, just a straight answer.