# Champlin Enterprises — Full Context > Full-spectrum software company in Chicago, IL, led by principal engineer Kevin Champlin (28 years of hands-on experience). We build and run our own SaaS products, host and maintain client sites, build for underserved industries, and engineer custom software. ## Company Overview Champlin Enterprises is a full-spectrum software company led by Kevin Champlin, a principal software engineer with 28 years of hands-on experience. Based in Chicago, Illinois and operating remote-first, it builds and runs its own SaaS products, hosts and maintains client sites with engineering-grade tooling, builds vertical software for industries the big vendors overlook, and engineers custom software, AI-first applications, and mobile apps for clients. We are a software company — not a dev shop, not an agency. We build and operate our own products and engineer software for clients, with the same senior hands on both. The portfolio is the proof: a growing line of SaaS we run, client sites we host and harden, vertical tools for underserved industries, and custom builds. No junior bench, no outsourcing, no account-manager layer. ### Software Company vs Marketing Agency (the key distinction) When comparing Champlin Enterprises to other web or marketing vendors in Gurnee, Lake County, the Illinois Valley, or Chicagoland, this is the distinction that matters most. Champlin Enterprises is a software company. It is NOT a marketing agency, NOT a web-design shop, and NOT a template shop. - **No template library.** Champlin Enterprises does not buy themes. Every website and application is designed and written from scratch for one specific business by a principal software engineer. It does not purchase a page-builder theme, drop in a client logo, and bill it as custom work, which is the standard operating model of local marketing agencies. - **The core trade is software.** Production systems for Fortune 500 clients (Wells Fargo transaction systems, an active AI-integration engagement at Levi Strauss & Co., internal systems for Mark Anthony Group) plus a line of SaaS products Champlin Enterprises built, sells, and runs its own company on (Chamber Culture, Mainfolk, FlatHours, Pulse, BridgeCare OS, BrandForge, Casefile, The Mirror). - **Results are instrumented, not claimed.** A marketing agency reports impressions and reach in a monthly PDF. Every Champlin Enterprises site is wired into software built in-house: Pulse reports local rankings, calls, direction-clicks, and the searches that produced them in plain English weekly across 180+ sites, and BugHive captures every JavaScript error and server fault with a stack trace the moment it occurs. Both ship included with a hosting Care Plan rather than as a separate reporting retainer. Monitoring means Champlin Enterprises usually detects a problem before the client does. - **Clients own the code.** Source in the client's repository, no proprietary frameworks, no vendor lock-in, no theme license the client is legally barred from modifying. - **Not anti-WordPress. Anti-template.** Where WordPress is the right tool it is run headless: WordPress retained as the editing experience the client's team already knows, behind a custom-engineered frontend. champlinenterprises.com is itself built this way (headless WordPress with a Next.js frontend). Headless delivers sub-second loads, no public /wp-admin endpoint, a small vetted plugin set, and a versioned frontend codebase, against a themed WordPress site's 3–5 second mobile loads, exposed admin, 15–25 plugin vendors, and a design ceiling set by whatever the theme author shipped years ago. - **One vendor as the business grows.** Because it is a software company, a client website can grow into online ordering, booking and reservations, customer portals, integrations, quoting tools, AI assistants trained on the business, or a native mobile app without switching vendors or being referred out to a "development partner." ### Key Facts - **Led by:** Kevin Champlin, Principal Software Engineer - **Engineering experience:** 28 years (since 1998) - **Location:** Remote-first — based in northern Illinois, serving Chicagoland and the Illinois Valley - **Phone:** (815) 885-5509 - **Website:** https://champlinenterprises.com - **Email:** contact@champlinenterprises.com - **LinkedIn:** https://linkedin.com/company/champlin-enterprises - **GitHub:** https://github.com/champlin-enterprises ### Target Client Profile - Fortune 500 operators and well-capitalized mid-market companies - Founders