How an ex-paratrooper built an $8M/yr translation company

You’re about to meet an entrepreneur who noticed that his clients needed translation services. So you know what he did? He bootstrapped the translation company.

Grant Starker is the founder of Straker Translations, a cloud enabled translation company.

Grant Straker

Grant Straker

Straker Translations

Grant Straker is the CEO of Straker Translations, a software company specializing in providing multilingual content management services for websites.

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Hey there Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And this is a place where I’ve done over 1,000 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. I want to really emphasize that in-depth part. I know that there are a lot of people who just have casual conversations. I know there are people who do shorter interviews.

My purpose here is to go in depth so that real entrepreneurs can pick up real ideas from these interviews. This isn’t for the wantapreneur. This isn’t for the dabbler. It’s for someone who really wants to learn and really wants to get as much information as possible from someone who’s done it. And yes, along the way you’ll get inspiration, but it’s not just fluff, it’s deep, in-depth conversations.

And you’re about to meet an entrepreneur who noticed that his clients needed translation services. So you know what he did? He bootstrapped the translation company. He did it. Grant Starker is, yeah, Starker, I was hoping for a … I’m sorry?

Grant: Straker.

Andrew: Straker, Straker. Something didn’t feel right, thanks for jumping in there. Grant. And any time I get anything wrong I’d love for you to jump in. I want this to be accurate, starting with your name. Grant Straker is the founder of Straker Translations, a cloud enabled translation company.

This interview is sponsored by AndrewsWelcomegate.com. You should know now that if you need to collect email addresses from your users, you have to explain to them why they should trust you with their email addresses.

And the best way to do it, the best on the planet, all right, a really good way to do it, the best way that I’ve found is AndrewsWelcomegate.com. You can use the page. It worked for me, on your site. Use it as a template. I make it available to you on AndrewsWelcomegate.com. It gets me over, over 20% of the people who hit that page give me their email address and I want the same results for you. Go to AndrewsWelcomegate.com. Grant, welcome.

Grant: Hi.

Andrew: What kind of revenue’s are you guys doing now with your translation business?

Grant: So we’re approaching the 10 million annualized revenue mark.

Andrew: Ten million New Zealand dollars?

Grant: Correct, correct.

Andrew: All right, so . . .

Grant: Eight million U.S.D.

Andrew: Eight million US. I was doing the conversion earlier. Yeah, $8 million U.S. That’s incredible for a bootstrap business, which people will see in a moment, venture capitalists didn’t want to invest in.

Grant: Correct.

Andrew: And we’ll talk about how you did that. It all started when you were in the British army. What were you doing there?

Grant: I was a parachute man actually in the British Army. So, yeah, I’m a New Zealander, but I was in the UK as a teenager, and it was at the heart of the recession I guess, in the very early ’80s, and there weren’t a lot of jobs or opportunities and you know, I just thought that the military was the right choice for me. So yeah, I was lucky enough to serve all around the world and do a lot of exciting things and I guess it set me up later on in life.

Andrew: You know what? It’s surprising that you would think that the military would be the life for you. And you did think that way. You weren’t entrepreneurial, you didn’t think hey, you know what, this is going to be a way for me to get a leg up in society and then I’ll start a business?

Grant: No, I think I wanted to serve, I guess. I just had that feeling that I wanted to serve my community, and my country, and where I was living, and so that was how I felt. And I guess being an entrepreneur, I also feel like that.

Andrew: I’m sorry, what was that last part? Being an entrepreneur, you always?

Grant: I also feel that I want to serve.

Andrew: Ah, I see, as an entrepreneur today you still feel you’re serving.

Grant: Yeah, and I want to create tax revenue for the country and I want to do things that improves peoples lives I guess.

Andrew: I agree with that, you know what, I feel that same way too. I ‘m glad you said it. I feel a patriotic duty, not just to my country, but frankly to my planet. When I’m an entrepreneur I feel I’m contributing, I’m helping the world, I’m doing so much more frankly, then even by going and voting.

Grant: Right then, that’s exactly how I feel, and that’s how I felt as a soldier, and I’ve done a lot of other things. I’ve been a volunteer firefighter and tried to just contribute I guess. And get something out of it as well. I would say it’s a two way thing. You get coming out of it, by doing that but you also contribute that, which is great. The right way, seems to work I think.

