Building a Customer-Centric Agency With Family and Friends

Imagine starting a successful agency that allows you to work with your family and friends while making 100 times the minimum wage where you grew up. When Keenan Theron created his Upwork profile as a freelancer in 2019, he had no idea that in just six months, he’d be able to create an agency that would employ his family and friends, change all of their lives, and let him travel around the world. 

Workiflow is a Top Rated Plus Agency with 100% Job Success on Upwork. As a certified monday.com partner, Workiflow helps companies create workflow solutions through app integrations and APIs. 

Keenan has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, which is an advantage growing up in South Africa, where the job market is extremely competitive and unemployment rates are high. He co-owned a local security business with his brother when COVID hit, and they had to go on lockdown. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt. 

“I needed to find alternative ways of making an income. At that time, I also met my wife, who’s from Germany, and I'm from South Africa. I needed to find a way to earn an income and do that remotely, which would enable me to travel and work while I'm traveling between South Africa and Germany.” 

Becoming a freelancer 

Keenan started researching different ways to make money online and came across Upwork. Although he’d never worked remotely before, Keenan had experience setting up systems and using apps like monday.com to streamline efficiency.  

“I just finished implementing monday.com for my own business and really fell in love with the platform and how powerful and customizable it is. I saw the value that it offers to other businesses and also the steep learning curve.” 

Keenan began offering his services as a monday.com implementation specialist on Upwork. He needed to work hard to get his first few clients. Keenan had to spend time submitting proposals and demonstrating his expertise to clients in interviews. He found that landing those initial projects can be challenging if you don’t have a portfolio of work samples or client testimonials to add to your profile. 

“Once I got my first clients, things really snowballed from there. And within the first six months of starting on the platform, I had too many clients and too many projects to handle on my own. At that point, I knew that I needed to start building a team that was going to help me support these clients because I was literally declining invitations to jobs that I was getting every day because I didn't have the capacity to service them.” 

Running an agency

As a freelancer on Upwork, you can grow your business by upskilling or starting an agency. One of the benefits of freelancing is that you can learn a new skill and then immediately gain experience and build your portfolio by taking on projects. You may need to start with smaller and more entry-level projects, but this allows you to learn in-demand skills and offer more services to clients. 

When working as a solo freelancer, you may reach the limit of what you can accomplish by yourself. This is what happened to Keenan, so he decided to start an agency and turned to his brother for help. 

“I needed to bring more people into the agency. So I brought in my brother, John Paul, and he was the first hire. Next was Samantha, my little brother's math tutor. She was curious about what I was doing all the time in meetings and humbly reached out to me. She's now one of our best, if not the best, implementation specialists in the company. From there, it really just snowballed. We were adding new people every month.” 

Workiflow initially offered only monday.com setup, but after working with clients and better understanding their needs, they expanded their service offerings. Using Make.com and Zapier, the agency is able to integrate many different apps and set up more advanced workflows and processes for their clients. 

Developing an agency model 

Keenan and John Paul wanted to maintain the hands-on approach that they were familiar with while still expanding and growing the agency. Their clients get the best of both worlds—the personal connection of working with a freelancer combined with the backing and support of an end-to-end agency.

Danny, CEO of Workiflow, describes the agency as a white-glove experience for clients.

“We want to make sure that we're here with you every step of the way. Most of the time, the person you end up meeting is the person you work with from beginning to end. That's kind of our agency structure.” 

Workiflow is a family business that recruits the people it trusts the most, even if they don’t have relevant experience. They believe in developing people from the ground up and investing in them with training and hands-on learning. 

“We've had a lot more success hiring people fresh out of high school or just coming out of a different job or unemployed,” Keenan explained. “We build loyal team members by sharing opportunity. Ultimately, everyone who comes into the agency is either family or friends, or friends of friends, or friends of somebody else in the agency. Everybody that's joined the agency has just been hired through word of mouth”  

Along with developing processes and structure, when creating an agency, you need to decide on a business model. At Workiflow, every team member is in charge of their own contracts and is the client’s point of contact from start to finish. They’re supported by the full team, but clients have consistency and get to build close relationships with their agency members. 

Misha, an implementation specialist, explains how this works. 

“In our structure, we are each client-facing. We don’t get instructions and then implement them on the back end. We all have to meet our own clients, find our own contracts, and keep those clients happy.” 

Why Workiflow chooses Upwork

Workiflow is a Top Rated Plus agency on Upwork, with 100% Job Success, and has earned over $900,000 on the platform. They have a core team of 15 team members and then hire other part-time freelancers as needed. 

As a freelancer on Upwork, you can choose whether you want to work exclusively for an agency. Non-exclusive freelancers can submit proposals to projects either as independent freelancers or as members of the agency. When working exclusively, your freelancer profile and proposals are agency-branded, and the client pays the agency directly rather than the freelancer. 

“We haven't found another marketplace that allows us to each have our own individual profile, each have individual hourly rates, and get individual reviews on projects and all of that. Even the ability for freelancers to work exclusively and non-exclusively with agencies. So for us and for our agency, we love working on Upwork because it just ticks all the boxes.”

The agency works primarily on hourly contracts, which they find helps to prevent scope creep. This is when clients try to make changes to a project beyond the original deliverables and objectives. Scope creep can mean more work for freelancers, increased costs, and pushed back deadlines.

“We never have to worry about billing or approving milestones or getting the budget approved. Once we're on an hourly contract with the clients, we can just bill them, and it creates a really nice dynamic where the clients understand from the get-go that more time is going to mean more money or more cost for them. This helps us to avoid scope creep and all the other challenges that come with working with other marketplaces.” 

