PTM 033 – Using a Passion for Language to Create a Multi-Million Dollar Business with Sean Hopwood of Day Translations
Today’s podcast features Sean Hopwood, founder and owner of Day Translations, a full-service translation and interpreting business. Sean has a passion for languages and speaks many himself. Sean wasn’t satisfied with his career in legal translation. He wanted more, and decided to start Day Translations while he was holding down another full-time job.
Day Translations has grown from a one-person spanish translation company to a full-scale translation and interpreting company with over 30,000 clients. Sean tells us how to start a translation business, gives us some of the keys to his success, and even shares how to get a job as a freelance translator.
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Highlights from the interview:
01:30 – A passion for language and doing what you love. Sean talks about his journey from having a passion for language to starting the business.
04:45 – The many language services that Sean’s company, Day Translations, provides.
06:45 – Most common customers.
08:45 – The many languages of the world and the team at Day Translations. Sean talks about his 90 corporate employees and over 3,000 translators and interpretors.
12:20 – Hiring employees, orientation, and training.
15:30 – Why translation services are still local, and the need for local offices.
19:00 – The story behind “Day” Translations.
20:45 – The timeline of Sean’s success, takings on risk, diversification, and decision making.
27:45 – Sales, profit, and the potential of the translation services market.
29:30 – Marketing efforts.
31:50 – Advice for freelance translators.
34:30 – Getting that first client.
36:00 – Hiring that first employee. Sean shares his thoughts on “letting go” and bringing on others to help his business grow.
39:30 – Getting professional liability insurance.
40:30 – Giving clients assurance through affiliations and accreditation.
42:15 – Doing what you love.
Watch the How to Start a Translation Business Google Hangout
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Philip Taylor: This is Philip Taylor from ptmoney.com. You’re listening to the part-time money podcast. Today I have the privilege of speaking to Mr. Sean Hopwood. Sean started daytranslations.com. It’s an international translation service company. So, if you need something put into a different language he can do it for you. Sean speaks five different languages himself so he really knows the business. He started this on the side while he had a fulltime job. I’m anxious to hear about the translation business, how he’s seen to grow this business fairly rapidly and how he managed to do that while maintaining a fulltime job. Sean, welcome to the show.
Sean Hopwood: Thank you very much.
Philip Taylor: As always, my first question is, how did you get started making some part-time money?
Sean Hopwood: Ok, well, as most people would start a company and then make them successful, they do something they’re passionate about. I’ve always been passionate about languages.
Sean Hopwood: I was always passionate about languages. So I decided to… I always had jobs that had to do with languages. As my grandfather had always told me, “Do what you love. Do what you’re interested in.” And so I worked as an interpreter at a law firm. I worked as a translator also at the law firm. I worked in a program at a university where I would do outreach for people – Hispanics, trying to get them to go into college. So, I’d always done something that I love. And the last job where I worked part time… no, I worked full time at a hospital, and I also worked full time during starting my own businesses as well. I worked at a hospital as an interpreter, mainly for Spanish and French. My Arabic is basic but I was able to interpret for Arabic people too. It’s a very important hospital. So people would fly in from the Middle East to get treatments and stuff like that. And so I did what I loved. But a lot of people want to have more control over their future. They want to have control over their money. So that’s where the entrepreneurial spirit comes out. I would work probably from 7:00 am to 5:00 pm at the hospital. On my breaks I would make calls, I would do emails on my Blackberry, a lot of stuff like that on my breaks. And then at 5:00 I would go have dinner and then I would work from 5:00 until 4:00 in the morning, or 3:00 in the morning. So, basically, two full-time jobs. And that has influenced me up until now. I’m still working 4:00 to 5:00 in the morning every day. But now, I’m also working from 7:00 to 4:00. So I work about 15 to 16 hours a day. But that beginning of working part time actually gives you a good work ethic. Because you have to really learn how to organize your time and manage everything really well and that’s what I learned working part time. As an addition to that, before I worked at the hospital, I worked at a law firm. And that’s where I really got the idea that I wanted to start doing my own translation company. There’s so many possibilities for it. Just the immigration laws they’re passing now. We would do a lot of cases for Hispanics. They needed the immigration. They needed their visas translated. They needed to get their visa. They need to get their birth certificates translated. The marriage licenses and stuff like that. So I saw the demand there and that’s where I started. It takes a lot of work and a really long time to get it up and running. After working at hospitals when I got it running.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. I’m excited to get into it with you. Sounds like a great story. It’d be perfect for the podcast. Folks out there who don’t know what your company does. Tell them what Day Translations does.
