He Tapped His Freelance Experience To Build A Fast-Growing, 7-Figure Agency

Nick Baudoin turned a freelance business he started on Upwork into a fast-growing design development and marketing agency, and he’s on track for $2.6 million in revenue for 2024.

Baudoin, based in Houston, is founder of Alkali, an agency that does WordPress custom development and applications, builds e-commerce websites and offers search engine optimization services. He launched the agency, based in Houston, on Upwork in 2015 and grew it while attending the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business, where he earned an undergraduate degree in information systems. He had taught himself coding while growing up.

As demand for his services picked up, he continued expanding the side business, growing revenue to $907,500 annually before hiring employees, he says.

Alkali is an example of the many small, capital efficient businesses that are breaking $1 million with tiny teams and capital-efficient practices. It’s a trend that will likely accelerate as efficiency-boosting tools, like artificial intelligence, catch on widely. Only 3.8% of businesses are using AI on average, according to research by the U.S. Census Bureau. However there are some anomalies, with firms in the information sector—such as software producers and web-hosting companies—using it at the highest rate (13.8%) and those in professional, scientific and technical services—such as publishing and investment firms—a close second at 9.1%.

Certainly, it’s still a challenge to break $1 million in revenue. There are 6.3 million employer firms in the U.S. and only about 1.8 million are achieving $1 million in revenue and beyond, according to the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey.

The good news for other small employer firms is many of these highly successful employer firms are quite small. There are about 4 million U.S. employer businesses that have 1-5 employees, according to the Census Bureau’s Statistics of U.S. Businesses. The data on their average receipts was not yet available for 2021, but to give you an idea of what they bring in, the average employer business in the U.S. had four employees on its payroll, with annual revenue of $816,180 and a payroll of $162,755, according to an analysis of Census statistics for 2017 calculated for my book Tiny Business, Big Money.

Baudoin brought on his first employee in 2021, and another hire in 2022 but he was juggling growing the business with starting his career. After graduation, he joined Google as a cloud engineer, helping large companies move their operations to the cloud. He worked in that hybrid role from 2022 to 2023 while his team helped run Alkali.

Managing it all required an around-the-clock commitment. “My schedule for that year was 6 am to 9 am – business, 9 to 5 – Google, and 5 to 11 – business,” he says. “I did that for about a year.”

He took the business full-time when it hit $2.1 million in annual revenue, gradually expanding the team to its current two employees and eight contractors. This year, he projects about $2.6 million in annual revenue.

Baudoin pulled it off by tapping into the strengths of using a giant platform—Upwork—to build brand recognition early. Initially, he was willing to sell his services at aggressive rates to build credibility on the platform and create the opportunity for his team to build relationships with clients and get positive reviews for its work doing WordPress development. “You need to intentionally price yourself super-low to get the experience until you are seen as an authority,” he says.

His first project was a $3,000 gig for an automotive lighting company. “It was a higher-traffic type of website,” he says. “They needed a decent server for it.” After guiding this client to a server that helped the company save money through an attractive annual deal, he cemented the relationship. “They’re still a client to this day,” he says.

With each project won, he prioritized clear communication with clients, earning a coveted five-star rating on Clutch. “When someone comes to you and says they want a website, there’s a lot of back-and-forth that needs to happen,” he says. By taking the time to explain what the website needs to be successful, he found he won a lot of repeat business.

“Nick was very reactive, quick and helpful. He managed to find good solutions to solve the issues on our old pages and updated our website quickly and efficiently,” one client posted on Upwork, after hiring the agency for a WordPress maintenance and improvement project in 2023.

Over time, he logged 5,044 hours on Upwork on 383 jobs His company logged 1,158 hours. Baudoin expanded beyond Upwork when clients began making referrals and Alkali began succeeding in doing outbound marketing. Today, Alkali does about 20% of its business on the platform.

Alkali now serves clients in industries such as healthcare, banking, and finance, building technical solutions to meet their requirements. Among his clients are PayPal and iHeart, the podcast company.

The concentration in highly regulated fields helps give his business insurance against disruption by AI, he believes. “What will be protected for a long period will be highly regulated industries: Health finance, and banking,” he says. “They’re still using systems so ancient they won’t be disrupted by AI.”

Banking in particular, he says, “is very specific in how they want things handled. They want to know what you are doing.”

He found that stepping into an advisory role has also helped him to grow the business. Clients often trust him enough to share their estimated budget and ask for his suggestions on making the most of it.

With a busy client roster, he says his goal is to continue scaling the development side of the business and build up the agency’s capacity for application development. “We’re continuing to expand our team to meet increasing client demand which has us on track for substantial growth compared to last year,” he says. For Baudoin, freelancing has been a doorway into traditional, scalable entrepreneurship, and he’s just getting started.