Entrepreneur grows home-based translations business international

Posted on | January 13, 2010 | View Comments

From time to time like to feature guest bloggers on my site. This is a story of Christian Arno who founded Lingo24, business more or less bootstrapped from the beginning. Lingo24 translated over thirty million words in 2009, covering clients in over sixty countries and every industry sector. Their turnover in the twelve months to September 2009 was £3.65m.

About Christian Arno

With a degree secured in Italian and French from the University of Oxford, Christian Arno’s passion for languages and a more-than-passing interest in the newly-flourishing e-business boom led the 22 year old Scot to launch his home-based translation service – Lingo24 – just a few months after completing his studies in 2001.With the support of a £5,000 loan from the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT), and a shrewd £500 investment of his student loan on the stock market which yielded a return of £15,000, Arno was able to build Lingo24’s website and IT infrastructure which would facilitate the young company’s success in the early years.

Arno’s main ambition was to build the ‘top online brand’ for translation services and set about doing so entirely from a spare bedroom in his parents’ home in Aberdeen.“It was nice to have such a short commute from my bed to the office”, says Arno. “But the main benefit was that I didn’t have to pay for premises and had minimal overheads. This meant I could offer some pretty big clients prices up to a third cheaper than our industry competitors.”

The Business

Indeed, this allowed Lingo24 to develop a lot faster than it may otherwise have done and in 2003 he launched a virtual office in New Zealand, followed by China a year later, both staffed by home-based workers. Arno says, “We recruited some fantastically talented management and linguistic personnel in China and New Zealand, and having operations in other time-zones meant we could operate ‘round the clock’. When our handful of home-based staff clocked-off in the UK, we could pass the reigns over to the guys on the other side of the world. It was a very effective system.”

Going global

Having operational capacity in multiple time-zones was key to Lingo24 ‘going global’, and they launched their first physical office space in Romania in 2005, followed by Panama in 2008 and finally their first UK office arrived in Edinburgh later the same year. “The key for businesses going global is carefully managed growth”, says Arno. “I found that by doing things in stages, building up one part of the business, seeing the success and then moving on to the next stage was crucial. Trying to grow things too quickly can spell disaster for young companies and their precious start-up funds.”

Indeed, carefully managed growth has been pivotal to Lingo24’s success. Equally important has been Arno’s realisation that the foreign language internet is the best way to tap into new and emerging markets:

“Three quarters of the world’s population speak no English at all”, says Arno. “And of those who do speak English as a second language, the simple fact is people prefer to do business in their native tongue. I arranged for Lingo24’s website to be translated into ten or so languages in our key target markets, so that businesses in Germany, France, Sweden, Japan or wherever they may be know that we’re serious about what we do.”

And there it is. From home-working and carefully managed growth, to multilingual websites and staff across multiple time-zones, businesses of all sizes can go global with nothing more than a networked computer and a touch of entrepreneurial nous.

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