Sean Hopwood: Day Translations is an interpreting and translation firm, first and foremost. As a growing company, as we’ve been growing, I always try to diversify the services that we offer. So we do subtitles for movies now. We do the actual subtitling. Took a while to get to learn how to do that. We do voice overs for movies. We do document legalization which is called apple steel in some places. It’s basically legalizing a document from one country to another. So if you are a corporation in Mexico and you want to have a subsidiary in the United States, you have to have your documents legalized to incorporate in the United States. We did that as well. So there’s a lot of little side things that all relate to language that we do. One of the main things we’re trying to focus now is phone interpreting for hospitals. That’s something that’s really high in demand where someone would come in the emergency room or someone will need an examination and they don’t want to bring an interpreter in, which we do offer but it’s a lot more easy for them to have someone they can call up, get on the line and then hang up. Saves them a lot of money and saves a lot of liability issues in the hospitals which is a growing trend. Law firms and hospitals are trying to reduce their own liability for interpreters by out sourcing that. So, that’s where we come in because we’re very confident in what we do. So we’ve always said, “Definitely! We’ll take responsibility for this because this is what we do.”
Philip Taylor: Sounds like you have a broader array of clients and that’s diversifying on a regular basis. But who would you say is your primary customer is?
Sean Hopwood: I would say that the customers that we receive are primarily law firms. We’re really targeting hospitals and we have several, several individuals as well. We treated the private sector, the public sector, individuals, everything. It’s mainly law firms. They’re people who have arbitrations, examinations under oath, even court proceedings that they needed an interpreter for. And the second most frequent that we get would be individuals who are trying to get documents translated for immigration or have an immigration interview. So those are our main two. Like I said, we’re really trying to break into the medical translation field, focusing on phone interpreting.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. Sort of focus on more of the high end client than just your traditional consumer need for translation.
Sean Hopwood: A lot of companies won’t do these small interpreting, small translations like one page or an individual who just wants his birth certificate translated. Well, we do that because we have a very streamlined process to where we make it efficient and cost effective. It was kind of challenging because you have to mail the documents out, you have to make it affordable for the client and you start to make a profit and we did all that. And there’s only a couple of companies that can actually do those individual ones which we do. And we make profits by the economies of scale that we have. You know, hundreds of people contacting us every day with certified translations and we’ve streamlined the process. Probably the margin is smaller but the frequency is larger.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. So you can expand it out. So let’s talk about that a little bit. You obviously have translation skills and abilities but you can’t possibly translate everything that comes across your desk with this business. So, who have you hired and how many employees do you have?
Sean Hopwood: No one can speak every language. There’s over 6,000 languages just in India alone. Africa, I believe has over 6,000 languages too. So there’s a lot of languages out there. There’s some dying languages that we also try to preserve. We’re really passionate about that. Like I said, I only speak five languages so I obviously can’t do it. I’m one of the few people who own a translation company that actually is into it, passionate about it. I’m really passionate about what we do and I understand how it works from the bottom to the top because I was an interpreter, I was a translator. I know how it works. But we have about 90 corporate employees. We have a marketing department, we have a social media department, we have accounting, we have project managers, we have web designers and developers, we have people who manage our shopping carts. It’s a challenge to do all that. And that’s the main corporate employees. And then after that we have over 3,000 translators and interpreters. They worked with us. It took a long time to establish this but, they’re working with us almost every day on translations and interpretations. We have people in Houston, LA, New York, Miami and we just did a large interpretation in Geneva, Switzerland. We did interpretation in Russia. We did some in Saudi Arabia and Singapore. What I learned when I was doing my MBA and even in undergraduate, they really told us to focus on the global market and that’s what I’ve always done. And everyone’s heard this a lot of times, “You have to think global and act local”. Everyone knows that but it’s kind of hard to understand. You have to actually really let the people know that you understand the market. I’ve probably gone off too long on something that you didn’t ask. You asked about how many employees we have? It’s 90 in the corporate and it’s a couple thousand translators and interpreters.
