Language Network CEO Jordan Evans on Sales Tactics and Growth Through M&A

Jordan Evans, the CEO of Language Network, joins SlatorPod to talk about the evolution of his family-founded language service provider (LSP) and his sales-focused growth strategy.

Jordan’s professional trajectory began with a blend of sales, tech startups, and a stint as a linguist and translator, before acquiring Language Network and achieving significant growth.

Regarding growth strategies, Jordan discusses the challenges and benefits of acquisitions, emphasizing the importance of finding the right fit and maintaining stability during integration. He advises starting with acquisitions within one’s core expertise before branching out into new areas.

The conversation shifts to sales and marketing in the language industry, with Jordan highlighting the need to cut through the noise and engage customers effectively, whether through traditional methods like cold calling or newer digital channels.

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When it comes to the role of AI in language services, Jordan advocates for adopting off-the-shelf technologies to meet customer needs efficiently while allowing for scalability and adaptability.

The CEO attributes the growth of interpreting in the US to increased awareness of language accessibility issues and funding initiatives, especially in sectors like healthcare and immigration.

Jordan advises that LSPs should capitalize on their unique strengths and niches, enabling them to differentiate themselves from larger competitors and maximize value for clients.

Transcript

Florian: Today on the podcast we welcome Jordan Evans. Jordan is the CEO of Language Network. So tell me a little bit about your kind of career trajectory. So we did our background research and you had a bunch of roles, right from like account exec to even linguist, translator, tech sales, you did some SaaS tech sales, and now CEO of Language Network. So go tell us the background there?

Jordan: Yeah, people love stories, so I can give a little bit of a narrative of falling into this industry. My story is atypical, but also not so typical or very typical and what we missed there is that I had left college undergrad, having studied Spanish and Economics. Fortunately now I’m combining those. But it was an interesting time in the US economy and I was on the West Coast here in the United States, and tech startups were the thing, to go out, raise seed funding for a product, find product-market fit, and just swing for the moon. And so what’s actually not on my CV or LinkedIn, and I probably should add them now that I think about it, is a bunch of swing and misses. I’ve been a part of five startups in software before ultimately flipping over, now CEO of a language tech-enabled services company. But long story short, raised some funds for a startup with some friends out of school. We ended up running out of funds before getting traction. That was the daily deal site for the hispanic market, was called Dealtopia. So I’ll share some of the losses too, I guess, in our conversation. But that opened my eyes to tech and the innovation and the massive growth that you could have. And I’ve always stayed on the sales side of the fence, sales, marketing, consulting, just the go-to-market side, a little bit on the customer success and retaining customers, but I like that side of the business. It’s the most fun for me. So long story short, tech startups, had a good run there, ultimately worked for Booking.com. If one of them was a success, we were acquired by Booking and I stuck around as the Commercial Director for North of America for a period of years and I’m skipping over a bunch of those startups in between and sales. And I think that’s a tremendous path to get to the C-suite is to learn how to sell, and it’s just blocking and tackling and fundamentals of communication and human persuasion. And I know that sales has this typical aversion you think of used car salesmen or something being forced on you, but that was a tremendous path and I can’t recommend that enough. So sales and startups is really where I jumped in professionally.

Florian: Especially in the language industry I think a sales background is tremendously important because it’s such a hyper-competitive market and often some of the founders originally were translators, maybe a little more reserved, and they sometimes are a bit hesitant to go out there and just beat the drum. I think it’s a bit of a head start if you’re in sales.

Jordan: Yeah and it’s a good place to be entrepreneurial too, like you’re a mini CEO of your pipeline and figuring out how to meet your customers where they are. But the truth is, I knew that sales was a stopover, that I’m a big proponent of you do a job and you earn, like we all got to feed ourselves, we got to pay our bills, but can you learn at the same time? What skills can you be adding into your repertoire and be improving? And so the ultimate goal was to be an entrepreneur and to do my own thing. And after having a couple of those misses that I mentioned that aren’t on my LinkedIn, but I’m going to put them on there actually, after this conversation, I think it’ll be fun.