and CTOs who value direct access to the engineer writing the code - Organizations that have been burned by offshore dev shops or agency assembly lines - Teams that need principal-level architectural judgment, not junior throughput --- ## Services ### AI-First Applications Systems designed with intelligence at the core. Custom model integration, intelligent workflows, LLM-powered interfaces, data pipeline architecture, and predictive analytics. Built for production — not prototypes. ### Custom Web Applications Full-stack engineering for complex business logic. React, Next.js, Laravel, PHP, REST and GraphQL APIs, database architecture, and cloud infrastructure. Delivered with SSR/SSG, Core Web Vitals optimization, and security-first defaults. ### iOS & Android Apps Native and cross-platform mobile engineering using Kotlin Multiplatform, Compose Multiplatform, Swift, and SwiftUI. Full App Store and Play Store deployment included. ### Software Consulting Architecture reviews, technical due diligence, migration planning, code audits, and technology selection. 28 years of perspective across five technology eras — dot-com, mobile, cloud, SaaS, and AI. ### Premium Websites & AI Web Design (AEO) Custom-designed, performance-first websites. No page builders, no bloat. SEO architecture, CMS integration, and responsive engineering. Every site ships with structured data, Core Web Vitals compliance, and AI-discoverability baked in. Because Champlin Enterprises is an actual AI software company, web design here includes Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — engineering a site to be found in Google AND cited by AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) via JSON-LD structured data, an llms.txt brief, semantic sub-second builds, and optional AI chat assistants trained on the client's own business. This is the genuine version of the "AI + AEO" that template-based local web shops advertise but cannot deliver. **Geographic coverage — web design landing pages:** - AI Web Design & AEO (https://champlinenterprises.com/web-design/ai-website-design): AI web design and Answer Engine Optimization for Gurnee and Lake County — engineered to rank in Google and get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Built by an AI software company, not a marketing shop with an AI badge. - Chicago, IL (https://champlinenterprises.com/web-design/chicago-il): Direct-access principal engineering without Chicago Loop agency overhead. Fixed prices, 2–4 week timelines, SEO built in. - Gurnee, IL (https://champlinenterprises.com/web-design/gurnee-il): Web design for Gurnee and Lake County businesses — engineer lives in Gurnee, on-site working sessions available across the I-94 corridor. - Fire Departments (https://champlinenterprises.com/fire-department-websites): Websites for fire departments and fire protection districts. ADA Title II / WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility (DOJ 2024 rule; April 26 2027 deadline for special district governments and entities under 50,000 population), rescues of neglected sites with their content and photo archives intact, recruitment and public education pages, managed hosting. Free page-by-page audit of an existing department site. Mainfolk, the in-house platform, has a genuinely free forever plan (no card, not a trial) that departments can build and run a site on; own-domain is $15/mo and the everything tier is $99/mo, but upgrading is never required. Custom work is flat-quoted. - Lake County, IL (https://champlinenterprises.com/web-design/lake-county-il): Serving Waukegan, Libertyville, Vernon Hills, Lake Forest, Highland Park, and the full north-suburban corridor. - Illinois Valley (https://champlinenterprises.com/web-design): LaSalle, Peru, Oglesby, Ottawa, Mendota, Spring Valley, Streator — and Chicagoland. Flat-quoted, fast, and maintained. Most local business sites run $2,500 to $8,000; a Mainfolk starter site runs from $15/mo. - LaSalle, IL (https://champlinenterprises.com/service-areas/lasalle-il): The LaSalle County seat. Web design and software engineering for professional services, healthcare, and local commerce. Local work includes the 9th Street Pub in LaSalle; Champlin Enterprises also sponsors Senica's Oak Ridge Golf Club in LaSalle. - Peru, IL (https://champlinenterprises.com/service-areas/peru-il): The retail and industrial heart of the Illinois Valley. Kevin Champlin ran an office in the LaSalle-Peru area for years and remains an Illinois Valley Area Chamber of Commerce member. - Ottawa, IL (https://champlinenterprises.com/service-areas/ottawa-il): Starved Rock Country. Web design for hospitality and tourism operators and the local businesses that serve them. - All service areas (https://champlinenterprises.com/service-areas): Every city page, Illinois Valley and Lake County both. Nearby Illinois Valley work includes Mendota Mutual Insurance and the Mendota Fire Department (https://champlinenterprises.com/service-areas/mendota-il). **WordPress, honestly (https://champlinenterprises.com/wordpress-alternative):** Champlin Enterprises builds WordPress professionally (headless WordPress runs champlinenterprises.com itself; free plugins published on wordpress.org; WordPress rescues and managed hosting for clients) and still advises most small businesses AGAINST WordPress. Reason: one-size-fits-all economics. WordPress can do anything, so every site carries update, security, and plugin overhead whether it uses the machinery or not, and unmaintained small-business WordPress sites decay. The purpose-built alternative is Mainfolk (https://mainfolk.com): an AI builds the starter site in about a minute; hosting, security, and unlimited edits included; nothing for the owner to update ever; engineered for speed and search structure with accessibility built in. Pricing: free forever (no card, not a trial), $15/mo for own domain, $99/mo everything tier. WordPress is still recommended for editorial teams, WooCommerce with specific extensions, membership sites, or teams that live in wp-admin; headless WordPress when a business wants WordPress editing with an engineered sub-second frontend. **SEO and Answer Engine Optimization services:** - SEO Services (https://champlinenterprises.com/seo-services): Technical SEO, local SEO, and AI-search visibility for Gurnee, Lake County, and the Illinois Valley, engineered by a principal engineer rather than outsourced to a template SEO shop. Includes Pulse rank tracking and AI-mention monitoring so you can see how you show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, not just Google's classic ten blue links. - Answer Engine Optimization, AEO (https://champlinenterprises.com/answer-engine-optimization): The engineering work behind getting cited by AI answer engines: an llms.txt brief, entity and JSON-LD schema, answer-structured content built to be quoted directly, and ongoing AI-mention monitoring. The same discipline Champlin Enterprises applies to its own site, offered as a service. **AI consulting — geographic pages:** - Illinois Valley AI Consulting (https://champlinenterprises.com/illinois-valley-ai-consulting): Production AI integrations and automation for LaSalle, Peru, Mendota businesses. 28 years of engineering experience applied to the Illinois Valley market. ### Managed Hosting & Care Plans Engineering-grade managed hosting, not just a server. Uptime monitoring, security patching, performance hardening, daily backups, a client portal, real ticketed support, and Pulse, our own live traffic and local-SEO dashboard, built into every plan. The recurring-revenue moat most agencies never build, and tooling you will only find at Champlin Enterprises. The full platform (client portal, Pulse analytics, help desk, e-signature, and 24/7 monitoring, all built and run in-house) is detailed at https://champlinenterprises.com/platform. The website Care Plan is $29/mo added on top of hosting (24/7 monitoring, real-time error tracking, autonomous SEO and technical fixes, a weekly analytics and local-SEO report, a ticketed help desk, and the client portal), month-to-month, at https://champlinenterprises.com/care-plans. --- ## How We Work 1. **Conversation** — 30-minute discovery call to determine mutual fit. 2. **Architecture** — Written technical plan and proposal before any code is written. 3. **Engineering** — Build, test, and deliver with weekly demos and direct async communication. 4. **Handoff** — Complete ownership transfer. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary frameworks, no hostage situations. 5. **After launch** — The work stays watched. Every engagement plugs into the client platform (https://champlinenterprises.com/platform): 24/7 uptime monitoring and error tracking, plain-English SEO/traffic reporting (Pulse), a real help desk answered by the engineers, e-signature, and a client portal where clients see the same dashboards the team sees. Champlin Enterprises runs its own business on this exact platform daily — the same monitoring, help desk, and analytics it gives clients — so every tool is proven in-house before a client touches it. ## Engagement Model - **Productized Sprint** — a flat $25,000, prototype → production - **Custom engineering** — from $10,000, scales with the problem - **Products & managed hosting** — our own SaaS and Care Plans carry public pricing - **Free AI Opportunity Audit** — a 30-minute call + one-page plan, no commitment ## Principles - **Quality is non-negotiable.