Year 7: Developing the company our way!
*time to say goodbye
We started year 7 with a big goodbye. Some say that cutting off your first business partners is the natural way to grow a business. Why? Because when you start you are still at the development phase. You take what you can and, at the same time, give away much more than you are ready to give at later stages of company development. So e.g., at the beginning of the business you are prepared, willing, even desperate to take any job, the smallest even any time of day or night. Once your company has developed, this initial eagerness not only disappears but even could harm your business! As you grow, you hope for more clients, bigger jobs, and you need to stay sane so you cannot keep yourself busy on Sunday at 23:00 with a job of a peanut size to be delivered first thing Monday morning. You need to take care of other clients, your employees, and yourself.
MD Youtube Academy Logo
This was the case with our first client. They wanted pace, 24/7 availability, and extremely low prices. We made our way towards quality & TEP where there was no place for what our client was expecting. And so we parted.
Parting from a client who does more than half of your business can be extremely difficult so we were preparing for that step for a few years. When we stopped collaboration the client was responsible for 20% of the business. We were definitely ready for that step, however it meant that if we wanted to grow that year we needed to replace the client turnover with new ones, those who care for quality.
Quality in translations depends a lot on translators- as well as on the in-house team. We introduced a number of quality in-house checks. In order to do it more efficiently we separated back and front office roles- a rather unusual step in the translation industry where project managers usually take care of both sides- however we found out that we high level of specialisation and tasks on the operational level of translations these two roles should be separated.
For external translators, we started a series of online training which we called MD Academy. This action developed more fully the following year- a year to remember for many as the year when COVID Struck. 2020. Keep reading!
Leave a Reply