Florian: The W’s and the L’s.

Jordan: Yeah. They can’t all be wins. I think all of them led to the success that we’re having now at Language Network. But what I wanted to say was I decided to go in sales and learn while working for somebody else and being part of some early stage startups, you get some equity and it’s a fun run. So the last tech company I was at, I was actually fired, and so I’ll share this L. The CEO let me go and at that time I didn’t understand why. I’m putting up big logos, we’re putting up enterprise logos, selling to Spotify and Tableau, and I built the first sales team, I implemented the first CRM. We were doing a lot of testing. At that stage we were sub 1 million ARR. It’s all about experimentation. It’s all about finding traction and finding which market niche that you are going to stay in, play in. And long story short, first time CEO, I know that fear was a big part of it, and I was afraid too. And that was such an eye opener to have had a good run at five different startups and then finally to be let go, and I realized now it’s time to go to work for myself. So that was a huge wake up call. It was around 2016 that you can be a mercenary, you can learn and earn, and now it’s time I got a kick in my butt to go out the door and put it into practice.

Florian: Yeah and then you acquired a small LSP, right? How did you come up with that idea? Or was that more kind of serendipitous, opportunistic? You came across this opportunity or you actively looked for it?

Jordan: I’m not the smartest guy in the room, so I wish I had a great story there that I saw some market need and found the industry and pursued it. It was actually a family story. My mom was a Spanish interpreter in the 80s and she had started Language Network and it was around that time that I was let go, figuring out what am I going to do next, that she had already been at this for 30 years. A small regional interpreting company in Orange County, in LA and California. And as I was going for a walk and she was calling me about the issues she was having with finding new clients, keeping big accounts, that I thought, well, this could be a great opportunity for me to help exit family and also me jump in the entrepreneur side of the pool and grow this thing. I think I can do that with my sales background, so that’s the story. I’m actually second generation and acquired Language Network from my parents and it was a lifestyle business for people. There’s thousands of these LSPs out there: small, they’ve got their basket of customers, they do a good job, but they just don’t expand beyond whatever level they’re at, either for lifestyle reasons or just for the skill reinvestment required to push beyond. So I didn’t know what I didn’t know Florian and I jumped in and said, I’ll figure this out, I’ll buy the company from you and we’re going to grow this thing, and that’s where it opened my eyes to the power of acquiring businesses. I didn’t realize you could do that before.

Florian: And grow you did. I think it’s like 15 X since you took over, right?

Jordan: Yeah, that was the challenge is coming from the software world where it’s all about like one X or two X growth, top-line revenue year-over-year, like massive growth to going into a services business where that’s impossible or unheard of. You’ll break everything and stress everyone out like you have a capacity supply issue in a services company. So just having to unlearn some startup growth bad habits and be able to scale up quality services at a healthy growth rate. So yes, we’ve 10, 15 X, whatever the official number is, we have a buy and build model now, and I’d like to say that that was my plan from the beginning, but it wasn’t. Just figuring it out as we go and finding an edge and using that edge.

Florian: So let’s look at what Language Network is today. Tell us a bit more about key clients, special areas, services. You mentioned interpreting, but you also do text translation, localization, kind of geographical presence. Just give us a bit of an overview of where you are at the moment.

Jordan: I guess the overview is we are an interpretation, translation, localization solutions provider and we break it up into those three buckets. Overly simplified interpretation, spoken translation, more traditional workflows, more documents or text, and localization for us is just more complex projects, different workflows, multimedia, stuff of that nature, connecting via APIs or having to do more technical projects, so we split it into three. We started primarily as an interpretation company and it’s about two-thirds interpretation and one-third is that translation, localization basket. And the other three areas that if you slice this into a pie, we’re about a third healthcare, a third government, and a third international business as our core customer segments, and that’s all intentional. Let’s find some verticals that we can go deep in rather than be a mile wide and an inch deep, and also we’re primarily based in the US as far as customers, Western United States.

