Speaking the Lingo
London Business Matters - 11th September, 2006
Speaking the Lingo
By Tanith Blackman,
news reporter
"You learn by doing; you can spend all the time you like at university, studying, but nothing prepares you like getting involved, spending money and making mistakes to make you think and learn"
Not many graduates four years out of university can boast the managing directorship of a multinational company witha ₤2m turnover,attracting high profile clients such as BP, Orange, Royal Bank of Scotland and Honda. But this is exactly the position of young entrepreneur Christian Arno, founder of Lingo24, the Aberdeen-based translation company.
After graduating from Oxford, Christian set up Lingo in 2001, literally in his spare room. Four years later and the turnover was ₤1.2m a figure expected to increase to ₤ 2million this year.
Adamant
Many young graduates could only dream of this success, choosing the safer option of graduate schemes, but Arno is adamant that this is the prime time to start up your own business.
He said: “You learn by doing; you can spend all the time you like at university, studying, but nothing prepares you like getting involved, spending money and making mistakes to make you think and learn." He is convinced that youth is the right time to experience this trial and error,and the low costs, and hence low risk of setting up a web-based company could allow more graduates to follow in his footsteps.
So why has Arno’s back-room business been such a success? According to The Miami Herald:“Globalisation and relaxed trade policies have increased demand for translation of web pages, annual reports, and other corporate documents for foreign investors and customers.”
In other words, there is a growing market for translation services companies. It is a valuable yet widely dispersed industry, with only two or three companies achieving the big business turnover of ₤25million a year. While some corporations employ in house translators, most of the work is contracted out to independent companies like Lingo, which looks set to expand in the future.
Creating these companies online makes it possible to automate the entire translation process cutting out the middlemen and extra costs such as paper. Being a web-based company means lower overhead costs can be passed on to the consumer, along with ease of use. Removing such overheads allows Lingo to offer prices such as 30 per cent lower than competitors, which is ostensibly more of an inducement to customers than a plush office building in Mayfair.
Lingo currently operates in four European countries, as well as in China and in New Zealand. In 2005 it expanded its operations to Romania, an ideal choice as the second most multilingual country in Europe, with relatively low wage costs and excellent skilled workers. There are now 22 full time staff working for Lingo in and around Timisoara.
The new trend for low cost, online businesses can lead to a lack of personalised service, and some customers remain unconvinced of having their translations completed without having any human contact. But Lingo is a prime example of a company which has overcome this, offering a highly personal, and personalised, service rather than a faceless corporate package. Regular staff and customer meetings and an informative and friendly web site offering free individual callbacks about questions indicate the kind of individual treatment both employees and clients can expect to receive. And coupled with the low cost of running an online business in this rapidly growing sector, it looks as if Arno has found a recipe for success.
