Episode #1: Business metrics for language companies

August 19, 2010
Articles

Recorded: March 17, 2007
Part 1 of 1
(Duration: 34m 22s)

[audio:https://www.wintranslation.com/wp-content/uploads/businessmetrics.mp3]

This podcast is an interview with Welocalize CEO Smith Yewell. An article titled the same was published in the January 2007 issue of Multilingual magazine. Yewell discusses the importance of time tracking for staff and other key performance indicators he uses to manage his $35 million language service empire.

Podcast minutes:

How do we make sure your business is efficient and profitable? You can’t manage what you can’t measure! But what is measuring means for language business?

1:12 – How Welocalize differentiates itself from the other localization service providers out there
5:14 – A few accounting basics: how to calculate the gross margin
6:11 – Without measurements is hard to make decisions
9:10 – How to compile numbers
10:28 – Tools for measuring
11:09 – Examples of major decisions based on measurements results
12:47 – How does the measurement system impact the employees
16:53 – Why Welocalize decided to grow by mergers and acquisitions instead of internal, organic growth
17:44 – How Welocalize measures the internal cost
22:46 – How marketing effort is measured
27:10 – Process that would systematically encourage innovation or process improvement
29:48 – “Hire people that inspire you and get out of their way.”

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Felicia Bratu is the operations manager of wintranslation, in charge of quality delivery and client satisfaction. As a veteran who has worked in many roles at the company since 2003, Felicia oversees almost every aspect of the company operations from recruitment to project management to localization engineering. She recently received certification as a Localization Project Manager as well as Post-Editing Certification for Machine Translation. Felicia holds a BSc. in Industrial Robotics from the University of Craiova, Romania.