Florian: So you mentioned one of the avenues for growth was, or still is acquisitions, right? So what were some of the key challenges when you faced both on the sourcing good deals, because there’s a big ocean of potential deals out there, is it going to be very selective? And also, of course when it comes to integration, that’s super hard, as we all know.

Jordan: Mergers and acquisitions, so great question. It’s how do you find the right fit? And first off, is it a right fit to even do an acquisition? And I do believe it’s a great way to grow, but it is hard, hard work, a lot of work. And we’ve tripped and stubbed our toe and banged our head along the way and figured it out. And I think that we’ve got a pretty good playbook but every time you’re dealing with people and you’re dealing with a moving car and you’re trying to switch out drivers and make sure the car keeps running down the road, and you want to make sure there’s stability for the customers, for the team, so it’s a wild ride doing acquisitions. The first and easiest thing to do is look for a good fit where it’s like a clone of what your core business is. And this is something I would recommend if you’re a smaller operator looking to do acquisitions is don’t swing for something that’s outside of your lane or core expertise. In fact, do your first one and learn your lessons on something you’re already familiar with. Our industry is hyper fragmented, so if you know interpretation, go find a lookalike, and so that’s what we did, and we expanded into a new state. So core competency, what we know, but got us into a new geographic area, a new basket of customers that we could upsell and grow the relationship. So that’s kind of been our model until 2nd, 3rd acquisition, where you start looking at the network now that I have of different verticals, different services, what are we missing here and how can we complement what we’re building? So, true to our name, our strategy is to be a network, to be able to offer any type of language solution to our core customer verticals, those three.

Florian: How disciplined are you in integrating kind of on the backend? Do you leave some of these entities fairly kind of at arm’s length for now, or are you very aggressively integrating them in all kinds of systems, et cetera?

Jordan: Again, this comes back to people, and we can only handle so much truth at once. I wish we could have brains that are powered by AI at times, or we can just move at lightning speed, but we have emotions, we have fears, we have souls, so to speak. And it’s important to move intentionally and build relationships before making operational integration changes. And the truth is you’re dealing with human relationships with clients first and foremost. You want to make sure there’s stability there and the revenue stream and security of delivering services. Then you got the team with awesome know-how and they’re all wondering, do I have a job tomorrow? And it takes time to speak to that and to know the people and for them to know you and to build trust. And then finally there’s another extension, which is all the translators, interpreters, and going through that trust building exercise and familiarity. So I would say the first 90 to 180 days, it’s more about just stability and putting out any fires and keeping things going, which ultimately leads to we’ve got multiple brands for goodwill and contract reasons. So Language Network, and we’ve got sister companies and multiple brands underneath. But operationally, we operate as one company, one team. So once we do hit that integration point, Florian, we want people to not be siloed and feel like I’m Team X and you’re Team Y. That’s just a toxic way to build a company and so that’s really my job as a CEO, is to get us all in the same boat. But commercially, we honor the brands, pay homage, and preserve the goodwill. And I’d say by year one, we’ve got systems implemented, and so people are cross trained and working out of similar operational systems.

Florian: I think on another podcast a couple of years ago, you mentioned, you’re also rolling out like communications tools like Slack and things like that and kind of transforming those maybe sometimes more legacy LSPs into kind of a very digital, SaaS-based type of business, right, so how do you go about this? What are some of the maybe early quick wins when you do some of these integrations?

Jordan: Good point. Quick wins, that’s a great way to build points and momentum is find those low hanging fruit areas. When we do an acquisition, I meet with everyone in the company, and one of the questions I ask is, how can we make this company better? What ideas have you had that have not been implemented or been ignored? And sincerely, just ask that question and shut up and it’s amazing what people will share. It’s like, I would love a different type of coffee in the break room. Just simple things like that that make a difference to morale and ultimately to the bigger initiative of buy in, as we’re one team. But technology, so Slack was a big one. Getting people where they can get around a digital water cooler, share photos of their dog or their family. Those are big culture wins, quick wins, as you put it. What else? I think quick wins commercially, so what customers like that just haven’t gotten some attention or love, that we can now show a little bit more love to in a thoughtful way. And we want customers to wake up six months down the road and look back and say, I’ve gotten even more care and attention and support than I have before. So there’s quick wins with team and clients that we look for, for sure.