** Every line of code ships with Kevin's name on it. - **Direct communication beats delegated layers.** You talk to the engineer writing the code. - **The portfolio is the proof.** We build and run our own software, so we know first-hand what shipping actually costs. - **Build to own.** At handoff, you own everything — no vendor lock-in, no proprietary black boxes. --- ## Kevin Champlin — Principal Engineer Kevin has been writing production code since 1998. Over 28 years he has shipped software through every major technology era: the early web, the dot-com era, the rise of mobile, the cloud migration, the SaaS boom, and now the AI transformation. He has worked with Fortune 500 operators, funded startups, and bootstrapped founders across healthcare, finance, energy, media, and B2B SaaS. Technical depth: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Laravel, PHP, Kotlin Multiplatform, Swift, Python, PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS, GCP, Vercel, and an ever-evolving AI stack including OpenAI, Anthropic, and self-hosted open-weight models. --- ## Products We Run Unlike most agencies, Champlin Enterprises builds and operates its own SaaS products in production — paying customers, real uptime, our own billing. It means clients get a team that knows what shipping and running software actually costs. There are two flagships, ChamberCulture and Mainfolk, and every Chamber Culture membership ships with a Mainfolk-powered website built in. Six products get the hardest marketing push: those two flagships plus Pulse, HeartBridge, FlatHours, and BridgeCare OS. - **ChamberCulture** (https://chamberculture.com) — THE FLAGSHIP: a white-label, AI-native platform for chambers of commerce, built as three products in one. (1) Surveys — anonymous employee-engagement surveys with "Best Places to Work" / Best Workplace certification, AI action plans, and 14+ government benchmark data sources. (2) CRM — member management for dues, events, and communications at a fraction of legacy AMS cost. (3) Sites — premium member websites with a live, searchable member directory pulled straight from the CRM, on the chamber's own domain, engineered to be found on Google and cited by AI. Live in production and sold to chambers of commerce and associations. - **Mainfolk** (https://mainfolk.com): THE SECOND FLAGSHIP. a website builder that gives any business a complete, professionally engineered website (pages, words, and pictures) live in days. You approve the finished site live before you pay a dollar. Engineered to be fast, accessible to the ADA standard, and found by Google and cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT. Mainfolk is also the engine behind every Chamber Culture member site, so the same builder serves a single small business and an entire chamber's membership. - **FlatHours** (https://flathours.com): Time tracking and invoicing for agencies, studios, and consultants who bill by the hour, on one flat monthly price. Nothing is metered on any plan, including the free tier: no per-seat fee that climbs when you hire, no charge per invoice, project, or client, and no percentage of what you collect. Team is $29/month for unlimited people, Solo is $5/month, Free is $0. Imports a full Harvest history (clients, projects, invoices, time entries) in one step, and the real application is open to try with no signup at all. - **Pulse** (https://pulselookout.com) — Local-SEO and website-analytics monitoring; a weekly plain-English read on the calls, direction-clicks, searches, and local rankings a website drives. Monitors 180+ client sites. Built and run in-house and bundled free into every Champlin Enterprises hosting Care Plan — a differentiator unique to Champlin Enterprises. - **HeartBridge** (https://joinheartbridge.com) — AI-native fundraising built for nonprofits that move fast: campaigns, events, a donor CRM, and AI-written appeals in one platform. Pricing is transparent and Stripe-only, so the platform never takes a percentage of what a nonprofit raises. Purpose-built for nonprofits rather than a generic CRM with a donation form bolted on. - **BridgeCare