Andrew: Is that where you learned how to code?

Grant: No, no. Not at all. When I left the army I went and studied engineering in the early ’90s. As I got into engineering I found actually, I decided to get into Excel and spreadsheets, and wondered how they worked, and wanted to do more with them. So I sort of looked under the hood, and I can figure this out, and actually just taught myself from there.

Andrew: Oh wow, how long did it take you to learn?

Grant: Not very long at all, I don’t think. I think I became reasonable proficient in coding within a year, and then I thought, I felt like I wanted to do that for a living so I thought I go on a course, so I go on a Java Course to learn and what happened was that the instructors said hold on you know better than I do. I also had a consulting company so they said, can you come on contract for us to do some work. So I got that I had a job. And went off and did that. That’s how it all started really.

Andrew: And how did you come across the need for translation?

Grant: So we were initially doing some coding and development work at the late ’90s [??]. We got some contract with some large tourism organizations. So tourism NewZealand, Tourism Australia and city of Seoul in Korea. And so what happened is that they needed multilingual under the content management system at the work place. So I rebuilt this in to sort of mainstream multilingual content management systems and as we started to roll that out people was getting multilingual web sites. One of that is to plug translation in to the Internet

Andrew: What do you mean when you say you built the first multilingual content management system?

Grant: Yes. You got a website and that’s in English. You wanted to have that in multiple languages. That means people were just creating a clone for each web site and having to take to see of they had platform or sort of just do it one by one. We said hold on you can do all of this inside one system. It’s going to be much easier to manage. It’s going to make considerably more cost effective. And so that was really what we built. We didn’t scale that business as we could have. It wasn’t a bad business, and that was a two to three million kind of turn over business that provided a living and fortune for four to five people and it was good fun I guess. But it wasn’t a business that we were going to sail certainly down from this part of the world.

Andrew: I see. And this was what you built while you were still working for the company that hired you that said you are too smart to be in this class. You should be working for us.

Grant: No after that actually. That was after that. So I had gone from there and started contracting so I had to form and set up a company to be a contractor and to grow somebody has to help me and by then I had set up my own company and growing from there.

Andrew: Can you help me understand how you understood the need was out there. Because frankly I was alive at that point. I didn’t realize that people wanted to translate their businesses. . Obviously in retrospect it feels a no brainer. But what did you see what exposed you that allowed you to see the opportunity here

Grant: Because we were looking at the tourism industry obviously global market opening up and I wanted to talk to people through the Internet in their own language.

Andrew: And this is your personal consulting company. You were working with the tourism industry building web sites for them.

Grant: Correct. But then what happened was as we built this tool we started to think that may be we should plug translation services in to it. So we tried to partner with some translation big wigs. But they were very technophobes. You know they were very manual very desktop acts. But when we started looking at this industry, we could see that it was billion dollars is the market for translation technology and thirty five billion was the market for translation services. So we decided hold on we have got a cool technology. Would we want to be in the billion dollar industry here, or would we want to be in the $35 billion industry and use our technology to provide the services?

Andrew: And that’s when you decide to make a shift.

Grant: Correct.

Andrew: What’s the first step that you took after you made that decision?

Grant: There were a few painful steps I think. Because we had a viable business what we could see what we wanted to change. And we had to really jettison some of those from the old parts of the business. And so you have to really do a pivot. And if you have to do that you have to do it properly. So we had to sell it. We have got to stop servicing these customers. We have to start our service business we have to lure some people become a bit lamer and you start from scratch. And that was the big moment.

And that was quite a difficult moment. And you talk about being amongst and be given to lot of us were looking at our family and your wife and [??]. Pretty difficult. I was the only guy hold on a minute. [??] This crazy guy is up again and wanted to do something different. So that was you know you took a lot out of us. It took a lot of convincing that this is the right decision.

Andrew: Why not keep them both at the same time. I have seen people build consulting companies and at the same time build side projects.

Grant: I think for us we needed to be, if we were going to be a big global player in this, we needed to focus on it. This is a distraction, when you’re in the services world, you are also in a head count of odd jobs coming through sort of game, and we didn’t want to be playing that game, and we didn’t want to be playing that game the same time as trying to grow.

Andrew: I see, and so you decided to just stop it and start fresh. Did you have enough money from the consulting business to be able to do this?