Florian: Now, you coming from sales, having done a lot of sales in your life, what are some of the top, let’s say top three challenges that you think LSPs, tech-enabled language service providers, currently face in sales specifically, right? I want to talk about marketing in a second, but now let’s just go hardcore sales, going out there. I mean, cold calling obviously isn’t a thing of the past, I guess. Who’s picking up the phone? So how do you get through? Because I was still trained on the older model. I literally did all the cold calling and people would actually pick up the phone and it would be actually awkward initially. But you get over that hurdle, you get the meeting, boom, you get through. So what do you think are currently some of the challenges in sales?

Jordan: Oh gosh. I don’t know if it’s the caffeine for my tea that’s hitting or the topic because I just got super excited. What do they say? What’s old school is new school? Yeah, there’s a conversation right now of how do we get in front of our customers? And ultimately sales and marketing is the right person with the right message at the right time. And what medium and what channel do you use is the question. So ten years ago, the phone was a great medium, and then over ten years, a lot of people moved to email and now to social media. And we all go over to our LinkedIn right now and we’ve probably got several dozen sales pitches in there cold. And so it goes back to basics of how do I cut through the noise and get the attention and the awareness of my target audience. So I think what’s interesting, Florian, is let’s not abandon all tactics or channels, so sales like calls. I think calling is actually a great way to do it now. I pick up my phone and if you leave a voicemail and then you do a LinkedIn message to me and then you show up in my inbox, believe me, maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, as a CEO, I’m already getting pitched all the time, but if I get multiple channels all at once and it’s somebody’s name or somebody’s company, it stands out, it leaves an imprint. I may not engage with it, but I think that’s where the work needs to be done. It’s a marketing exercise, really. A lot of sales efforts, a lot of outbound sales is what we’re talking about, where we are going to the customer with the message. Some people might call it interruption sales or interruption marketing versus inbound, where you’ve got great content and ebooks and SlatorPod and people come to you because they want to learn and engage and you can cultivate a relationship that way until they are ready to buy, so you need a push and a pull. The challenge with the pull, the inbound marketing is like, well, who am I trying to reach? In our industry, it’s everywhere, it’s so fragmented. So if I have a message for everyone, then I have a message for no one, and that’s the challenge is how can I go deeper? What are my customer segments on my website? And I cringe when I say this because I love and I hate our website. It takes so much work and time and maybe that will change with AI.

Florian: No, I don’t think it will. It’ll make it even harder because all the websites are going to get even better and better and then like, oh.

Jordan: Yeah, but it’s the second and third order thinking of how do I get to my customer or my prospect and what are they going to be thinking about and leveraging all the channels that are available to us and we’re still a work in progress in figuring it out and testing. I think being a leader of the company, how do we grow? It’s a long ways away from booked revenue from a sales effort and so can we manage the inputs at least? And then the outputs would come. But in the sales front, it’s, am I putting enough input? So am I waking up and I’m getting enough meetings? And use whatever strategy you need to to get those meetings. Go to a conference. Old school is new school. What breaks through the noise better than shaking somebody’s hand or buying them a coffee or buying them a sandwich or bringing them pastries or cookies. Or if you can’t do that, send them cookies to their office with a personal handwritten note. It’s just in our digital age, people are getting lazy, and so what can we do to build relationships and cultivate them? Because it’s really about a time of need. Not everyone wakes up saying, I need to localize X, Y, Z, unless you’re a localization project manager.

Florian: Very few people do. Yeah, you’re right. So how important in your part of the world is in person meetings? Because my past, I was always, for LSP selling, I was like in big cities with giant skyscrapers, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai. So you could take ten meetings in the same building, right? But in your part of the world, how is that? Would you still be expected as a salesperson to do like two or three meetings a day? Or is that even physically impossible? Or what’s your thinking around that? Just scheduling in-person meetings at the client’s office, for example.

