Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You came on board in 2000. The business was about $1.9 million.

Kristin Quinlan: Yes. In 2001, it was about $1.9 million. We had a slow incline. We’ve never had a year that has gone down. Every year has been an increase from the previous year. The first early years were very slow.

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights in terms of milestones or major strategic moves in building this company between 2000 and 2006 when you took over as CEO?

Kristin Quinlan: As I was working my way through the ranks and ascending to managing the company, the vision of the company was to continue to leverage advancements in technology to do connect as many interpreters in as many languages as our clients were demanding in the fastest amount of time. Better, faster, cheaper was our on-going mantra.

Every single one of the companies in our sphere staffed call centers for their primary languages. Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese were all sitting on phones in a brick-and-mortar call center. That concept made a whole lot of sense for the industry. We didn’t need to do that. We felt we would be more flexible, have faster connection times, and be able to deal with a larger party of expertise interpreters if we use all remote agents and utilize them on a contractor model as opposed to the employee model. We paid them by the second.

Our interpreters were all remote. We didn’t have the embedded expense of our interpreters staffing call centers. In the early years, we’re working on documents and typing in telephone numbers. We understood that to grow the company, a lot of this needed to be automated. The vision and the growth of the company has been leveraged on foresight and daydreaming, if you will, on what technology is going to make us cooler. What’s going to make us faster? What’s going to limit the road blocks to connecting an interpreter as quickly as possible? Those of our competitors who were working in brick-and-mortar facilities staffing their top language interpreters had limits. Our utilizing a model that was completely separate, allowed us to scale incredibly quickly.

Sramana Mitra: Your key differentiator is you’re using home-based agents as opposed to a call center?

Kristin Quinlan: Yes. All home-based agents are all contractors paid for the time they’re on the phone. It also allowed us to engage a higher level of expertise because we can afford to pay them more money because we’re only paying them by the minute. We do not train bilinguals in the art of interpreting. We only hire proven, tested, credentialed interpreters in a wide range of disciplines.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International
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