Grant: Just about, not really though.

Andrew: How much runway did you have? How many months?

Grant: Yeah I think it took us about 18 months to really sort of switch over and to get to the point where we were starting to really pay our way.

Andrew: I see.

Grant: A really painful time.

So Grant, in those 18 months, you were doing some client service, bringing in revenue from that, using that money and those people to start off the new business and transitioning towards the new business.

Grant: Yes, that would be a fair way to think about it.

Andrew: Where did the effort go in the 18 months, what were you building out at that point?

Grant: So the effort went into classic business stuff. One, getting sales. We already had a number of customers that we knew from our old business that needed translation services so our first port of call was hey, can we grab some of these guys, can we say look I know we’re not doing this anymore but we can offer you this. And we had good relationships. And it guess it was painful a bit, when you get into translations, if you get it wrong, there’s a lot of people that don’t know and there’s a lot of contextual stuff. We learned a lot then, so we didn’t have it quite right as we built up our core of translators and the technology base.

Andrew: Do you remember the first customer you got, for the translation business?

Grant: Yeah I can, sure. So for our first really decent customer was Sunlife USA. So we did a large project for them. They were already a customer for our technology platform at the time, so that was probably, if you’re talking numbers, a good 5 figure number as a budget. It was into about 8 languages. It was a very tight time frame. And so what happens by then is that as you develop technology and systems there’s a lot of manual overhead as you figure it out. So that’s one of those ones where there were a lot of hours, a lot of cutting and pasting.

Andrew: What kind of work did Sunlife Financial want from you?

Grant: They wanted their website. They had a website, a customer portal, where they communicated with their customers. So I built a hundred page website into a number of different languages.

Andrew: I see. And it was outside translators who were doing the work? How did you find them?

Grant: There are portals you can go to find them. We are also quite strong in Google ads in terms of looking for customers and translators. And so we had a place to sign up here. And the trick was then validating them, how do you know if these translators are any good?

Andrew: How do you find out if they are any good, especially if you don’t speak all these languages?

Grant: We do it with a [??] and we check whether they can do the grammar test and we have super translators, if you like, test them and mark them. But back then we used university lecturers who were teaching those languages to look at how good these people were. And it was a cost, how good do you feel about them. And then you don’t know at the time what they produce, how efficient they are, so it’s a bit of trial and error.

Andrew: I see. I’m looking at some of these articles you mentioned. Search engine optimization. I’m looking at some of the content here. October 21, 2010. “Why should you care about web translation?” posted by admin. And you talk about that. Here’s one, “Internet World 2010” a London presentation on web localization. Here’s another post, “The hidden cost of multilingual websites.” And this was the kind of stuff you were doing to bring in new business and explain to people your mission.

Grant: Correct, and that’s something as we develop more, we’re learning more about this. What’s happening in our industry is not a different than a lot of other industries where artificial intelligence is starting to play a big part, and big data is starting to play a big part. So we are trying to talk to people about how you leverage those and benefit from them. That was part of what we could see happening four or five years ago, but now it’s coming to the fore where people are seeing it in other industries. We were very ahead of the game in terms of thinking the way that we have.

Andrew: You know what’s interesting to me looking at these old articles? Usually at the end of a blog post there is a call to action. Either leave comment or sign up to the mailing list or buy from us. You had that too and here is the call to action, email me or here’s my Skype name, Skype with me. And it was always relevant. If you want the presentation, email me for it. If you want any information on anything above or are interested in a discussion about the points raised here in this post contact me, and you leave your email address and Skype name. Why did you do it that way?

Grant: We’re trying to be responsive. So one of the things that you find in an internet club based business is really making it as human as you can. Trying to say, “Hey look. We’re real people.” Anybody could put up a website and say, “Yeah, we can do these things.” But we’re trying to make it as human as we can and have as many interactions as we can with customers.

It’s the reason we have our chat. And to support 24/7 live chat on your website you have to have two production centers and shifts and staff and people that speak various languages as well. That means that somebody is getting some very relevant sales information the minute that’s [??] to us. All customers are getting support and that’s part of the reason.

Andrew: You’re talking about how when people go to your website now there is a pop-up that comes up or a little chat box that comes up that says, “Do you need any help?”

Grant: Yes. If you go to other sites what you’ll find is, “Sorry. We’re away right now.”