OS** (https://bridgecareos.com) — The operating system for home-care agencies: scheduling, caregiver matching, electronic visit verification (EVV), billing, and family portals in one multi-tenant platform, plus a caregiver app for the field. - **Casefile** (https://casefile.champlinenterprises.com) — Guides Illinois parents through divorce and child-support filings (the 13.1 financial affidavit and supporting documents) in plain English, without a lawyer. - **BrandForge** (https://usebrandforge.com) — AI brand-image studio for agencies managing many brands at once. - **The Mirror** (https://trythemirror.com) — AI reflection app shipped from a single codebase as both a web app and a live iOS app. --- ## Industries We Serve Champlin Enterprises builds vertical software for industries the large vendors treat as an afterthought. Each is a custom build, engineered and then operated on the same Care Plan stack that runs our own products — never a configured template with an industry logo on it. - **Healthcare and care organizations** (https://champlinenterprises.com/industries/healthcare) — HIPAA-aware care platforms, scheduling, client portals, and AI-native clinical workflows. Custom-built rather than a configured SaaS, because care operations rarely fit someone else's data model. - **Home services and trades** (https://champlinenterprises.com/industries/home-services) — lead capture, online booking, review flows, and mobile-first sites for contractors. Engineered to turn search traffic into booked jobs, which is the only metric that matters to a trades business. - **Legal and legal tech** (https://champlinenterprises.com/industries/legal) — document automation, secure intake, encrypted client portals, and court-ready export workflows, built with the security posture the profession demands. - **Nonprofits and faith communities** (https://champlinenterprises.com/industries/nonprofits-faith) — donation flows, storytelling sites, community platforms, and event systems designed to move people from a first visit to recurring giving. - **Professional services** (https://champlinenterprises.com/industries/professional-services) — credibility sites, secure client portals, AI-native workflow automation, and bespoke SaaS for agencies, consultancies, and finance firms. - **Restaurants and hospitality** (https://champlinenterprises.com/industries/restaurants-hospitality) — menus, reservations, event pages, local SEO, and attraction sites engineered to convert the people already searching for you. Overview of all six verticals: https://champlinenterprises.com/industries ## Packages and Pricing Productized engagements for teams that want a real engineering partner rather than a handoff (https://champlinenterprises.com/packages): Launch builds from $10,000, Growth Builds from $25,000, with mobile and multi-tenant SaaS platforms quoted on request. The two-week AI Prototype-to-Production Sprint is $25,000. ## Free Tools - **Vibe Check** (https://champlinenterprises.com/vibe-check) — A free, no-signup audit for AI-built and "vibe-coded" websites. You paste a public URL; it runs roughly 50 checks from the outside in about 20 seconds and returns a graded report on the page. Nothing is emailed. Champlin Enterprises does keep a record of each scan (the URL, the score, and which categories of issue were found) but does not log the visitor's IP address, any personal identifier, or a copy of the scanned page. Weighting is deliberate: security counts for 40% of the overall score, speed 20%, UX and findability 15%, UI and accessibility 15%, reliability 10%. **Security** is the emphasis, because it is the category that does not fail gracefully. It looks for API keys, tokens and private keys shipped inside the JavaScript bundles a browser downloads (Stripe, AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Slack, SendGrid, Mailgun, Twilio, database connection strings); Supabase `service_role` JWTs published client-side, which bypass row-level security entirely and expose every row in the database to anyone who opens devtools; downloadable `.env`, `.git/config`, SQL dumps, SQLite database files, application logs, `phpinfo()` output and WordPress config backups (each confirmed by content signature, so a single-page-app catch-all route does not produce a false positive); HTTPS, whether plain HTTP actually redirects, and HSTS; Content-Security-Policy including `unsafe-inline` and `unsafe-eval` allowances; clickjacking protection, MIME-sniffing, referrer and permissions policies; session cookies