Philip Taylor: So obviously the corporate folks are true employees, W2 employees. But the translators, are they all freelance?
Sean Hopwood: We have a culture that’s a little bit different for some languages such as Swahili, for example. Some really rare languages, tribal languages in Africa, there’s a language called Chin in Burma. These languages are rare. It’s hard to give them work every day. For the main ones, they’re everyday people. They work with us every day and they have the same loyalty to us as a full time employee.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. If I wanted to work as a translator for Day Translations, how would that work? Would I just sort of tap into the system, get the job and then get paid on a freelance basis? Would I need to officially get hired? How would that work?
Sean Hopwood: There’s a hiring process that takes about two weeks initially. And the training would be three months. We have them apply to our company. And after they apply, we send them a form they have to fill out. The form focuses on professionalism. And that’s the main thing we try to detect is professionalism and skills and grammar. After they pass that initial application, some of them don’t realize that they’re being tested on everything they do. And we do test on everything we do – Grammar, punctuation, spelling, everything like that. After that initial process, we test them on their translation skills and formatting skills. We send them documents to translate and we put some difficult things in there, cultural nuances that you have to know both languages in order to be able to translate. And we look for those keywords such as ‘engaged’. That’s a hard word to translate in different languages. So we see how they do it and how creative. Because this is a human approach, translation, you have to take the human approach because language is very dynamic. It’s changing every day. In the past 10 years, the way people write has changed a lot because of texting and multimedia messages and stuff like that. You have to learn to adjust. We test them on that. And after that’s finished, we give them an orientation process. I have designed an orientation process whereby they take the test and after they’re done with the test, they have to fill out all the information. They give us their address. We have a database where it goes into, where it organizes them by language. If they’re an interpreter, we have to know their location. That way we can look up their location easily after we’ve put them in the system. For example, if we need a French interpreter in Houston, Texas, we get their information and easily access them in our database that we’ve created. And every three months we test them because sometimes people get a little bit complacent so we make sure to avoid that as well.
Philip Taylor: So why is there still this… obviously I understand for interpreting, that you’re used to have a localized presence. But I would think that for translation services, there wouldn’t be a need for any localized services. Other than saying, this person can translate this specific language in this specific country. What I mean is, I noticed that you have an office in Atlanta. So why do you need an office in Atlanta and are there truly people in Atlanta or just one of your translators who happens to live in that area?
Sean Hopwood: We have actual offices. There’s not one in Atlanta. There’s one in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Tampa, New York, Washington DC, Frankfurt Germany, London, Hong Kong and Dubai. And those are the only places we have real offices. There is a need for the real offices. That’s really a good question. For a while we weren’t sure about that. And we realized there’s definitely a big need for real offices. Everyone thinks that there’s a lot of people doing things online. And there really is real people working there. It’s an issue of trust. It’s an issue of being local. It’s an issue of understanding local market. But most importantly, it’s an issue of we have to store our interpreting equipment. And people actually have to drop their documents off. For example, we tell people a lot of times to scan the documents and email them to us. That’s another service that we offer. It’s called Document Scanning Services and we put them online and we store them in the cloud for a lot of clients. And that’s one of the services that we offer. Sometimes law firms, especially when there’s a big case going on, they’ll have a whole box of documents that needed to be translated. They can have 2 or 3 boxes. They want to bring them in and one of our employees will go through the whole process of scanning everything for them. Some of our offices, we have high speed scanners where we scan all these documents and that we can translate. We recently had a project from Chile and we had a lot of corporate documents for a case that needed to be translated. And it was four boxes full of stuff. So they actually had to bring them into the office.