Jordan: Yeah. I mean, we took a full left turn with the pandemic and this whole work from home, so you don’t know if people are even in an office. I think it’s amazing if you’re in a major metro like Singapore or London or San Francisco, where you have higher probability, you could just get out in your car and go do the rounds and get face to face. I think the equivalent now is trade shows and conferences or industry luncheons, whatever you can think of, or memberships. What business groups or associations are your customers spending time and money going to? And I can’t remember what publication I just read, but it was saying we’ve bounced back from pre-pandemic, that business travel is booming. People are even more wanting to get out of their home office cocoons and from screaming kids and barking dogs and go out into the world. So it’s very important to get meetings, period. Whether it’s digital Zoom or whether it’s face to face. Even better if it’s face to face because you can just build so much more rapport that way and do a little more discovery. People divulge or share more in person so you can get closer and a little more intimate that way.

Florian: Let’s talk about the inbound. You mentioned marketing. How do you cut through this giant AI overload? Super hard to differentiate, kind of always has been in the language industry, but now I feel it’s even harder because a lot of companies are putting that AI kind of layer on top. But like, how much is hype? How much is not hype? What do you do there?

Jordan: Oh gosh, this is such an exciting time to be alive. Hopefully every generation before that said that. And the AI thing is a lot of headlines and it’s the sky is falling, or this is the next best thing since sliced bread. And the reality is most people don’t know what the heck to do with it yet. So we’re talking more about an adoption curve than we are about something just taking over the world. I don’t know if I understood your question, but with AI I try and use it every day in so many different applications. We’ve got the early adopters who are adding it to existing software products. We got people that are using it, like me, to do all sorts of tasks to figure out where does this fit into my life, where does it fit into my workflow? And so we’re really at the beginning of larger scale adoption and trying to figure it out. How does this fit into what we do?

Florian: In your production, like, I mean, you’re probably using machine translation, right? Or maybe some kind of AI-enabled thing in your VRI or OPI or whatever, right? And then you could just go full blown AI messaging on your website, for example. It’s hard to cut through that hype. So how do you position a company in the language industry in this kind of AI era, as when a lot of maybe more naive outsiders would think isn’t this automated already anyway? It’s a complicated discussion.

Jordan: Yeah. I think, in fact, you had posted a few weeks back about, it was German text on Nvidia’s website or a big.

Florian: You picked it up, all right. That was so bad and so ironic. That’s why I posted it.

Jordan: 100%, but when you break down a big company, it’s just a bunch of different people and departments trying to do the best they can with the resources they got. And most companies don’t have a centralized approach to communication or localization. Or a prolific company like Nvidia, they’re shipping so much content fast to have the right workflows and the right quality checks. Yeah. I’d be curious how they’re set up, but I think your post was about, maybe this was AI-generated translation on their website.

Florian: The genesis was basically, I think Nvidia just broke through, like 2 trillion dollars in market cap or some bizarre number, right? And I’m like, well, let me check their website. Just randomly, like just one of those kind of random internet things, and then I’m like, I’m looking, and then it automatically geo gave me as being in Switzerland, switched to German. The German was like borderline gibberish machine translation, like not proper 2024 machine, but just really bad. I’m like, whoa, what’s that, right? But it was just ironic that the third largest company in the world by market cap, who’s powering basically the entire AI revolution, would not have proper machine translation on their website, right? So that was just the ironic post. Yeah, but you’re right. I guess if the third largest company by market cap in the world is having a hard time breaking through in their content or producing it, then a lot of others would have too.

Jordan: There are fax machines out there in the wild. People still use the fax, this technology, and it’s like, why is that? Why are they not immediately overnight switching to something that is more modern? Or I’m thinking of the book, where’s my flying car? And it’s a good book, but because of regulation and other impeding factors, we’re not able to adopt the latest and greatest technology. And so I’m thinking of healthcare specifically for that fax example. That’s like the go to to send information cross offices or records, even though we have encrypted emails now, the fax is still a prolific thing. So it’s an interesting time, to be sure, with AI and tech and what can we leverage? Maybe we’ve gone off from the sales and marketing topic.

