Executive Profile

By Holly Rodriguez

Living at Full Speed

Laurie Baldwin is co-founder of NetBaldwin, a search engine optimization firm in Innsbrook.

Laurie Baldwin has never lived her life at a slow or moderate pace. Starting from her days growing up in a small town, through 15 years of working for various marketing and public relations firms, to her current role as co-founder of NetBaldwin, LLC, she says she has always lived her life at full capacity.

Today, Baldwin works with companies such as Children’s Wear Digest, Lumber Liquidators and American Senior Safety to help them maximize their presence on search engines to drive traffic to their websites. The Michigan-native who grew up in a small farm town just south of Ann Arbor and started out wanting to be an attorney. But her entrepreneurial drive started early, and carved a successful career path that landed her here in Richmond.

“My dad was an engineer at Ford Motor Company and my mom was a stay-at-home mother,” she says. Baldwin’s career in marketing began when, as a teenager, she worked for her parents who owned their own company. She did marketing and administrative work for the company, and also attended trade shows.

And as if puberty, school and working in the family business was not enough, during harvest season, Baldwin woke up at four in the morning to pick corn and then sold it at the farmer’s market.

“I thought this was big time because I was making $2.50-$3.50 per hour, which was twice my babysitting rate at the time,” she says.

By her senior year, Baldwin says she had three jobs. She went to school for half of a day and in the afternoon, worked for her mother and father. She also worked for the paper, and in the summer worked on the farm in the morning.

But despite this entrepreneurial drive, Baldwin had her sights on the courtroom.

“I was a state finalist debator for four years in high school, loved it, loved the thought process behind it, and so the next logical step was to become an attorney,” she says. During her high school career, Baldwin also became a member of the National Honor Society, played clarinet, trombone, and piano, was a member of the pom-pom squad, sang in the choir and was runner up for the local “Fair Queen” beauty contest. And in her spare time, Baldwin wrote for the local newspaper.

Soon after high school, her career took a turn toward technology. Baldwin began by working with a software products company, and started their services division. She also started doing technology writing and marketing work. Her comfort with computers, then a new technology, came from her father’s insistence that she learn how to use a computer – back when computers were just beginning to be regularly used in the business environment.

“As a sophomore in high school, he brought his computer home on weekends and told me that I would learn to use the computer to type, or I would be grounded,” she says. By age 21, she was teaching computer classes.
Over the years she has remained in the industry because she says she enjoys the work. And her passion for the field led to an appointment on the governor of Michigan’s IT Roundtable.

In 2001, when Baldwin was hired to do a training for one of her clients, she met her husband Jim, who was the Chief Information Officer of the company. In 2001, Jim took a job at Capital One and the couple moved to the Commonwealth. Baldwin started doing freelance work, and when a client needed a website, Baldwin turned to her husband for help. When the site was launched, Baldwin and her husband decided to market the website to search engines to show the client that their work was trackable.

And in July 2003, NetBaldwin was launched. And in only three years, Baldwin says the company has seen impressive growth. Not an easy feat for a newly-wed couple with eight children between them.

Baldwin has had her fare share of accomplishments, but she says she keeps it in perspective. And, knows when to ask for help and is consistently focused on trying to balance it all.

“Jim and I work very hard,” she says, “but I have a phenomenal nanny, I work out two to three times per seek and I recently started kickboxing.” She also coaches a little league soccer team and sings in the church choir.

“I think I thrive on high energy,” she says. “You balance it all because you tell yourself you can,” she says. She credits her parents with her unshakeable faith in herself.

When she takes a break from her responsibilities as CEO, wife and mother, this executive volunteers at her children’s schools, spends weekends in locations such as Berry Hill Plantation in South Boston, or weekend trips to the beach with her husband and children.

“When I stop the noise, I think to myself – what a wonderful journey,” she says.