Sometimes for interpreting, you need a booth. It’s like a square. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie The Interpreter with Nicole Kidman or anything like that. But there’s a square that they go in and they have a table top and then there’s a microphone. In the main places where we have big conferences, like Washington DC and Houston and sometimes Dallas, we have interpreting equipment where the technicians will pick the documents up and they pick up all the equipment and they take it to the event. It’s a lot of equipment that you have to set up. So it’s important for us to have offices – a lot of virtual. And there’s some growing companies that do everything online, for example, Google. They still have a lot of local offices. They have offices everywhere even though most of their work is done online. It’s hard to replace actual physical presence. It’s really important.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. That makes sense. So what’s up with the name? Why Day Translations?
Sean Hopwood: The name is Day Translations because my grandfather’s name is Francis Joseph Day. He passed. It’s a family name. And it’s also very simple – ‘Day’, it’s three letters. So I figured it would be easy to put in a website because we also have Day Commerce and we try to revolve everything around that name. It was a big influence on me in my life. My grandfather was a very organized, professional person. So, it’s something that reminds me every day to keep myself organized and as professional as I can. So his last name was Day, and it’s my mother’s last maiden name. So it’s a family name. One of the times, people think it’s because we only translate during the day. I’m like, “No.”
Philip Taylor: I was a playoff of Same Day Translation.
Sean Hopwood: No, it’s a family name. It’s patented. The name is patented. It’s been around for a long time.
Philip Taylor: Backing up a little bit. I was actually surprised to hear you have so many offices in so many employees and translators now. You have a really big operation here now. Give us a little bit of the timeframe, a history of when you started the company to where you are now. Dates.
Sean Hopwood: I was working in a hospital in 2007 as an interpreter. I started the idea of making a website in the company around June of 2007. And I actually started the company in November 2007 while I was working at the hospital. I realized that I saved up enough money and I really want to take the leap from jumping from just working at the hospital to working on my own. There’s this something in you where it’s not even a risk. There’s a point where you feel like you’re not even taking a risk. You just feel confident in everything you do. And that’s the way I felt. I felt there’s no way that anything could ever go wrong. Everything’s always going to go right. And so I had no worries about quitting my job. I was getting so much work. So, I quit the job and around December of 2007…
Philip Taylor: So you were talking about risk.
Sean Hopwood: I felt no risk. I never do. Something that people say is a challenge. What you’re doing when you love it, it just never feels like a risk. It just feels you’re always doing what you like. I feel like, the world likes action. Business likes action. And so you just always have to be taking action. And that’s kind of what I did. I’m not going to just sit there and work at my job forever trying to do this. It’s not good, you know. And it taught me nearly everything I do. For example, if we have decisions to make at the company, I think about it for a while and I make a decision. And there’s a couple of things that I think are really important to being a manager and one of the most important things is the ability to make decisions. Sometimes decision that might be problematic for other people. You have to weigh the options and you need to make a decision. I think sometimes that’s more important than a lot of things. Education or intelligence. Even though I think education is very important. I have a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree but I also think that decision making skills are really important for running a business.