Andrew: Yes.

Grant: If you come to ours you’re going to find somebody. There is a little window on Sunday morning when we’re not there but six and a half days of the week somebody will respond to you very quickly.

Andrew: I see it right now. I’m on your site and Jane Alexander came in and asked if I had any questions and we could chat with Jane. You told our pre-interviewer that in the beginning everything was a prototype including the technology platform. Do you have an example of that?

Grant: What we’re trying to do is change the way the industry works. There is the artificial intelligence and the fact that we can use machines and humans to speed things up, we had to build a platform to figure that out. So we were just going, “Okay, let’s build an interface. Let’s get some humans using this. Let’s see how fast we can make them go if we plug in certain types of machine translation. Let’s see if the output is good enough or how much they have to change.” That was when we were just trying to build things and totally and continually iterate over each step of this. That’s really what happens and we didn’t know what the outcome was so there are many experiments.

Andrew: Can you give me an example of one of the many experiments you did in the early days?

Grant: Yep. We go into our work bench and we had had to build a tool that translated [??]. So then we had to figure out if we display content broken up in sentences or broken up into paragraphs would the translator go faster at a sentence level or a paragraph level and get the same output quality? Now, they go faster at a sentence level.

Andrew: Ah, so if you get a text from a client and you break it up, each sentence on it’s own paragraph, your translators work faster.

Grant: Yes, I would say yes, correct. If you break it into sentences, not keeping it in paragraphs, they will go faster and it’s just the same quality. And then you come into how do you measure quality and that’s a little bit more tricky.

Andrew: But that is the kind of test that you ran in the beginning?

Grant: Correct, yes.

Andrew: Interesting. How did you know the collection of services that you would use? I’m looking, again, at an early screen shot of the site. You say, “Quick translations. Just upload your document.” That’s one. The translation API, website translations, technical translations. How did you pick those services?

Grant: Over time we looked at how people come through our website and what type of leads we’re getting. We’re very data rich. I guess we can see that we’re a couple of things [??]. One, technical translations can actually be easier than marketing translations, as an example, even though we do it. You’ll find that it’s a good price point. There is less room for contextual issues, it’s black and white a lot of times [??]. So it’s really customer driven I think. As we’re starting to do jobs we’re going, “Okay, this is important.” And some [??] have developed and evolved. If you look at video, [??] come through video early on we used to do it but we didn’t get much work out of it but now we’re seeing a lot of video transcription.

Andrew: You basically have the same services today that you had that then but you say that you didn’t have as many tools back then when you were staring.

Grant: I think things like real time feedback. One of the really [??] that we have got now if you take about the [??] which is now a very common format that people would want as it. There is no way for reviewers to go ahead and actually adjust the tape that would it [??] document. And there actually I would have to do it all of that in the cloud. And that one allows one of the biggest time saver, quality saver, layout saving.

Andrew: Someone would have to take that document, translate it somewhere, take the new translation, put it back in the document in the format it was there, make sure that aligns properly and hand that out to the client.

Grant: Correct.

Andrew: well I see.

Grant: We are able to give client the web link and say I give this to a design people [??] and seen that to in the market. You know, guys are they happy with the translators and all the terms. So all this will be done online and thus dramatically reducing the work flow time and all the issues [??] once it come along.

Andrew: One of the challenges you had in the earlier day was gaining trust. How did you deal with the trust issue when you were just getting started?

Grant: I don’t have to do it at the personal level. We have to able to talk to our customers.

Obviously, we had some existing customers which was useful. As we started doing work for them, it gave us a small portfolio that we could leverage as examples. But a lot of that comes down to how people trust you. And upfront for the business to continue. So again a lot of the bigger jobs that we got I have to guide it. Make sure that [??] flights a long one. So a little bit of travel.

Andrew: What’s the farthest you have to travel back in the early days?

Grant: I would travel round the world three or four times a year.

Andrew: Really.

Grant: I just took round the world ticket. Australia to New Zealand, Singapore and then to London and then to Europe and then I stop in U.S and back to New Zealand.

Andrew: What type of business were you doing with these client that you were flying out to see?

Grant: It could really be it might be quite small. But we could see the potential in the longer term.

Andrew: How small would it be that you would be willing to fly out?

