Movin’ on up: a guide to going global
This week I’m very pleased to introduce a guest poster – Alexandru Rotaru – with an inspiring story of entrepreneurship which is truly amazing.
Christian Arno, started his business in 2001, based in a spare room at his parent’s home. His company now operates across four continents and has clients in over sixty countries, turning over £3.65m in 2009.
It’s from people like Christian Arno that we get the best teachings, and this week we’re privileged that his story is being shared with us.
Enjoy.
Some people were simply born to be entrepreneurs. At the top end, the Richard Bransons and Alan Sugars of the world were selling their wares when they were still in their teens, and their subsequent success was borne from a natural instinct for business rather than any specific academic qualifications.
Indeed, Branson started publishing a magazine at the grand old age of 16, launched the beginnings of Virgin Records at the age of 20, formed Virgin Atlantic Airways by the time he was 35, Virgin Cola by the age of 45 and had his own mobile phone company before he was fifty: quite a broad spectrum on his entrepreneurial CV.
However, not everyone has the desire to get involved in 101 different business ventures. Some people take a few years to find their area of interest, perhaps going through university first and working in a few jobs before taking the plunge and using their learned skills and experience to launch their business.
And some use their formative university years to hone and fine-tune their ideas, so that when they emerge with their hard-earned qualifications, they can hit the ground running as a successful entrepreneur.
So in short, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to entrepreneurialism. But all share a drive and determination to succeed and, importantly, they all have an instinct for what is right.
Christian Arno, Managing Director of UK translation company Lingo24, founded his business in 2001 after graduating with a degree in French and Italian from Oxford University. He operated initially from a spare room in his parents’ Aberdonian home, building business gradually and careful not to grow too fast too quickly.
Funds came from a £5,000 loan from the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT) and he had invested £500 of his student loan on the stock market, yielding a return of £15,000. But it was the home-working model that was key to the company’s early success:
“Whilst there was the obvious advantage of having a short commute from my bedroom to the office, the main benefit was reduced overheads”, Arno says. “I was able to offer major clients prices up to 30 percent cheaper than our competitors.”
And whilst this allowed Lingo24 to grow a lot quicker than it otherwise may have, he made the decision to start opening virtual offices elsewhere too, with New Zealand and China in 2003 and 2004 respectively.
But the big change came with his decision to open physical office spaces, starting with Romania in early 2005, Panama in early 2008 and Edinburgh later the same year.
“There are strategic reasons why I opened all these offices where I did. The skill-sets in these particular locations combined with the multiple time-zones means we can literally operate around the clock. This is crucial to our international ambitions.”
Lingo24 now operate across four continents and have clients in over sixty countries, translating over thirty million words for many major blue-chip companies along the way and achieving a turnover of £3.65m in 2009.
Having come so far in eight years, Arno has some advice for companies looking to market themselves abroad.
“It’s important that you don’t throw large sums of money at things without knowing what the outcome will be. In the early years, I found that companies would call me up and try to sell me advertorials which sounded great, but weren’t. After a couple of costly ones, it became apparent that the return on investment just wasn’t there.”
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising were still relatively novel concepts at the turn of the century but Arno was quick to realise the potential of these marketing tools.
“The internet was pivotal in the success of Lingo24 and today direct online marketing is still our most powerful tool”, says Arno. “I discovered SEO and Google AdWords and there has been no looking back. PPC allowed me to test out online marketing techniques for very little money – I could set my monthly budget at a nominal amount, allowing me to gauge its efficacy without blowing my entire marketing budget. And as it turned out, it has brought us a lot of custom.”
Online marketing certainly seems like the most cost-effective route for businesses to go in the current economic downturn. And for Lingo24, it has been an integral part of its global expansion plans, with websites now in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, French, German and a number of other key languages helping them to tap into new and emerging markets.
“The majority of the internet is in English, yet most of the world’s internet users’ first language isn’t English, so there’s a clear gap there”, says Arno. “I researched key search terms used by local customers and incorporated them into the translated websites. Because the saturation is nowhere near what it is in the English-speaking market, I found that we rose very rapidly in foreign search engine rankings.”
Arno has this final advice for entrepreneurs seeking to grow their business abroad:
“Take things slowly at first – understand your market and talk to others who have succeeded before you spend too much.”
So regardless of your ambitions as an entrepreneur, it’s clear that there is no substitute for experience. Start small, learn as you go along and follow a carefully managed growth model. And it doesn’t do any harm to learn a little from those who’ve been there before you.
About Lingo24
Lingo24 is an international translation and localisation company, with operations in the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia. With over a hundred employees working on four continents, and a network of 4,000 translators, they achieved a turnover of £3.65m in 2009: projected to rise to over £5m in 2010.
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