In 2007, I was just starting off as a Spanish translation company. I had to make a decision whether or not we wanted to do all languages. And that was a huge decision because we were overwhelmed with work just for Spanish and I was like, “How are we going to do all the languages?” And we eventually got to the point wherein we did get to do all the languages and it’s like I’d have to hire and hire and hire people all the time. It’s come to the point where we can handle all the languages. All we have to do now is just keep growing and managing all the clients that we have, which we have over 30,000 clients. It’s really good. The thing is sometimes it’s kind of frustrating to me to know that we don’t have a very large percent of the market share and there’s so much more business out there to be having. There’s people who need translations and I honestly feel like we’re the best at it. The way we handle things, the way we handle our clients and stuff like that. So, I had to find a way to implement our excellent customer service and grow it to be able to handle more clients because we already have the great customer service. I just have to keep it solid like that. And keep our company cultured. The timeline after 2008, we were still doing Spanish and nearly the end of 2008 we started doing all languages. Around 2010, we started doing interpretations as well. That’s why I actually made another site for it called World Interpreting so we can just focus on interpreting because I realized it’s really good also when you have your own business to diversify. For example, if you’re a farmer and you grow only oranges what happens if one day there’s bugs that infest your whole farm and they kill all your oranges? But if you grow oranges, apples, grapefruits, bananas, all those things that if you’re oranges crop goes down you’re still going to have apples, bananas and grapefruits. These are really simple things, very simple concepts that I think that everyone should know. Diversifying these things, taking action and stuff like that. And that’s something that I’ve always done and I said to my boys, “I’m not the kind of manager that tries to keep information from you.” I try to empower them. Give them the ability to work autonomously. And it’s sometimes hard to let go but sure, that’s another skill that you have to have as a manager.
Philip Taylor: But you’ve been able to do that fairly quickly it seems. That’s impressive. So six years going on here.
Sean Hopwood: That’s 4 1/2 for Day Translations but six years for Day Translation and the Spanish one which is called US Spanish Translations. So, it’s a total of six.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. And you still own the company out right?
Sean Hopwood: Yes, yes. I do. It’s kind of hard making all the decisions but I just need to be patient. I’m trying to build people around me that I can trust. Making these decisions and people who have the same mind set as me, and the same beliefs that I do, which are professionalism and positivity. Those are my main beliefs.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. Very good. It seems to be working. So let’s talk a little bit about the numbers in terms of sales last year and what you have in total sales.
Sean Hopwood: We had a few million dollars in sales last year. I don’t know if I should go into the total but it’s a few million. I’ve done studies of other companies and I’ve seen the potential. I would like to make over a hundred million a year. But that is something that I have to be patient about and the right time will come along to get that.
Philip Taylor: Right. What’s your, of the few million, what percentage would you say is profit?
Sean Hopwood: Well that’s an extreme amount of cost. I would say that the cost in the tax rate is around 40 percent. So, that’s 40 percent gone right there. The employees get a lot of percentage of it too. I have never really thought about the exact percentage. So, I don’t know. It’s got to be less than 40 or 30. I really don’t know.
Philip Taylor: Well, it’s a good business to be in. It sounds like the demand is really there. You’re really growing your business out of that demand, it sounds like. You haven’t had to market your business a lot, right?
Sean Hopwood: That’s true. I have not had to market our services. People are constantly contacting us but I’m trying to get more into it. We’ve done some YouTube commercials. I would like to test them on the television sometimes. We’re trying to do a radio commercial. We’re been trying to put it into a couple of radio stations to see how that works. I don’t know how good it’s going to work because I think that most of the people who needed translation, I’m not sure if this is correct, but they would search online on a search engine or maybe go to one of their associates. If it’s an immigrant, they would probably just ask around to people that they know. There’s different ways, different paradigms and viewpoints that people have. You can’t just focus only on search engines because there’s so many other people out there who don’t use them.
Philip Taylor: Right. When you first were getting started, you just also have this entrepreneurial spirit in you and there was nothing going to stop you from doing this business. You’re not scared of risk. You’re really had a passion for what you’re doing but you had to have seen some really strong job offers come across either from more law firms or from the government who’s seems to always be in shortage of translation services. What propelled you from those opportunities or were those opportunities out there to doing your own thing?
Sean Hopwood: That’s one thing that propelled me to start my own business is I didn’t see the opportunity to do what I wanted and be happy doing it. I wasn’t earning a lot working at a law firm. I was not earning a lot working at the hospital. That’s one reason why it wasn’t that hard a decision to start my own business. I didn’t look too much into government jobs but I know those are out there. I just feel like the stability and the ability to control your own destiny, it was the best decision. I did not have a lot of huge offers out there.