On hourly contracts, freelancers can log their hours and track their time, and Upwork will automatically invoice clients each week. When the terms of service are followed, all hourly contracts have Upwork’s payment protection, so freelancers can feel confident knowing they’ll always be paid for the work that they do. 

“As long as we're tracking time and there's a good amount of activity on the contract, then we know that our time is protected, and we'll be paid for that work. We've had situations where the clients filed a credit card chargeback, and Upwork actually paid us out through the hourly protection service that they offer. We've just never found another platform that gives us that peace of mind, knowing that when we perform work, even if the client does something like a credit card chargeback, we're still going to get paid.” 

Three benefits of hiring an agency

Working with an agency can allow you to think bigger about what you can accomplish with the help of freelancers. Many agencies, like Workiflow, offer a team of experts that provide end-to-end solutions. You can get the benefits of a full team without having to be the project manager. Ruan, an implementation specialist, highlights some of the main benefits of hiring an agency like Workiflow.

1. Saves time 

As a client on Upwork, hiring an agency allows you to complete bigger projects, faster. Instead of hiring individual freelancers and having to manage their collaboration, you can choose an agency that specializes in exactly what you need. You can focus on the end-goal rather than the processes, it’s a more hands-off experience that can save you time. 

“Having to manage different freelancers the whole time can be quite draining, time-consuming, and quite expensive.” 

2. Reliability 

Agencies can offer more reliability as there is a full team to support a project. They have more bandwidth and if one freelancer needs to take time off, another can jump in and keep the project on track. As a client, you don’t have to worry about the internal operations, the agency handles the project management side. 

“It's that whole experience of knowing that you have somebody that's going to be there, regardless if somebody gets sick or something. Your work is always going to be done, and somebody is going to make sure that you get the best experience.” 

3. Access to skills

Working with an agency is like hiring a pre-vetted team. You have access to a wide range of skills and experiences that you can tap into. An agency gives you access to multiple experts and specialists through one source. Agencies allow for collaboration in a way that is often easier than hiring multiple freelancers to work on a single project because they have systems already set into place. They’re used to working together and collaborating. You can get everything you need within one contract. 

“If you stick with an agency, instead of having to go through the process of looking for a freelancer, finding out if they are capable, and then having to introduce one freelancer to the other, we've got the whole team that can offer that for you. So like a one-stop shop to get the car fixed essentially.” 

What they love most about freelancing

Each member of Workiflow has a different background and story about how they became freelancers. Keenan, John Paul, and Misha are all siblings. In South Africa, the minimum wage is very low and unemployment rates are very high, especially among young professionals. Freelancing has allowed them to work remotely while earning more than they ever imagined. 

Keenan, co-founder, shares how freelancing on Upwork has provided him with financial security that he once thought was unattainable. 

“I think one of the biggest benefits of being able to work remotely and work with clients on a global scale is the earning potential. In South Africa, we have a minimum wage of around $1 (USD) an hour. So for somebody to charge what we're charging now, like $150 an hour in South Africa, that would just be unheard of. Doctors don't earn that money. Nobody earns that money.” 

Misha, an implementation specialist, currently lives in India. Working at Workiflow gives her the flexibility in her schedule and financial freedom to support her family as a single mother. She works with clients in the U.S., allowing her to start her workday as her kids are going to bed, so she doesn’t miss out on anything. 

“Being a freelancer means I can be there for my kids the whole day, which is great. Then they go to bed, and I start my workday because I work with clients in the US. My full-time job is actually a mom. I live in India, so earning in dollars and spending in rupees is definitely a positive. I get to work maybe five hours a day or four hours a day, and I earn more than I would in a full-time job in India.” 

John Paul, co-founder, appreciates the autonomy that freelancing gives him. Instead of having a manager who assigns tasks and work, freelancers decide which contracts they accept. 

“I enjoy the opportunity to choose my own clients and choose who I want to work with and what I want to work on. That was a big thing for me, as was the ability to choose your clients and projects and then your access to the whole global market. “ 

Danny, the CEO, started off on the client side. The company he was working for at the time hired Workiflow to implement monday.com. After three months of working with John Paul on the implementation, Workiflow extended an offer for Danny to be an implementation specialist. 

“I loved not only what they did but also their hearts so much that I bought into the business, and now I'm the CEO. So it's really cool what you can do with Upwork. It really does feel like a family. It feels like I'm working with my best friends, and I'm very grateful and blessed to have these people by my side.” 

Samantha, lead workflow architect, enjoys being able to work directly with her clients. At Workiflow, each team member works one-on-one with their clients while still having the support of the rest of the agency. 

“Often, a client will ask me who I'm going to be working with. Very simply, you're going to be working directly with me. However, I might bring a team member on to a certain call here and there because they might come through and do some work that I delegate to them because they would be faster at it than I am.” 

Ruan, an implementation specialist, appreciates the support that he has working with his family and friends. The people he trusts the most are there to help him whenever he needs them to. 

“Knowing that I've got that support behind me, that I can take on anything, really helps motivate me to work online and to continue being a freelancer.” 

Every team member's appreciation for the opportunities that working at Workiflow is reflected in their work. They’re passionate about what they do. Workiflow is an agency built on trust and relationships. Clients get a hands-on approach to their projects while working with a team that is incredibly supportive of one another. They maintain the same point of contact from start to finish, giving clients all of the benefits of working with a freelancer but the security of knowing they have a full team of expert support behind them.

If you’re interested in implementing monday.com or other workflow apps into your business operations, you can hire Workiflow for your next project.

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