Grant: The flight brings in like a $5,000 deal. I am obviously going to see a few customers. It could be simple, but on the outside if they are going to do $5,000 now, but they are going to do $30,000 a year and [??]

Andrew: I see that is unusual. Especially since, am I right in understanding that a lot of the clients came to you online. They buy ads, they come to you via search engine and that’s when they would express interest.

Grant: That’s correct. So I think when you are in a place that has a very small critical mass say New Zealand has only 4 million people, that’s a very small business environment to operate in given the distance you have to travel anywhere else. You have to come up with different way to earn customers. And so it forces you in to that. I think I was in the middle of London and not had 30 million people within a day’s drive or a 40 million, I think it’s a 60 million in London within a day’s drive. We have a different attitude. Why would you need to put in distance and language and bring other things in to the mix? But for me you have to do that.

Andrew: So why do it why stay there?

Grant: I would like to have my camera right now and just show you beautiful pictures of the Pacific Ocean.

Andrew: Do it.

Grant: Do it. I will you the Pacific Ocean. You can see it. Yeah. I put that on both sides.

Andrew: That’s what it is. It’s the drive the beauty of your country.

Grant: I think it is. I love my life style and I love my kids growing up in this country and I like living here. You know I have been around the world a lot. And I guess I have family and ties and stuff. So there is ultimately, you ask anybody who runs a business in Australia and New Zealand and you get the both of both worlds. Where as you get a international business you get to travel to various small places and also get a great place to live.

Andrew: So that’s how you got a lot of trust by going out there taking to people , seeing them in person putting your Email address in your Skype name online for people to see and things were growing big and then you went and talked to Venture capitalists. Why talk to venture capitalists?

Grant: At this stage you could say that we have got the basics of a great business. We have got a big market. You’ve got an engine that clearly has some value and is doing things differently to the rest of the industry. So you have this opportunity, and with technology, you have a limited opportunity timeframe, generally. So you need to capture that, and you need to really make sure that you do the right things. So, for us it was about saying, “If we can get some capital, we can drive this business a bit faster and really capture this competitive advantage our technology has given us.”

Andrew: What would you have done with technology that, it seems like…I thought it was very manual.

Grant: In terms of…?

Andrew: I guess in terms of the translation, but then when you talk about allowing your clients to upload the format that they prefer, and then letting your translators just focus on translation and not on doing the format and redoing it, if that makes sense.

Grant: Yeah, but also what we’re doing is we’re getting all of the translators to work in the cloud, and by doing that we’re tracking their time so we can offer different business model alternatives. So we’re able to then say do a per-hour rate, because we can make translators go faster. So our whole platform has a lot of working parts, but does really separate us from the way that most other translation services operate.

Andrew: What size revenue were you doing at the time that you went to talk to the investors?

Grant: We were probably doing just over a million dollars New Zealand, so around about a million U.S. And at that time we could see…I mean, it’s funny when you talk about getting [??], because everything is a different number. When you’re at a million, you’ve kind of got something that works. Can you scale it? All the questions are asked. Can you scale this? Really, is it that different? What sort of advantage have you got? Are your teams good enough to execute this vision that you’ve got in place?

So, it’s an interesting time. But at the same time, we’ve shown enough to interest them. [??] Hold on, these guys are in a big industry. If they’re right, then this could really be quite a good investment for them.

Andrew: And you were talking to investors, and they did like it, and they started doing due diligence, and then?

Grant: Yeah, so then this one case in particular that you’re referring to here was really painful, because it was right at the point when we had done this big pivot. We had gone through this really tough period of getting rid of the old business, getting into the new one, had the house mortgaged, had everything on the line, but we were also getting some interest. And so what happened was we picked one, and we turned down a couple of other options which would have been quite good.

We picked one, and basically because it was the Christmas period, and there was a little bit of delay, they said “Okay, well, let’s just wait. We want three months to really assist this business and make sure we can do our due diligence.” Which we said, ‘Fine.’ But then what happened was, on the last afternoon of the last day, they came back and had quite a lot of reasonable signals up for them, and they just pulled the plug and said, ‘Sorry, it’s not for us.’

Andrew: You pulled the plug?

Grant: No, they pulled the plug.

Andrew: They pulled the plug. After stringing you along, they said, ‘Sorry.’ OK.

