How I made it: Christian Arno Founder of Lingo24.com

The Sunday Times - 17th May, 2009

Even as a child, Christian Arno was always looking for ways to make money. At the age of seven he would buy penny chews and sell them to friends for 2p until his scheme was rumbled. “It got shut down because one of the kids’ mums didn’t think it was really appropriate,” he said.

Arno was born in Nottinghamshire to an English mother and Norwegian father who took the family to Aberdeen for his job in the oil industry when Arno was only four.

After leaving school he studied French and Italian at Oxford, including a year as an English language assistant at a college in Pavia, northern Italy. He decided to stop teaching after only two weeks: “I decided that I really wasn’t a very good teacher. I didn’t have the patience.” He was, however, allowed to stay on with full board and lodging.

With free time on his hands, Arno set up a rudimentary website offering online translation services with the help of a friend from university, Jos Shepherd, and got the other language assistants at the college to help with the translations. The website brought in some work and it planted an idea in Arno’s mind.

“It wasn’t a proper business - it was literally beer money - but it proved that there was something in it if I was to take it seriously,” Arno said.

He also had an unexpected stroke of luck. While he was in Italy he invested £500 of his student loan in Knowledge Management Software, which was listed on the Ofex market. The share price soared from 20p to more than £20 in the space of nine months, giving Arno a windfall of £15,000 when he sold the shares.

Flush with cash, he returned to finish his degree and then decided to give his online translation idea another go. Arno asked Shepherd to design a website in return for a 20% stake in the business, then launched Lingo24.com with £2,000 he had made from his share dealing.

Initially, he ran the business from his bedroom at home. As work came in he would recruit translators he found through professional bodies, getting a proof-reader to check the work.

It was slow going at first. He said: “I was in Aberdeen, which is an international city, but it is a small city, and I didn’t really know how business worked. It wasn’t until I started to understand how internet marketing worked that we got decent amounts of business.”

Requests for his services varied from individuals requiring the translation of a contract for a house they were buying in a foreign country to businesses conducting due diligence on companies they were acquiring.

Arno also received occasional late-night calls from desperate students seeking help with homework. He said: “I remember on several occasions getting calls from kids who were clearly stressed and had found their parents’ credit cards, saying they had a 300-word document which they needed to translate into French and asking how much it was going to cost.” Arno delivered in time for lessons the next day.

He drew the line, however, at requests for help from porn sites. After 18 months he set up an office in New Zealand so that the business could offer a proper 24-hour service.

One of his larger customers then began to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, which enabled Arno to invest in technology and in turn helped to win more business.

He has since opened offices in China, Romania and, most recently, Panama.

He has made his share of mistakes. He spent a lot on “ads that I thought were magically going to bring me business without having a clever thought about where my target market was”.

Belatedly, he also discovered the importance of using translators living in their native countries. “In the early days we used a German translator who had married an Englishwoman and had been living in Yorkshire for 25 years. The syntax he was using had become so anglicised that to a German in Germany it was a bit weird.”

Three years ago the business went through a rough patch when Google placed the website far down the list of search results for translation services and demand fell off. As a result Arno had to sack three staff. He also decided to buy out Shepherd’s 20% share of the business for £120,000, which he borrowed from his family.

He has since reduced the company’s reliance on the Google search engine to attract business by using other marketing channels such as trade shows.

Lingo24 now translates into and out of more than 100 languages and turnover this year is expected to be £4m. It has 100 full-time employees and more than 3,000 freelance translators.

Aged 30 and with a 85% stake in the business, Arno thinks the secret of his success has been following his instinct. “I have found that the times when I haven’t gone with my instinct, I have regretted it.”

He has this advice for others: “Seek out people you respect, who have done it before and have got experience and can give you advice - but go with your instincts.”

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