Philip Taylor: Okay, okay. Any advice for… a lot of people that hit our site are freelancers and someone who may ever freelance a translation skill. Any advice for those types of folks for maybe following in a similar path as you?
Sean Hopwood: Definitely. The most important thing is to be professional in everything that you do. Especially as a translator, if you’re in that field. But if I’m speaking to someone out there who’s not in that field, you have to understand to be professional. There’s a lot of people who lost that ability for professionalism or who think it’s not very important. They might apply to a job and not include a cover letter and think that that’s not required anymore. Or they might apply somewhere and have a lot of misspellings in their resume. Or they might refer to the guy who is interviewing them or the woman who is interviewing them by their first name or as a buddy. And they might not understand the importance of being professional. And these are things that sometimes get lost. Just because it’s online or just because you’re emailing or texting doesn’t mean you can be unprofessional. You have to start off as very professional and wait to create a rapport with your boss or wait to create some kind of relationship to test it out and see if that person feels comfortable treating you in a more informal basis. So professionalism is really important. And if you’re emailing someone or you’re doing anything, make sure everything looks professional and is well-formatted. Just don’t forward your resume off to people with a blank email. So if you’re trying to get a job, make sure you’re very detailed and specific. If you’re applying to a certain job, make sure that you specify the name of the company or the name of the person that you’re trying to contact. If someone sees that you forwarded something that you copied from a lot of people, you’re trying to apply for 15 jobs at the same time and they’re all in the CC field in the email, everyone’s going to realize and they’re going to feel less important. Everyone wants to feel important. Even the owner of the company wants to feel important. So you have to be specific. Just make sure you act very well-educated and professional. That’s the main thing that I can– professionalism and specificity.
Philip Taylor: Gotcha. I like it. Initially, when you were marketing your services, how did you get your first couple of clients?
Sean Hopwood: That’s interesting. The first client I ever had was from a church. It was actually from word of mouth. I was getting my import/export license in Tampa, Florida, and there was a church, a Lutheran church that needed a translation. So I drove down there. I spoke to the pastor. He told me what he needed and I translated them myself. And then I started going on classifieds and I would read them and there were people who needed translations. So I would actually drive everywhere and speak to these people individually and then I got a large one and I drove down there and it was for $6,000 and I was really, really excited about it. So I went there. They wanted me to stay at their office and translate it. So I actually stayed at their office, translating everything for weeks and weeks at the time until I made the entire money. For the first 5 or 6 months I was actually, 75 percent of the work was doing was driving around and trying to get translation from people in person. And that’s still a way you can do things. I have to spread myself and use the time that I have. There comes a time that the clients would contact us now, I would love to outreach to everybody. That’s how we started. Our first client was a church.
Philip Taylor: So, talk about that first decision to bring someone else in to help you out.
Sean Hopwood: That was important. That person is still working at our company. That was one thing, no has ever quit our company. The whole we’ve been in business, no one has ever quit. I try to make a real amendable environment to the employees. I was working on this very large translation and I love languages but it is kind of hard to sit there with hands on the computer and just type all day. And I can get a little bit obsessive about things so I will spend 12 hours straight. Typing, just getting up to get my coffee or sandwich and that’s it. A lot of translators would tell you that’s how they live. They will sit there and they’ll translate all day and then they’ll get up and they’ll have a coffee, they won’t sleep much if they have a deadline. Most translators can do about 3,000, 4,000 words per day. And I would try to do 5,000, 6,000,7,000 per day. My shoulders would hurt, my hands would hurt. So I needed help. I found this woman that was a mutual acquaintance. She started helping me with it. She was even better than I was at it. So I was like, “Okay, I’m going to have a couple of people to do this.” Then the way to even increase the quality was have one person do it and another person proofread it. So they’re going to get translated and proofread. So these translations were— and they still are— this is the way we do it. They’re perfect because we have two or three sets of eyes. We have our translator, then we have our proofreaders, then we have our project managers look at it. So we have three people to look at it. Then I realize that I can and I have to let someone else do stuff. So I hired more translators and then I had three or four of them. Now we have over 1,000. And it’s to the point where you have to trust them and you have to let go. And that’s really hard. And I think that’s something that’s probably really relevant to this podcast, that a lot of people have to learn to let go and to learn to trust other people. A lot of people are interested in their own things and that’s something that they’re always going to do. People are always going to have a self-interest. You have to accept that. Someone might want to start their own company one day; some of them might want to leave one day. You know it’s your company and you know it’s your baby but you have to understand that and let it go. You have to realize that on the grand scheme of things, it’s your company and people may come and they may go and if you have a store, someone might steal from your store but they steal something that’s $50, it’s okay. It’s not okay but we have to think about the big picture. Hiring a lot of people, having a good system of things where you can minimize those kinds of events as much as possible. But what’s worth more, try working yourself to the bone or trusting other people to help you out and giving them a good environment to work at. And that’s what I’m still learning to do today.