Grant: Yeah. Yeah. And, it’s funny. The guy that actually did that? I flew up to the U.S. about two weeks ago. I had to fly up to Seattle. And he was on the plane. I hadn’t seen him since that day, and that was several years ago. It was quite interesting. I didn’t talk to him, actually.

Andrew: Why didn’t you talk to him? How did you feel about it at the time?

Grant: Not very happy.

Andrew: Still, to this day?

Grant: No, still to this day. And I’m not a guy that really bears grudges or feels a bit sorry. You need to carry through life, but I guess I don’t have a lot of respect for him, and the way…I don’t have any issues with people’s decisions about whether they invest or not. I just…there’s a way you can deal with people, and you can be transparent, and you can make life a lot easier. And it is very tough on entrepreneurs when they’re in that spot.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Grant: There is a responsibility on these guys to actually be [??] people as well.

Andrew: Yeah, and meanwhile, even though you did a million in revenue, you guys weren’t in such a great situation. How did the company fare after that?

Grant: Strange enough, and when it’s not [??], it’s very strange stories. The following week we closed…we just got a lead from one of New Zealand’s biggest customers, which was a huge job. And at the same time, our model around upfront payments kicked in. So what happened was, we get a lot of credit card payments, and it just grew exponentially. It’s almost like we hit a tipping point, where suddenly we built this trust, and maybe we had enough references on our website. And suddenly we started to get this really big uptake of people paying us up front with credit cards and that got us through the cash flow. It was within a week.

Andrew: What was that week like?

Grant: It was from a very low, low to a really is this going to sustain? I guess you have some [??] that you’re not sure of but some [??].

Andrew: Were you in a place where you almost didn’t make payroll? Is that how bad it got?

Grant: It did get that bad, yeah.

Andrew: It did. Did you miss payroll for anyone?

Grant: No, we didn’t.

Andrew: How did you keep from freaking out or from obsessing about how wrong that venture capitalist was in being indignant about it?

Grant: How did I do that? I guess my wife didn’t take it quite the same way that I did. I just became very determined I think. I just became incredibly determined. And I think that was one thing that I had to know when I was in the army and had to pass paratrooper selection and those types of things. If anybody asks me what I’m like, I’m a very determined person and I just used all that anger because I was quite angry [??] and I put it into the right place. And I became very determined to prove them all wrong.

Andrew: Ah, I’m going to prove them wrong, prove those venture capitalists who didn’t give me a shot wrong and prove the guy who did give me a shot and then backed out, wrong. This is going to be my way of dealing with it.

Grant: Correct, and I think that’s a very powerful force.

Andrew: So then you started getting new credit card payments, business started to roll, you didn’t need the investors anymore soon after that. What’s the next big milestone that allowed you to grow to where you are today?

Grant: It kept growing through that period and then the following year it got to this great stage where we starting to generate a profit and I remember our kids had been through a pretty tough time up to this so then we carried them off to Disneyland and we had a great family holiday and we got to really enjoy some benefits. And then we went, “Right, okay. And now we’re getting up to $3 million in revenue. How are we actually going to grow this so that we can become . . .” I had this vision, and I still have this vision that we can be a $100 million dollar revenue company within a few years. And how are we actually going to achieve that? We said, “Look, we don’t think we can achieve it without a huge amount of risk to us again. We need to get some money on-board.” and that de-risks it. So we sold down some shares but it gives us the capital we need to grow fast.

Andrew: Who did you sell the shares to?

Grant: We sold them to an investment fund. In New Zealand, what’s happened is they’ve started to make [??] compulsory. And a lot of that money flows from the investment funds here. Australia had this since the ’70s and New Zealand has only had it for the last five or six years. That’s become a multi-billion dollar fund. And those funds now have a [??] a certain amount goes into high growth New Zealand companies.

Andrew: So they buy your share out?

Grant: I’m sorry, no, it was an investment.

Andrew: I see, it was an investment. So you bootstrapped up until a point and then you took outside funding.

Grant: Correct. It wasn’t de-risking in that we took money off the table, it was de-risking and that money went into the business.

Andrew: I see. How much did you raise?

Grant: We raised a couple of million dollars. When you’re growing but you’re pretty close to breaking even or profitable, I didn’t see the need for us to go crazy and raise $2 million which people have done. I wanted to have a certain amount of equity and control because I feel that I have this vision about the company and that I wanted to make sure I had enough of a share holding to get that vision through. And I think we’re on that track now so I’m not so fussed about what my shareholding is or what percentage it is now but at that time I did care.