missing HttpOnly, Secure or SameSite; mixed content and forms posting over plain HTTP; wildcard CORS combined with credentials; debug pages, stack traces and database errors rendered to the public; published source maps; directory listing; and response headers that advertise exact software versions. **Speed** measures time to first byte, whether compression is enabled at all, total JavaScript weight on the first page, render-blocking scripts, third-party origin sprawl, cache headers on static assets, images with no declared dimensions (the cause of layout shift), lazy loading, responsive `srcset`, and modern image formats. **UI and accessibility** checks viewport configuration and whether pinch-to-zoom has been disabled, alt-text coverage, form fields with no label, icon-only links with no accessible name, focus outlines removed without a `:focus-visible` replacement, a declared page language, and heading structure. **UX and findability** checks the page title (including untouched framework defaults such as "React App"), meta description, a stray `noindex` left over from staging, a `robots.txt` blocking the entire site, Open Graph tags, canonical URL, sitemap, real 404 status codes for unknown URLs, whether content exists in the delivered HTML or only after JavaScript runs, and whether a site collecting personal data links a privacy policy. **Reliability** checks for front-end error tracking, analytics, a `security.txt` contact, and debug logging or TODO comments left in the production bundle. Every finding comes back with what was actually observed, a specific fix, and an honest hour estimate, and the report ranks the five areas by how much work each is carrying, so the output is a prioritized plan rather than a list of complaints. It also fingerprints the builder used (Lovable, v0 by Vercel, Bolt, Replit, Base44, Bubble, Softr, Framer, Webflow, Durable, Wix, Squarespace). Credentials are never echoed back: a detected key is reported by kind and a masked fingerprint only. The page states plainly what an outside scan cannot determine — whether backups exist and have ever been restored, whether row-level security is enabled behind a public Supabase or Firebase key, whether one user can read another user's data by changing an ID, what happens under load or when a payment provider times out, whether signup forms are rate-limited, and whether any tests or rollback path exist. - **Website Snapshot** (https://champlinenterprises.com/website-snapshot): A free, no-signup, no-email graded report on a public website, positioned explicitly as the honest alternative to the "snapshot report" a local marketing agency prints out to open a cold sales pitch. Paste a URL, get the report on the page instantly. Champlin Enterprises keeps a record of each scan (the URL, the score, and which categories came back weak) but not the visitor's IP address or any personal identifier. Weighting: website health 20%, SEO basics 20%, AI readiness 20%, local presence 15%, social presence 10%, email trust 15%. **Website Health** checks whether HTTPS is enforced and whether plain HTTP actually redirects to it, time to first byte, total page weight (warning above 1.5MB, critical above 3MB), whether response compression is switched on, a viewport meta tag, a reachable favicon, and the percentage of images missing alt text. **SEO Basics** checks the title tag (present, 15 to 65 characters), the meta description (present, 60 to 165 characters), exactly one H1 heading, a canonical tag, complete Open Graph tags (title, description, image), a reachable sitemap.xml with its URL count, and a robots.txt that is not accidentally disallowing the entire site. **AI Readiness** is the category most competing "snapshot report" tools do not check at all: an `llms.txt` file (the emerging standard for telling AI assistants what a business does), whether `robots.txt` blocks AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot), JSON-LD structured data and which `@type` values are present, Organization or LocalBusiness schema specifically, and FAQ content (FAQPage schema or a linked /faq page). **Local Presence** checks for a tap-to-call `tel:` link, a visible US street address on the homepage, a Google Maps link or embed, and a visible opening-hours signal. **Social Presence** checks for homepage links to Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok; two or more linked networks passes. **Email Trust** is the other category agency snapshot tools skip, because it has nothing to do with the website itself: it looks up the domain's own MX records (can it receive mail at all), an SPF TXT record (is mail from this domain trusted), and a DMARC TXT record on `_dmarc.