Year 5: Divide and conquer

Year 5: Divide and conquer

With 2 different, but related workflows running (translations and PhD editing) the time came to work on right division into two separate business entities. Legal formalities is only one first step, what comes next is separation of employees, clients and brands. The time to recruit specialized PMs who understands perfectly the requirements of academics, to inform clients about change of provider,  get a new domain, website etc. Actually it is a hella lotta work.

logo of the eCorrector

We got there with a lot of internal input- Agata, our first employee kept responsibilities over both companies, while others were taking sides. Magda, senior PM in handling translations designed a beautiful logo for MD Online that serves us to today while Mark took to design of eCORRECTOR logo for scientific proofreading arm of the company based in UK.

At this stage of growth we needed to incorporate professional management software. Our turnover, by then become substantial, could not go just based on excel sheets and a basic invoicing program. We looked into several options but our final winner was a start-up, Mantreo, from Poland. We found the program suited our needs and most importantly was very flexible. At that stage too the business owner Tomasz Zielonka took personal care of the clients which helped us design many features that we just needed.

Separation of the translation and PhD editing side of our business increased the efficiency of MD Online a lot! Fact is that these two businesses although both based on the idea of providing high quality native speaker linguistic services are very different. Translation is a business where we work on fast pace, where time matters no less than quality…so a big network of translators is necessary to fulfill those needs and very alert PMs. With scientific proofreading the needs and expectations are different. We deal with texts that build on many years of research. Here a scientist does not have such pressures of time. Instead what matters most is the highest quality PhD specialist in the area most closely related to the particular research field. So pure quality with hardly any time pressure.

The division of MD Online and eCORRECTOR helped our PMs to take off some pressures and at the same time greatly improved customer experience. Our base of customers kept growing as did our network of linguists! We felt the time had come become even more efficient and specialized.

Keep reading to find out how we achieved that goal in 2018!