Are You Ready To Set Up Your Own Translation Business?

Are You Ready To Set Up Your Own Translation Business?

At some point, you may feel that you are ready to set up your own translation business, making the move from freelance translator to director of your very own translation company. This will probably come after you have been working as a freelancer for a few years and know your trade inside out. But are you sure that you are totally prepared to make this move?

Sure, creating your own business is something that you will be able to feel really proud of. However, there is a lot that you will need to organize and plan before you commit to this new career move. So how do you know if you are ready to run your very own company? Hopefully, this blog post will help you figure that out.

You Need To Be At The Top Of Your Game

If you are thinking about creating your own translation company, you need to make sure that your skills are as good as they can be. You will be competing for clients and customers a lot more fiercely when you have a company, so it is important that you stand out from all the other translation agencies. It could also be worth thinking about adding more languages to your portfolio. Generally speaking, the more languages you offer, the more attractive you will look to clients. That’s because you will be able to do a lot of work in various languages, and they won’t have to seek a different translator for each language they need work on. If you start hiring staff, you should aim to find staff who can translate to and from a variety of languages.

How to choose your collaborators: freelancers or employees?

Once you become a company, you will be able to hire staff. This will be a necessary move if you are planning on growing and developing your company at some point in the future. Firstly, you need to decide between taking on freelance contractors or employing full-time staff. More often than not, contractors will be a lot cheaper for you as you will only pay them for the real work they do. As with everything in life, there are upside and downside to both choices. Let’s see them.

Pros and Cons of Hiring Permanent Employees

Permanent employees, whether full-time or part-time, are usually more expensive in the short-term. I’m saying “in the short-term” because in the long-term it can actually prove the most convenient option. In fact, while working with freelancers seems cheaper at a first look, it can become a lot more expensive in the long-term if they don’t work well and you have to hire a second freelancer to cover up for a work badly done. This wouldn’t happen with a permanent employee because you can always go to them and talk to them directly, working together to fix the translation if it was not accurate without having to pay more, if it’s done within the employee’s normal working hours.

Furthermore permanent staff is usually a lot more dedicated as they have an invested interest in the company. They know they have to see you every morning, so they’ll put in a lot more effort than a freelancer that could potentially just disappear, and you wouldn’t even know where to find them.

Finally, hiring permanent staff has the big advantage that you can rely on them, you know they’re always there, while freelancers might be available, but might be not. You cannot be sure a freelancer will always be free for you, even after years of collaboration, while an employee is a stable resource.

Pros and Cons of Working with Freelancers

Working with freelancers might be the most viable option. Especially at the beginning, it will keep your expenses down because you will only pay them if there is actual work to do. Otherwise, you don’t have to pay them a fix salary, like you would with employees.

However, the process of working with freelancers is a bit more complex than with employees, and you must keep that in mind when you set up your own translation agency. Firstly, you will need to create a database of freelancers, interview them and collect some information about them so that you know who is going to be the most suitable person for each project. These are just some of the details you need to have about them:

> What is their native language?
> What languages can they translate from and into?
> What are their specializations?
> What CAT tools do they use?
> How many years of experience do they have?
> Are they available for long projects or just short ones?
> Can they do face-to-face interpreting or just written translations?

Secondly, when you have a new project you’ll need to ring them up and check whether they are available. They might be, they might be not. In that case, you’ll need to contact someone else, and that’s why you need to have a long database and keep it always up to date.
Thirdly, you’ll need to hire an accountant that prepares the invoices and pay them on a project bases. Or you can do it yourself, using an invoicing software, but that becomes an extra task on your to-do list, which as a business owner tends to be ever-growing.

Think About your Office Setup

What about your office? Up until now, you were probably working from home. Once you have a company and staff, you won’t be able to carry on with that setup. So you are going to need to start looking for office spaces. It is worth considering a central location in your city that would be convenient for both your employees and any clients who want to meet with you. If you can’t afford an office, consider co-working spaces: they’re a great solution for startups and they will allow you to network with other businesses!

Be Prepared To Network

You will already be used to networking from your time as a freelancer. But it is more important than ever once you have set up your very own business. Hopefully, you will be able to keep on some of your current clients once you are trading as a business. But you will also start to find some more, especially if you want to afford new office spaces and a team of employees.

The best way to find all these extra clients is to get out there and start networking. Most towns and cities across the world hold specialist business networking events. It is important that you go to as many of these as possible, especially those were your target clients meet. As a translator, you will want to also try to find as many international clients as possible. For this reason, it could be worth going to international networking events and translation conferences that are held around the world.

You Need To Hone Your Management Skills

When you were a freelancer, you would have needed to effectively manage your various clients and accounts. This is still the case once you have set up your translation business. However, now you have the added extra of managing your freelancers or your employees as well!

Thankfully, there are various tools and resources that can help you while you try to gain experience as a business manager. One of our favourite is the Glider Path Academy. Becoming a good manager is something that you will learn over time. This is something that shouldn’t put you off making the move into a translation company. At first, managing your staff may prove to be a headache, but over time you will become very skilled at doing just this.

Know How To Register Your Business

Freelancers don’t need to do much when it comes to registering themselves as a sole trader. As long as they have told the taxman, then they are pretty much good to go. However, things are a lot different when you create a business. You will need to make sure that you register it in the correct way so that you can legally trade. You will also need to inform that taxman that you are moving from a freelancer to become a company. There will also be quite a bit of paperwork to be filled to get all this sorted, but it will certainly all be worth it in the long run!

Get Your Business Plan Started

It is very important that you don’t overlook a business plan. Even though your business may only start off very small, you still need a business plan. This will keep you on track throughout the first few years of trading. In your plan, you need to include a lot of details about your finances and where you expect to get business funding from. Not only that, though, but you should also list a few short-term and long-term goals and how you expect to achieve them. It’s good to register to associations of small business owners, where you might find the support you need. If not, think about getting a consultant to help you defining your business goals, and keep tracking them over time to make sure your business is sustainable.

Are you thinking of making the move from freelancer to owner of a translation agency? Let us know in the comment the challenges that you are facing and the results you’re seeing with your translation business!