Florian: That’s fine. I mean, the fax thing, just on a total side note, I mean, exactly, it was in COVID when they found out in Switzerland that all the hospitals would actually fax the COVID numbers to the central health department and the entire country was like, what do you mean? And young people, what is a fax? Anyway, let’s move back to more familiar shores here. So let’s talk about tech and like buying and building tech for localization. interpreting. A big question, right? I mean, do you want to build this internally? Do you want to just buy best of breed? Like how many of these tools do you want to buy? What’s your approach there? Because your business covers, again the text component, but also the interpreting component, so there’s a lot of tech you could choose.

Jordan: Yeah, I mean, 10 years ago I would say build your own tools. In fact, I did try to do that. You can look up my Twitter: mundabla. I was trying to build a software for my parents’ language agency with some developer friends to be project management. Somewhere like Plunet or Interpreter Intelligence. You have one full workflow, and so at that time, software was eating the world, niche SaaS. But now it’s been a decade and we’ve got off-the-shelf solutions. And so I’ve swung from the build and innovate and create to why would you do that? Lease the best-of-breed? Because at the end of the day, it’s about customer intimacy and who’s closest to the organization that needs language support or whatever tangential or related solution that goes with languages. And so can you get something that has already been built off the shelf and can you plug in? There’s some really exciting companies that I’m keeping my eye on, in addition to just the different AI engines. Blackbird is one, Lochub, I’ll give them a shout out. Just these integration points and connecting points. I think that’s really where we’re at. You can get something that’s 80% there off-the-shelf and buy it as enterprise software and then adapt and adopt the plugins.

Florian: For a long time, it was buying, building, sorry, and now it’s buying, and I think it’s a wise move because things are moving so quickly. I mean, if you’re in a services business, tech-enabled services business, really hard for you to build all of these different components on your own. I mean, that’s practically impossible for anybody, right?

Jordan: Yeah, for 99% of our industry, too. The long-tail of language solutions, companies, and providers. Engineering and having a dev team is a totally different business model. It sounds like a great idea, but you get distracted and that requires investment to do that right and to create technology, it’s iterative. You have to build it and destroy it and build it and destroy it. So it’s a totally different business model. It’s like oil and vinegar. I know all the big guys in our industry, we’ve got our proprietary tech, but the truth is the clients don’t care. They care about the outcome and so it’s tomato, tomato. If you’ve got your own, I won’t name names, whatever your TMS brand is versus this one. It’s really about the integration point. Can you fit into our workflow, make our life easier, put the text or whatever right back in context to the way we wanted it. So I would rather spend time and energy figuring out how we get in front of customers and solution engineer something for them with off-the-shelf than have to build and maintain and make that continued investment.

Florian: Can we talk a bit about interpreting? Because one of the very obvious data points that we collected from our 2024 Language Service Provider Index really was that US interpreting was such a major standout in terms of growth. I mean, a lot of the other areas were flat to down, but interpreting was just like double digit up. What is it? What is it that’s driving kind of interpreting in the US? Is it language access, health care, immigration, all of the above?

Jordan: I mean, it’s regulation. It’s a compliance thing, right? I’d love to say that it’s a goodwill and common decency for mankind and maybe in some instances, it is. But the United States, we don’t have an official language, believe it or not. And we’ve got plenty of laws and rules at a federal and different state levels that require for non-discrimination, equal access, disability rights, to be able to provide care, to be able to allow people to vote or get governmental services in their languages. Whether those government agencies abide by it every day, I’m thinking of being in a California DMV, which just the other day, which is a different level of hell, super inefficient. Actually, the best time to go to the DMV, this is a good tip for everyone in California, is you book your appointment, always book ahead, but go at like 4:30 because they all leave at five and they are so motivated to get their work done and get out the door right at five. And so they’re at their most efficient when they’re just trying to ram people through versus if you go first thing in the morning, you could be there all day. They don’t care. They got to be there from nine to five anyways.

Florian: On another note, why do people still have to go to a DMV in the first place? You have to show up there?

