We built the agency we wanted to hire.
Digital Squad started in 2016 because we'd all been the client on the other side of a bad agency relationship — billed monthly for activity, reported to in metrics that never appeared on a P&L, and quietly locked out of our own ad accounts.
So we wrote down every practice that had frustrated us, inverted it, and made that the operating model. Ten years and 412 projects later, it still holds.
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Projects delivered
Since 2016
$0M
Revenue driven
Attributed client revenue
0.0x
Average ROAS
Across paid accounts
0%
Client retention
Year over year
Six things that make us occasionally difficult.
These aren't wall posters. Each one has cost us money at least once, which is roughly how you tell a value from a slogan.
Say the uncomfortable thing
Our most-quoted moments in client testimonials are all the same shape: we told them something they didn't want to hear. A hero product losing money. A spec that was 71 features too long. Ten categories that needed shutting off. Agencies that only agree get fired in year two.
Report the number that matters
Impressions, reach, and engagement are diagnostics, not outcomes. We report blended CAC, contribution margin, and revenue — including when those numbers are worse than the platform dashboards claim.
Publish the price
Every service page lists real prices. It costs us some inbound volume from people who'd have been talked into a bigger package, and it makes every call we do take dramatically more useful.
Leave clients better than we found them
You own every account, pixel, audience, repository, and design file. Several clients have taken our work in-house and stopped paying us. That's a good outcome, and we'd rather that than a dependency we manufactured.
No bait and switch
The strategist who runs your sales call runs your account. If you're going to work with a junior, you'll know their name before you sign, not after.
Turn work down
If your ad spend is too low, your product isn't ready, or a specialist freelancer serves you better, we say so. We turn away roughly one in four inbound enquiries, and it's why retention is 96%.
Ten years, abbreviated.
- 2016FoundedThree people who'd been on the client side of bad agency relationships, starting the one they'd wanted to hire.
- 2018First $10M client outcomeNorthwind's predecessor engagement proved the full-funnel thesis: fix economics before buying more traffic.
- 2020In-house creative studioWe stopped outsourcing creative after concluding it was the biggest lever in paid social — and the one agencies control worst.
- 2022Published our pricesContentious internally, obviously right in hindsight. Inbound volume fell; qualified inbound rose.
- 2024$40M+ in managed spendCrossed forty million in annual managed media across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
- 2026412 projects deliveredThirteen disciplines, eleven verticals, and a 96% year-over-year retention rate.
Partnerships & recognition
Trusted by teams at
The part clients actually remember.
Not the reports. The uncomfortable conversation that changed the trajectory.
We'd worked with three agencies who all wanted to spend more on ads. Digital Squad was the first to open our P&L and tell us our hero product was losing money. That conversation was uncomfortable and it changed the business.
The repositioning work paid for itself in the first two closed deals. We stopped being the cheap option and started being the obvious one. Our reps say discovery calls feel completely different now.
We spent four months optimizing audiences when the answer was 'make more ads.' Digital Squad didn't just tell us that — they built the machine that produces them. We haven't touched an audience setting in months.
Our board's biggest concern was that growth stopped the moment we stopped spending. Eighteen months later most of our pipeline comes from an asset we own. That changed our fundraising conversation entirely.
For two years marketing and finance argued about numbers in every board meeting. Digital Squad ended that argument by building one source of truth. The $2.1M we stopped wasting was almost a side effect.
We'd been burned by programmatic SEO before and were genuinely skeptical. The difference was that Digital Squad refused to publish pages that weren't useful. Fewer pages, vastly better results.
Find out what your funnel is really worth in 30 minutes.
We'll audit your site, ads, and analytics live on the call and show you the three biggest revenue leaks. You keep the findings whether or not we work together.