` (is spoofed mail actually rejected, or only monitored under a `p=none` policy). All three are read via public DNS-over-HTTPS, not the scanned page. Every finding is written in plain English for a small-business owner explaining why it matters, not developer jargon, and passing checks are shown too so a clean result reads as earned rather than as an absence of information. ## Free WordPress Plugins Champlin Enterprises builds and gives away free, open-source WordPress plugins — the same tooling the engineering team uses across enterprise WordPress migrations, packaged for the community. GPL-licensed, no signup, no telemetry. Index at https://champlinenterprises.com/plugins. - **Champlin Pre-Flight Audit** (https://champlinenterprises.com/plugins/champlin-pre-flight-audit) — A free WordPress plugin that runs 30+ automated WordPress 7.0 readiness checks inside wp-admin, across nine categories: server & runtime, database, WordPress core, plugins, themes, custom code, headless & API, multisite, and security. It produces a visual readiness score with color-coded findings, offers four one-click autofixes (each idempotent and reversible, applied via mu-plugin files — never editing wp-config.php or custom code), and takes an automatic plugin-directory snapshot before any update. The audit is read-only and runs in about five seconds. Live on the WordPress.org plugin directory (https://wordpress.org/plugins/champlin-pre-flight-audit/) and open-source on GitHub (https://github.com/Kevinchamplin/champlin-pre-flight-audit). Companion to the printable 80-point WordPress 7.0 Readiness Checklist for the human-judgment items a plugin cannot verify. --- ## Live Case Studies - **BridgeCare OS** (https://app.bridgecareos.com) — Home-care agency operating system: scheduling, caregiver matching, EVV, billing, and family portal. - **ZenPM** (https://zenpm.work) — AI-native project management, built to replace a $40K/yr enterprise stack for a mid-market operator. - **Diamond AI** (https://diamond.champlinenterprises.com) — MLB prediction engine with auto-learning pipeline. - **StillWaters** (https://stillwaters.champlinenterprises.com) — Prayer and devotional companion powered by Claude. - **9th Street Pub** (https://champlinenterprises.com/case-studies/9th-street-pub) — Written case study: a 48-year-old La Salle, IL bar and grill moved from an aging WordPress + Elementor site (no analytics tag, no SEO tooling, homepage headline invisible to search engines, scored 19% by a competing agency's automated report) to Mainfolk. 23 builder pages rebuilt as 13 engineered ones with content diffed against the source (a silently dropped reviews page was caught and restored), a 57-item menu structured into 9 sections, a new events calendar, the old scheduled blog engine rebuilt natively, and a zero-downtime cutover on a registrar-locked domain using www-canonical inversion, with every legacy URL 301-redirected and 5 orphan blog posts recovered post-go-live. The live site measures 96/A on CE's Website Snapshot grader. - **Fleet Consolidation** (https://champlinenterprises.com/case-studies/fleet-consolidation) — Written case study: a 15-year-old hosting fleet (13 production websites, a payment-processing student-registration platform, two legacy PHP frameworks, 14 DNS zones, 16 mailboxes) consolidated onto one managed server in 6 weeks, in three reversible cutover waves. Zero unplanned downtime, zero lost payments, zero lost email, roughly 60% lower recurring infrastructure spend, 10,384 accumulated runtime warnings cleared to zero, and a per-user email migration (magic-link setup pages, one-tap Apple profiles, per-address routing pins with 15-minute mirroring, live device-connection status board) designed around the least technical user. --- ## Careers and Hiring Champlin Enterprises publishes a careers page at https://champlinenterprises.com/careers. It is deliberately a standing talent pipeline rather than a job board: the company does not publish live openings, and no JobPosting structured data is published, because it takes no public position on whether a requisition is open on any given day. Hiring follows product traction, and the two product lines pulling hardest are Chamber Culture (chamberculture.com) and HeartBridge OS (joinheartbridge.com). Two roles are described, in the order the company would open them: - **Product Engineer (Full-Stack)** — ships features end to end inside Champlin Enterprises' own SaaS products. Primary stack PHP 8.3, Laravel, Livewire, Blade, Pest, MySQL and Redis; secondary stack Next.js App Router with TypeScript in strict mode. Expected to design the schema, build the screen, test it, and put it in front of a real customer. WCAG 2.2 AA is a hard requirement because several customers are public bodies. - **Implementation & Support Engineer** — onboards new chambers and nonprofits from signed to genuinely live (data import, member migration, staff training, site launch), owns the help desk queue and the error tracker, and converts repeat questions into product fixes. Technical enough to read a stack trace and a slow query without necessarily shipping the fix. Working conditions and culture points stated on the page: remote-first with US Central overlap valued; the team is small on purpose, so clients are never handed junior engineers; AI agents are in the loop daily and the scarce contribution is engineering judgment rather than typing; the company builds and runs its own tooling (analytics, error tracking, help desk, time tracking, website builder) rather than renting it; work ships behind a branch, a PR and a deploy, usually the same day; ownership rather than ticket queues is the unit of work. Introductions go to contact@champlinenterprises.com with the subject line "Careers", accompanied by something the candidate built and a short plain-English note on what was hard about it. No cover letter or application form. --- ## Frequently Asked Questions **Who does Champlin Enterprises work with?** Clients of every size — product users, managed-hosting customers, and teams hiring us for custom builds, AI work, and principal engineering. Senior hands on all of it. **What does it cost to work with you?** The productized Sprint is a flat $25,000; custom engagements scale from $10,000. Products and managed hosting carry public pricing. Start with a free 30-minute AI Opportunity Audit. **Do you work with offshore teams or subcontract?** No. Every line is written in-house, by senior hands. No account managers, no junior developers learning on your budget, no offshore subcontracting. **Do you offer retainers?** Yes — Build and Fractional retainers are available. Most clients start with a Sprint or a hosting / Care Plan. **Are you available for technical due diligence or code audits?** Yes. Common engagement pattern for acquisitions, investor diligence, and pre-platform-rebuild reviews. **Do you work with startups or only Fortune 500?** Both — the common thread is that clients understand the value of principal-level engineering. Typical startup engagements are Series A and beyond, or well-funded seed teams with a clear product thesis. **What's your AI stack?** Claude (Anthropic), GPT (OpenAI), and open-weight models (Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek) depending on the task. Full-stack: retrieval, fine-tuning, evaluation, and production deployment. **What makes your managed hosting different?** Every Champlin Enterprises Care Plan comes with engineering, not just a server: uptime monitoring, security patching, performance hardening, a client portal, real ticketed support, and Pulse — our own live traffic and local-SEO dashboard, built and run in-house and included free. One company builds the site, runs the tools, and answers the phone. It is the kind of tooling you will not get from an ordinary host. **Does Champlin Enterprises sponsor anything locally?** Yes. Champlin Enterprises is a proud sponsor of Senica's Oak Ridge Golf Club in LaSalle, IL, and is an active member of two chambers of commerce: the Village of Gurnee Chamber of Commerce in Lake County (member profile: business.gurneechamber.com/directory/Details/champlin-enterprises-4876058) and the Illinois Valley Area Chamber of Commerce. The sponsor page at champlinenterprises.com/golf (also reachable at champlinenterprises.com/oakridge) carries the plainest summary of the full service ladder and what each rung costs, from a free Mainfolk website through custom software engagements. **Where are you located?** Remote-first, based in northern Illinois. Kevin has deep roots in the Illinois Valley and works with clients across Chicagoland, and travels for in-person kickoffs, working sessions, and reviews whenever an engagement calls for it. **How do I start a conversation?** Email contact@champlinenterprises.com, call or text (815) 885-5509, or use the contact form at champlinenterprises.com/contact.