1. Art and Diseño

The business grew quickly didn’t it?
Yes, there was a big demand for translation services in
Cornwall, but also nationally and internationally, so I very
quickly started outsourcing work to other freelance translators to fulfil all our orders. And it sort of snowballed from
there. In the first year, we grew from just me working from
my kitchen table at home to having a team of 10 freelance
translators.
5 minutes with: Anja Jones from Anja Jones Translation.
From the kitchen table in Penryn to her own office in
Newquay - Anja Jones Translation is a fast growing business.
We talked to Anja about how it all started, her expansion
plans for the future and the excitement of taking on new
staff.
How did you come to start your own business?
I studied linguistics and French at university, so a career in
language came naturally to me.
When I first moved to Cornwall in 2007, I wasn’t sure if there
would be any language jobs available, so I actually worked as
an administrator for an international sailing association for
about three years. But I really wanted to get back to my language roots, so in 2010 I decided to take a leap of faith and
start working as a freelance translator. I really enjoyed
translating and initially focused on hotel websites, because
the tourism sector in Cornwall attracts large numbers of
French and German speakers. I created a website and sent
postcards to marketing managers of local hotels advertising
my translation services.
www.anjajonestranslation.co.uk/
01637 874 855
find out more…
www.erdfconvergence.org.uk
Over the next three years, the number of freelancers we
worked with grew to over 40. I was essentially still working
as a translator but also dealing with all the other aspects of
running a business, like project management, marketing,
accounts, handling quotations, customer service etc.
By the end of 2013 I realised that this set-up wasn’t really
working anymore - one person being in charge of everything caused a kind of a “bottle neck” which hugely limited
the amount of things that could get done in a day and stifled any further growth potential. Plus, working 14 hours
each day wasn’t going to be sustainable in the long run.
So what changed for you and the business?
I attended a Fast Forward course run by Unlocking Potential where a small number of business people got together
to focus on managing growth. They all had similar challenges and it was helpful to hear about their experiences.
On this course, I learnt about the Get Set for Growth programme, which helps businesses in Cornwall to grow and
access funding. Working with Get Set has been instrumental in changing our business model. We received 12 hours of
business support which were used to really get under the
skin of our business and tackle our biggest challenges: finance and marketing. We worked through our marketing
strategy and created a marketing plan, we dug into the finances and created a cashflow forecast. Initially, I wasn’t
sure whether we could afford to employ someone, but by
the end of our work with Get Set, I was confident that we
could take on an employee.
The first step was employing Jo for one day a week to help
us with the accounts side of things. She is our super efficient accounts genie who deals with bank reconciliation,
sending purchase orders to translators and chasing invoices from customers. After only one month, our accounts
were up to date – which was a new experience for us!
Last September, we also took on Jenny, our first full-time
employee. Jenny works as a project manager, translator
and also helps with the marketing side of things. Up until
now, most of our business has been coming from existing
customers and word-of-mouth recommendations, which is
fantastic, but we really want to get the ball rolling now and
become more proactive in acquiring new clients.
And now?
We now have a team of over 50 freelance translators who
mainly live in England, France and Germany. The majority
of our work involves French, German and UK English.
Usually, the translators live in their home countries and
translate into their mother tongue. That way they are
immersed in the local culture and stay on top of any
changes in their language.
find out more…
www.erdfconvergence.org.uk
Any highlights?
I Attended the Cornwall Business Fair, Get Set for growth
sponsored us, I’d never done anything like that before and it
went really well!
What does the future hold?
We are currently looking for an in-house French translator to
join our team in 2015. Since taking on employees, I have managed to reduce my working hours to roughly eight hours a day,
which is a tremendous improvement and gives me the ‘brain
space’ to concentrate on business development. We are just
preparing our first outbound marketing campaign and hope to
work with new local and international clients this year.
When you first start out on your own it is hard to know whether you are doing things right. It’s a time of huge insecurity and
you are constantly wondering whether the client is happy or if
you are charging enough. There’s always going to be a lot of
competition, but now we’ve found our foot in the industry, we
want to concentrate on developing our particular niche market. Our aim is to deliver the highest quality using cuttingedge translation technology. We want to become leaders in
our language pairs and provide our customers with the best
service they can possibly find.