Your business is thriving in these awful times: tell us why!

Kevin Lossner wrote:

There are too many formulas for success, many of them very individual.

Eric Hahn wrote:
Maybe in hard times one should rather think in terms of survival

For a lonely wolf with no overhead and no bubble susceptible to explose, it is possible to survive anytime and anywhere...

Oleg Rudavin wrote:
- Extensive clientelle base. Nobosy builds chairs with two legs; and a three-legged chair will fall if one leg is broken.
- Good interpersonal skills. We often deal with PM's who keep an exessive stock of translation providers (no one-legged chairs!) Building proper relations with PM's can generate additional, sometimes triple inflow of jobs from the same outsourcer.

Marie-Hélène Hayles wrote:

I just hope it's not tempting fate to post here!

Anyway, I'm not really much of a one for analysing the secret of my success, but I think it's due to a combination of things:

1) Reliability: I do what I've agreed by when I've agreed to. It sounds simple, but a friend of mine who works in the editorial field told me that an astonishing number of translators/revisers simply don't meet the deadline! Added to that, there are the no-brainers like always running your work through a spell-checker, having at least a basic knowledge of formatting (I know one translator who hasn't worked out what the tab bar is for yet - her formatting is done via a million spaces...), following the client's instructions and so on.
My tagline is "trouble-free translations" - that's what I aim to provide, and I hope I succeed.

2) Specialisation: I work in an area where there seem to be very few decent translators - so it's easy to make myself stand out. Plus, of course, specialising improves your throughput, as your expertise means you spend less time looking things up and more time actually translating.

3) Attention to detail (AKA going the extra mile): where appropriate, improving on the original, pointing out inconsistencies, suggesting extra points that could be used for added impact. This is normally easier with direct clients, but can also be possible through agencies, as I noted earlier on another thread.

4) Offering the occasional freebie: Only worthwhile with regular customers, of course, but throwing in the odd free translation of a tiny job (or giving advice on something that wouldn't normally concern me) doesn't affect my bottom line but keeps the client happy, and coming back. (I learned the hard way that this is not worth doing with potential clients - if they can get you doing things for free right from the word go, why should they ever start paying you?)

5) Rates: as far as I can tell, my rates are on the high side for my language pair, but on the low side for my fields. Certainly, from my POV the various threads dogmatically stating 10 cents a word to be the bare minimum any self-respecting translator should accept are pie in the sky, if we're talking about Euro - almost all my work is at a lower rate. But I care not a jot! I'm far more interested in my actual income, which is doing very nicely, thank you - and no, I'm not working my arse off at weekends to get there. Which brings me on to my final point:

6) Luck? I do an awful lot of extremely repetitive documents. They're scanned PDFs, so I don't get asked to do them with a CAT and apply a discount (although occasionally I apply one anyway - see 4)). What I do, with the help of Google Desktop, is search for similar files I've done in the past and use them as a template - often copying and pasting from 2 or 3 different documents so the amount of actual translating I have to do is minimal. This does of course then require extremely careful revision to make sure my copy-and-paste job matches the original exactly, but in any case it means I get a very high throughput on these jobs.

I added the question mark because I don't know if this is luck or not - I'm not familiar with any other fields, so I've no idea how many others are likely to contain such a high number of specialist-but-routine jobs. Surely mine can't be the only one though?

[Edited at 2009-02-12 12:28 GMT]

Silvia Barra wrote:

I'm probably missing luck. It is true that I'm almost a beginner (5 years of experience only), but I fulfill all points that Marie-Hélène put down (my specialisations are chemistry and medicine - I'm a chemist) and still have not so much success.
Silvia

"A Dios rogando y con el mazo dando", which means "Pray to God you must, but hit hard with the club" ... i.e. pray a lot to God for guidance and sound translation/business decisions, but also try to work as intensely as possible.

Kevin Lossner wrote:
Thriving is a good way of surviving and worth aiming for at any time. What many understand as "survival" is at best just postponing an ugly demise and probably spiraling downward unless there is a strong focus on basic principles. Maybe that's what you meant.

Oleg Rudavin wrote:


Marie-Hélène listed three points related mostly to translation (1-3), one related to interpersonal relations (4) and a single ponts connected to business (5).

Marie-Hélène Hayles wrote:
Of, course, the examples I gave are specific to translation, but "doing what I've agreed by when I've agreed" is surely the foundation of all business relationships.

Eric Hahn wrote:



Yes, but as a freelancer, you also need clients you can rely on. This is most important in every long-term relationship.

Marie-Hélène Hayles wrote:
And again, I don't think that's peculiar to freelancing; it's true of all business relationships - or at least the very vast majority of them.