Andrew: And you guys are still profitable today?

Grant: Yes. We’ll be monthly profitable and we keep growing so we go, “Okay, within a couple of months, when we have profit, we’ll need to put some more money into growth strategies.”

Andrew: I see, so when you make profit that’s too much of profit you want to reinvest it in the business so you’re not paying taxes on the profit but you’re growing the business.

Grant: Yeah, and it’s nothing to do with taxes it’s actually just about improving business management. We’re trying to say, “Okay, we know that we [??] to this strategy.” A lot of businesses will go, “Hey look. Settle down, let’s take some big losses for a couple of years let’s just … [??] I think in the services business, it is good to start a [??] because we can share it at any time and we can start raising some reasonable profits out of this business if we decide that we do not want to grow any faster.

Andrew: So after raising the money, where do you invest your money for growth?

Grant: We have invested it into technologies that have barely gotten [??], which ultimately goes through into our address margins so that the more that we make, the more that our translators are faster, the more profitable we are in terms of gross margins. We listed it in [???] so that our status changed underground around the world and it brought it down to trust. People like to buy locally and they like to trust that they are buying from somebody who is in the market and understands them. So you know, we have styles changed underground in the United States, we have got them in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland…

Andrew: And it is outbound sales?

Grant: It is more that, in terms of marketing, yes, it is outbound, but we have got a good marketing background, and so we generate a lot of leads from around the world and from the underground [??].

Andrew: How do you get leads?

Grant: Again, we bring together co-companies to provide us…

Andrew: I see. And that is a big one, because I am hunting through your similarweb.com profile to see where your traffic is coming from. The number one place it is coming from is Go Squared, which is an analytics program, so that is not…

Grant: Yeah.

Andrew: How do you use Go Squared?

Grant: I use that on a daily basis to see how traffic is going through, so that is all.

Andrew: Yeah, so that is not big for a source of traffic. The next one is translator.strikersoftware.com. That is just the portal that your clients, and its search…

Grant: Yeah, that’s the one…

Andrew: Sorry?

Grant: Yeah, I was saying, that is the one that our translators use, actually.

Andrew: The translators, I see. Then there is search.smartshopping.com. Again, not huge, so it seems like it is not so much even organic – there is not one person sending you a lot of traffic. Your core competency is in Google Ads.

Grant: Correct, we spend probably a million dollars per year on Google, and we have a very strong profile that is determining around how much revenue we generate to make sure that what we spend on Google, so that if we are paying for interpreting Google, we know what that would generate…

Andrew: I see.

Grant: And we had some very strong compliments on that.

Andrew: I see some of those ads right know. Boy, I really love Similar Web, I am glad they gave me this account because now I can see the ads themselves. Fast translation service, profession quick and great rates, corporate and personal translations, fast document translation, USA’s leading translating services, that’s what the ads look like. Keywords are one hour translation, translation services, official translation, tons of them.

Grant: Yeah, correct.

Andrew: Yeah.

Grant: Yeah, so the thing about Google Ads is what happens is that it is designed to give you diminishing returns. So basically as you spend more, eventually you will hit an apex on a bell curve where you will start to get diminishing returns.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Grant: What it is about is for each campaign and each specific keyword is about understanding what part of the apex you should be spending money to get the maximum return for. And we do that on each market and we do it for each server-internal campaign. And so until you are spending probably, a specific sum at least, you are not really going to get knocked out to analyze it to make those calls, but when you get it right, it is a great channel.

In some markets you will hit saturation, somewhere like New Zealand or Australia, we might hit that saturation point where we know we have hit the bell curve and we are not going to get any more. So we will go offline with what we are doing. We might do some radio campaigns, some different marketing campaigns and different options. But certainly in the big grounds of Europe and the U.S., there is still a lot of leeway for us to move forward with that.

Andrew: I see that you also send people to a different landing page, I think so, and on that landing page that I see from your Google Ads, there is the trustpilot.com ratings. You send people to Trust Pilot. Why do you like Trust Pilot?

