Do we have a treat for you! We got the chance to interview the young team behind designvetica. How young is young? Let’s just let these Go Getters tell you their story.
YGG Interview with Design Vetica

1) We know you’re a “Young Go Getter”, but so our readers know, how old are you?

Our team is comprised of high school students aged from 16 - 17 years old.

2) Can you tell us the quick history about Design Vetica, and what drives you guys to succeed?

We have all either worked as freelance web designers/developers, or have built websites on our own, and we’ve all been tinkering with the web since we were around 12- and 13-years-old. We’ve been involved in web design about 2 years before we started the company, and most of the projects we received were referrals from friends. William and I started talking about building a company for web design and media production in a shared IT class, and we pulled in Alex as he had worked on previous projects with William. In February of 2009, Design Vetica was born.

3) We know you are a younggogetter, but I am sure there is more to you than that. What are some other things you have done prior to you current job or things you are currently working on?

Our goal has always been to establish a premium design agency, and we will be looking to expand and grow, with a new motion graphics team, and the development of web applications. Currently we are focusing on the launch of our upcoming web app, so you can expect to hear the announcement from us soon ;)

4) Adversely, what has been your biggest vice?

Our most challenging aspect of being a young entrepreneur is that we are STILL in high school! People who are not constraint with schoolwork can focus solely on their work. However, we, as students have to juggle school work and getting good marks while keeping up with deadlines from multiple projects with clients. This has caused some problems already. For example, we had to drop potential clients during finals. Nevertheless, at times, we encourage each other to keep up our grades in school.

5) What can we expect next from the talented Design Vetica in the near future?

this question is basically answered in #3

6) Everyone starts to feel burn out on a project every now and then. What do you do to keep yourself motivated and focused?

Meeting new people, going to conferences, and working with new clients every week really makes the whole experience enjoyable and pushes us to go forward.

7) Can you give us three tools that you use every single day to make your life as a younggogetter more efficient, productive, or fun?

We use the usual suspects, like Basecamp, and Google apps, but we still prefer to do the initial draft of any design work in our Moleskineand dotGrid notebooks. Nothing beats pen and paper!

8) What is your favourite quote?

We don’t have one at the moment.

9) And last but not least, if you could give one piece of advice to fellow Young Go Getters, what would it be?

It may sound cheesy, but just DO IT; because you never know unless you try. The truth is when we think back to how we started, we were even shocked to find ourselves following such a crazy idea; but we are glad that we did it. Even if your idea fails, use it as an experience because we all learn from our mistakes.

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.

I was talking with a friend recently who was sharing his frustrations with trying to start his own business. After reading book after book about how to be successful, measuring success, and how to become a millionaire, he came to the conclusion that they were all wrong. I won’t share the names of the books that turned him off to being successful, but I will describe the characteristics of these books and why thousands of people that read the same book don’t all become millionaires.

Beaten Down and Degraded

You may aware of the tactics that many armed forces like the Army use, in which they “break” a person emotionally and mentally so that they can “rebuild” them to be conditioned as soldiers. The reason they do this is because it’s basic psychology and it works. Ever hear of victims becoming attached to their harassers or women staying with abusive husbands? When you’re broke mentally you begin to rely on others to mend you. This applies to the financial world as well. Many “millionaires” and authors want to make more money with their books, and they’ve got a tried and true approach to doing it. Submission. Most of the people reading financial books are insecure about their finances already, thus being in a submissive state from the beginning, they are easily controlled and manipulated by the author. If the author’s goal is to get them to buy more products, then they simply communicate that to the reader. This is why SO MANY people are still poor no matter how much they read; it’s all a mind game.

Knowing this, it’s important to recognize the good eggs from the bad before reading anything. Unless you’re confident in your financial state, you shouldn’t pick up a book on finances without doing some research. Be wary of author’s claims of religion, overnight success, or training programs to attributing to you success. Not that these methods don’t work, but they’re often used to mislead the reader or win their trust (sadly, I know far too many church goers that have been taken advantage of for putting their faith in people that play the God card).

Who do I trust?

Nobody. You should never trust anyone 100% because very few people are completely out to help you for nothing in return; and the few that are can become corrupt at any point. The real key is to trust yourself. If you can have enough faith and trust that regardless of what you read, learn, or do — that you will be happy and successful — THEN you are ready to learn. Many authors (even the corrupt ones) have something valuable to share. As long as you have the discernment to know what to apply and what to scrap, then you’ll be able to build your own blueprint to success.

How do I build my confidence?

It’s easy to say, but hard to do, right? Well not exactly. Building confidence is a slow growing process, and it takes a lot of time and positives to outweigh the negatives which have torn it down. You can’t gain genuine confidence overnight, and as much as it may seem possible, you can’t ignore or fake confidence. It lies in the subconscious mind and can only be built with genuine experiences. Here’s a few exercises that can help it along however:

• Make a list

  Of the 5 most important things in your life (religion, family, dog, car, house, etc) then add up the actual financial value they have. If the value is 0 like mine is, then what do you have to lose? Assets and Liabilities can come and go like the wind. Money won’t buy you happiness, it just makes it easier to maintain :) SO be thankful for what you have, make sure that you won’t lose those most important to you, and do your best to succeed. If you fail, you get up and start again.

• Remember failure

  Isn’t always rock bottom, and even if it is, rock bottom is a good foundation to build on. Even though it sucks crashing down, the only place left to go from their is up. No matter how hard your life may seem, or how much it may sting, its important to remember that there are MANY of those that endured your struggles or worse and still found success.

Measuring Success

You are the measure. Don’t let anyone else define you. The end.