A go-getter’s guide to going global

Some folk were born to be entrepreneurs. The likes of Richard Branson and Alan Sugar were strutting their stuff when they were only midway through their teens, and their success results from an innate instinct for business, rather than from any specific scholastic qualifications.

To use Branson as an example, he published his own magazine at sixteen, launched Virgin Records at twenty, formed Virgin Airways at thirty four, a carbonated cola drink by the age of forty five and his own mobile phone company by the time he was fifty. And all this before we discuss his train company and recent intergalactic dabblings too: a rather broad spectrum on his entrepreneurial CV.

This isn’t for everyone though. Some use their formative university years to hone their thoughts and ideas, so when they emerge with their hard-earned qualifications, they have already done much of the necessary groundwork towards becoming a successful entrepreneur.

In short, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to entrepreneurialism. But they all share a drive and determination to succeed and they all have a natural intuition for what is right.

Christian Arno, from global translation services provider Lingo24, founded his company in 2001 after graduating in French and Italian. He worked initially from a spare bedroom in his parents’ home in Scotland, building a client base gradually and careful to spend his start-up finances wisely.

Funds came from a £5,000 loan and, crucially, he had invested £500 of his student loan on the stock market, which had yielded a return of 3,000%. But it was the home-based working model that was key to the company’s early success:

Arno says. “I was able to offer major clients prices up to 30 percent cheaper than our competitors. It was imperative that we could compete from the start, and having no overheads for premises helped facilitate this.”

He made the decision to start opening virtual offices elsewhere too, with New Zealand in 2003 and China in 2004.

But the big change came with his decision to open physical office spaces, beginning with Timisoara (Romania) in early 2005 and Panama and Edinburgh in 2008.

“There are strategic reasons why I opened all these offices where I did. A combination of local skill-sets combined with the multiple time-zones enables us to operate around the clock, quite literally. This is crucial to our global growth.”

Today, Lingo24 operates across four continents with clients in over sixty countries. They translated 33 million words in 2009 and achieved a turnover of £3.65m – which Arno predicts will rise to over £5m in 2010.

Having come so far in the past 8 years, Arno reckons that gradual growth is the key to businesses succeeding.

“Don’t throw large wads of cash at any initiative without having a clear idea of what the outcome will be. 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 was clear that the return on the investment 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 a number of key European and Asian languages, helping them to tap into new markets.

“Most of the internet is in English, but 75% of the world’s population speak no English at all, 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 part with your hard-earned cash. Start small, learn as you go and follow a carefully managed growth model.”

About Lingo24

Lingo24 is an international translation 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.