Grant: I guess it is a third party validation platform. Every job that we do, our customers, good or bad or investment outcasting, are given the chance to go on and rate us, and that is very accurate. You know, it is a subjective industry, it can be, we push to do things quickly, but there are jobs that can have issues, by a rule, we say that we want to give our customers a chances to comment if we did a good job, did we do a bad job, If we did a bad job, what we’ve done a bad job, what did we do wrong and how do we fix it?

Andrew: And so you send them to TrustPilot after they’ve told you how you can fix it, right? You don’t just say, “Go over right away, do you?” Because the ratings are phenomenal there.

Grant: The minute we’ve done a job and they’ve got it delivered, they all get it together and go to TrustPilot.

Andrew: I see. We asked you if you could teach a class to other enterpreneurs, what would it be? You said, “Never giving up.”

Grant: Yes.

Andrew: Why would that be what you want to teach entrepreneurs?

Grant: Because I think that it is always easy to [??] stuff, you know. It’s a little hard, man, and this isn’t working for me and I need to get an app. I just feel that if you’re really committed and you just, you know, believe in what you’re doing and just keep going. You never give up the idea. And sometimes it’s just a saga. We might be at the bottom of a saga whee things might be under control and then they come back inside. [??] So you never give up, and things will come your way.

Andrew: And here’s a quote directly from you, “For something to be rewarding, it has to push you to the edge of your limits?” Why do you say that?

Grant: I guess because I believe it. That was something I learned early on just coming back to my Army days where we [??] a very hard course.

Andrew: Which one did they push you really to your limits in the Army?

Grant: So that we [??] company that’s in the British Army. It’s one of the hardest courses you can do. You have to do it to be a paratrooper. So that’s one where, you know, after six weeks and you’ve got no time hours left [??]…

Andrew: They’re down your back?

Grant: Oh yeah, just [??]. Two hundred people and you aren’t relieved, and you go on a test week where, you know, you have to do incredibly hard tests, so running with concrete which is across the [??] Mountains and various other really tough courses. And you just want to give up. I mean, I remember doing it and I’ll never get to do this again. I had nothing left, nothing. So it really drained on you

[??].

Andrew: What is the internal force that kept you running them and kept you running now?

Grant: I just don’t like to fail. I wanted to do it and I just didn’t know…

Andrew: But you haven’t failed. I mean, now if you close up, you’re still a success. You’ll still do well. You continue to go and said earlier, “I can make this a hundred million dollar company.” What is the internal motivation that makes you continue?

Grant: Again, it just comes back to wanting to succeed and have the ability to influence a lot of lives. If you want to sell it, you’re talking about the company. It’s one of the greatest things in the world. Hiring somebody and giving them a job and giving them a [??] and giving them a really meaningful life experience and spend so much time at work. It’s a path that really motivates to me, I think. And so that’s part of it. I’m not doing it because I want to go and buy a Ferrari or a big yacht. I have a house.

Andrew: Did you get to buy anything like a Ferrari or something that’s personally fun?

Grant: No, we’ve done a few trips there. I bought a Jeep actually. It’s just a Jeep Wrangler. You can take the roof off of it and you can drive around.

Andrew: That’s the most extravagant thing?

Grant: That’s about it, yeah. I mean, I do have a little boat for fishing, and when you’ve been reasonably conservative the life you live you do things. It’s something hard that you break out of. Okay, now I’m going to start being a bit crazy. [??]

Andrew: I’m not going to see you leaning on a Lamborghini in your Facebook page any time soon.

Grant: No.

Andrew: No.

Grant: I might get a Ferrari, if I think about it. That might be my one thing, but I like fishing so I love fishing actually.

Andrew: It also feels like that there’s a sport on this, that you want to see. Can you put more points on the board? Can you get more of those great companies that you have whose logos you have up on your site? Can you get more of those? Can you get more customers? Is that it?

Grant: Yeah, I think that’s possibly true. [??] Can we really pull this off? You know, I think if we’re not doing it, somebody else is going to do it. And, you know, we do love, not just made it [??], we love what we do and we’ve had this vision for four or five years before we achieved it. Let’s see if we can really pull this off.

Andrew: All right. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing you pull this off. I hope this won’t be the last time you come here to do any interview. Thanks and congratulations on all of the success.

Grant: Thank you very much for having me.

Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of it. The website, if you want to check it out, is StrakerTranslations.com. Thank you everyone. Bye.

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