Philip Taylor: That’s awesome. So you translated a lot of legal documents. Do need to have some kind of special insurance to protect you?
Sean Hopwood: We do have insurance. I don’t do a research on the other companies but I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones with really good insurance. We have very good insurance. We do that.
Philip Taylor: Is it professional liability insurance? Is that what it is?
Sean Hopwood: Yes.
Philip Taylor: Is that pretty expensive?
Sean Hopwood: It varies in price. You can contact different people in different places. I always try to get a deal. I try to keep our expenses as low as possible. There’s discounts if you’re a translator and stuff like that. But I was going to say that we’re also members of different organizations. We’re member of the Better Business Bureau. I think a lot of people recognize that even more than the Translators Associations. People recognize that you’re a member of the Better Business Bureau and we have an ‘A’ rating. And that’s another thing that I point out, it’s really hard if you’re obsessive about everything being perfect like I am. If you want to prevent yourself from getting in any kind of complaints out there. So now we have a perfect rating on the Better Business Bureau and I’m trying to keep it that way. And if you’ve been in business for 7 years, they’ll give you an A+ rating. So we’re coming upon to getting that A+ rating. For these certifications, we’ve joined a lot of organizations like the American Translators Associations, we’re in the Better Business Bureau, we’re in a lot of local translators associations like the New York Circle of Translators. We’re in a lot of these because we have an office in New York and that’s where I spend a lot of my time. There’s also something that we do a lot of certified translations. That is a process that you have to be really, really be professional about. You have to sign it, you have to stamp it and a lot of times you have to notarize the documents. And that’s the process in what I was talking about that we have streamlined and made it affordable for our clients while we still make a small margin.
Philip Taylor: Excellent. This has been great information. I feel like I can talk to you forever since you have such an involved company here and such a detailed operation going on. But I think we’ll have to end it at this point. Any other questions I forgot to ask that you think would be helpful for people or maybe some successes you’ve had along the way that might encourage someone else?
Sean Hopwood: This isn’t something people say a lot but I believe is true. Just to really do what you like and do what you love. A lot of people are always looking for a mission or a market or something like that. Maybe some people have been successful doing that but a lot of successes have been driven out of passion for things that people love and I think that’s where mine comes from. Just doing something I’m really passionate about and try not to lose sight of that. Because that’s what’s most important, doing what you love.
Philip Taylor: Awesome. Thanks so much Sean for being on the podcast. Where can people find out more about you and your company?
Sean Hopwood: They can go do DayTranslations.com. That’s where our site is and they can click on Contact Us tab or the About Us tab and there’s a lot of information about us and what we do.
Philip Taylor: Are you looking for any freelance translators right now?
Sean Hopwood: Yes, make sure you send your resume and a cover letter. Click on Contact Us and you can find the Jobs tab right there.
Philip Taylor: Okay, thanks so much Sean.
Sean Hopwood: Thank you too, sir.