For 25 years, MINDSCAPE has grown alongside the people, businesses, and technologies that shaped its story.
To mark the milestone, co-founders Pete Brand and Paul Ferrier reflect on the early uncertainty, the people who believed in MINDSCAPE, the lessons that carried the company forward, and why they remain excited about what comes next.
Paul Ferrier, Co-Founder/CSO
Owning my own business was never really a question of if. It was a question of when. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I always assumed I’d follow a similar path. The plan was simple. Finish college, spend five years working for a web design company to learn the business, then start my own company.
There was just one problem.
About a year into college, I started looking for web design companies and realized there really weren’t any. The internet was still in its infancy, and this industry barely existed. Then one afternoon, a classmate came to my house to help me with some software. During that visit, he discovered I was a designer, and I discovered he had started a web design company that didn’t have one.
By the time he walked out my front door, I owned 50% of the company.
That partnership eventually introduced me to Pete. The original plan was for Pete to become an equal partner in that business, but circumstances took us in a different direction. Instead, the two of us made the decision to leave and start over.
That decision became MINDSCAPE.
Looking back, one of the things I’m most grateful for is that two incredibly talented people believed in us before we had much to offer. Mark Swanson and Steve Olson left the stability of the previous company to join us with little more than our promise that we’d work as hard as we possibly could to make it succeed and continue providing them with a paycheck.
Twenty-five years later, Mark is still part of MINDSCAPE.
When I think about what I’m most proud of, it isn’t a particular website, award, or milestone. It’s the people. Over the years, we’ve had the privilege of helping clients grow their businesses, solve difficult problems, and achieve meaningful success. At the same time, we’ve watched team members build careers, develop their talents, and create opportunities for themselves and their families.
MINDSCAPE has been many different companies over the years. We’ve been small and scrappy. We’ve been larger and more established. We’ve experienced different markets, different services, different technologies, and different cultures. Through all of that change, the one constant has always been the people.
The early years weren’t easy.
Summer was always the time we dreaded. Work would slow down, uncertainty would creep in, and we’d find ourselves asking the same difficult question. Is this the year we have to close the doors?
Somehow, every time, one project would arrive at exactly the right moment. One client. One opportunity. Just enough to build the bridge to the next month. Looking back now, it’s amazing how many times those moments changed the future of our company.
Starting MINDSCAPE at 21 years old also meant that the company shaped almost every part of my adult life.
Today I’m 46, and when I look around at the life my family and I have built, it’s impossible to separate it from MINDSCAPE. The experiences, the friendships, the lessons, the challenges, and the opportunities all exist because two young entrepreneurs decided to take a chance on an industry that hardly existed yet.
Of course, the industry itself barely resembles what we started in.
When we launched, everything was hand coded. Projects that now take days or even hours once took weeks or months. The tools, the technology, and now artificial intelligence have transformed almost every aspect of what we do.
But despite all of that change, one thing hasn’t changed.
Our purpose has always been to help clients achieve measurable results. Technology will continue to evolve, but helping people succeed remains timeless.
If I had to point to one reason MINDSCAPE is celebrating 25 years, it would be resilience.
Not because Pete or I had all the answers. We certainly didn’t. We simply refused to quit. We surrounded ourselves with great people, stayed patient during difficult times, and kept moving forward one step at a time. That persistence, more than anything else, has carried us through the highs and the lows.
After 25 years, I’ll admit I’m a little tired. Building and leading a company isn’t something you clock out from at the end of the day. It becomes part of who you are. It’s challenging, rewarding, stressful, fulfilling, and deeply personal, all at the same time.
I don’t know if I’ll be here for MINDSCAPE’s 50th anniversary, but I sincerely hope the company is. More importantly, I hope it’s still doing what has mattered most for the last 25 years. Making a meaningful difference in the lives of its clients, its team members, and everyone who becomes part of its story.
If that’s the legacy we leave behind, I’ll consider these past 25 years well spent.
— Paul
Pete Brand, Co-Founder
25 years. Still can’t fully wrap my head around that number.
When I left college after 18 months, people thought I was making a mistake. I hoped they were wrong, because I knew I wasn’t built for that path. What I didn’t know was what I was actually signing up for.
MINDSCAPE turned out to be the answer.
What started as belief that I could build something myself and that I could help businesses in a way that actually mattered became 25 years of doing exactly that. I’m proud of it.
But the honest version of 25 years isn’t just the wins. It’s the moments early on when I had no idea if this was going to work, when the gap between what I believed we could build and what we actually had in front of us felt enormous. I remember sitting with the reality that people were counting on us, and that the only thing I had to offer them was a genuine commitment to figure it out. Somehow that was enough. We figured it out. Over and over again.
There were clients who took a chance on us before we had the track record to back it up. There were people in this industry who dismissed what we were building. There were moments where the simpler path would have been to chase bigger budgets and shinier logos and just become another agency that ignores the small business owner. We never did that. It was never tempting. This is the work I care about, and I knew from the beginning who I was building it for.
What I’m most proud of is the team. When people average 13+ years here, that’s not a coincidence. That’s a statement. It means we built something worth staying for. Mark and Steve made a bet on us in the early days when we couldn’t offer certainty and could only offer a promise that we’d give everything we had. They said yes. That moment is still where I locate the real beginning of what MINDSCAPE became. Not a logo or a launch or a milestone. Two people saying yes to something they believed in before it had earned that belief.
Watching Amanda step into the leadership of this company and own it the way she has been one of the best things I’ve gotten to witness in 25 years. She leads with a calmness and a clarity that I’m still learning from.
What genuinely has me fired up right now is where we’re going. The original reason I started this was to give small businesses access to real marketing expertise. Not leftovers. Not whatever the big agencies didn’t want. The full thing. I’m a small business owner. I know what it costs to go without good help and having limited access to the solutions we truly needed due to our size and lack of appeal to the larger providers.
That frustration never went away. If anything it sharpened over 25 years of watching founder-led businesses get overlooked by an industry that was supposed to serve them. Companies doing real revenue, running lean, making real decisions, carrying real risk, and getting handed a brochure when they needed a strategy.
For most of our 25 years, we could serve that audience but not scale it. AI changes that. We can now bring what we’ve spent 25 years building to the exact people who needed it most but couldn’t reach us. That’s not a new direction. That’s the original direction, finally fully possible.
I don’t know exactly what the next 25 years look like. But I know what they’re built on: a team that has stayed, clients who trusted us, promises we kept, and a mission that mattered before it was popular and still matters now.
25 years in. More excited than I’ve ever been.
Grateful to every one of you for being part of it.
— Pete
