About
A small studio, working with small businesses
We help local businesses compete online without the jargon, the retainers nobody can explain, or the sense that something is being kept from you.
99 MPH is a digital studio in the Chicago metropolitan area. We build websites and run the marketing around them — local search, SEO, paid ads, social and email — for businesses that need more customers rather than a rebrand.
Most of our clients have been sold something before that did not work, and are reasonably suspicious as a result. So we try to be the opposite of that: fixed prices published on the site, no contracts, accounts in your name, and an honest answer when the honest answer is that you should not spend money yet.
How we work
Four things we will not budge on
- 25 years in IT, before any of this
- Robin D spent 25 years in IT and engineering before this studio existed. That is where the habits come from: sites with no database to break into, hosting that does not fall over, and a bias toward the boring choice that still works in three years. The studio is younger than the experience behind it, and both facts are worth stating plainly.
- You should own everything
- Your domain, your hosting account, your Google Business Profile, your ad account. We get added as a manager, never as the owner. If you leave, you take all of it and nothing needs untangling. This is the single most common way small businesses get trapped, and it is entirely avoidable.
- We do not mark up other people’s tools
- Your ad budget goes to Google or Meta on your own card, never through us. Managing those campaigns is a stated 20% of spend, on a minimum of $500 a month, invoiced separately — a fee we name rather than bury. Where a good free tool exists we use it and set it up in your name. What you pay us for is judgement and execution, not for sitting between you and a bill.
- Speed is a feature, not a nice-to-have
- Most of your customers are on a phone on a mediocre connection. A site that takes six seconds loses people who never tell you they left. It is the most under-diagnosed problem in small-business websites.
- Reports should be readable
- Calls, enquiries, and where they came from. Not impressions, not reach, not a dashboard you have to interpret. If a month went badly we will say so.
Talk to a person.
Calls are answered and routed, and anything real reaches Robin the same day.