Jordan: Where’s my flying car? It’s exactly right. But the interpreting, we took a big tangent. Sorry. Yeah, the interpreting. I mean, there’s multiple underlying factors. With the COVID pandemic, there were a lot of funds pushed out to government and social services. I think there was a general awareness of the barriers to communicating about this global pandemic and there was inequity in health outcomes. And there were different populations that weren’t aware of which vaccine I should get and what services are available to me. So I think we got to thank the pandemic for making aware that in a time of crisis we have so many different populations that English is not the bridge to build and take care of our communities. We need to leverage all the different languages, all the different mediums available to us. So that awareness, I’m grateful for that, that it’s become more in vogue and people are more aware of equality or inclusion, and then we have the extra funds. That’s at the end of the day, what it really comes down to is who’s going to fund this mandate or this regulation? And then health care is its own animal too. We’ve got massive immigration and interpretation is really a demographics thing. Who lives in this area and what type of services do they need? So it’s regulation, it’s demographics. It’s more of a public sentiment and awareness. ASL is part of interpreting, too, and that’s a whole subset. I would love to build more of a core competency in services for the deaf, hard of hearing. I’m going on a tangent, but there’s just a crisis. We need more qualified interpreters available for the demand. Another market I know nothing about, but I know it’s booming with interpretation is Australia. Similar fundamentals, I believe they don’t have official language, a lot of immigration. They actually have a lot of different jobs maybe that are blue collar that would support immigrants coming to that country. And, I mean, they’re so close to Southeast Asia, and they’ve got so many indigenous languages. So I think that’s an interesting case study when you look at interpretation and what’s driving that growth. I think Australia, it’s boom time as well.

Florian: So when you’re planning your next acquisition, maybe you can check down under. Yeah. Now, you did mention ASL, just to close, are there any other kind of adjacent areas for growth that you would consider for the Language Network or maybe for other LSPs now as kind of things are happening so quickly? Everything’s developing so quickly on the tech side as well.

Jordan: Yeah. This conversation of machine versus man and conflict, where I don’t know why we can’t go from the story of John Henry. It’s an American fable. I won’t tell the whole story, but it’s the story of a man versus a machine and can this machine do more like log splitting or piling for railroads than John Henry, who’s like the buffest guy and the best worker? Human effort versus machine effort and so it’s the story where they compete. And I think it’s a beautiful story in that John Henry’s a man, he’s got a family, he’s got a community, he’s got a soul. And you got this systematized steam powered machine just going at, cold and ruthless. It doesn’t get sick, doesn’t take days off. So I think it’s a combination of both of areas of growth, is investing in your own people, because at the end of the day, we’re services company, and services requires tact. It requires knowledge and skill of connecting all these tools that we talked about. So can an LSP upskill their team to be more solutions engineers and fully aware of the array of options that that customer needs? So I’m team John Henry as far as building a company and so growing and upskilling your people so they can offer more value to your customers, I think is the lowest hanging fruit for growth. The higher value your team can provide to the customer, your customer is not going anywhere. Then, on the machine side, we talked a little bit about that, of what can we do to make ourselves more efficient, be more creative in solving our clients needs. Can we have more of a basket of services across the board? Not just the traditional ones, which most long-tail of LSPs, that’s more traditional, interpretation, translation, simple workflows. That’s the bulk of the demand. I’m curious where that’s going to go in five to 10 years with the AI.

Florian: Yeah. It’s a fast, fast moving environment.

Jordan: I do want to answer this question and hopefully this would give some takeaways is adjacent areas, I would argue, why do we need to do adjacent? Look at what you’re good at and go deeper and keep doing that. Like, what’s your edge for your language company? Or if you’re a language service provider, can you niche down even further? The world needs more experts. And in a world where knowledge is democratized, I can go on YouTube and learn anything. We need more people that can take all this data and put it together and actualize it. So I think that’s where LSPs should focus, is don’t be an ostrich with your head in the sand with all this AI that we’re talking about. But what customer segments are you in? What language pairs are you in? Go a little bit deeper. Hopefully I’m making sense there.

Florian: No, that’s great. So basically I’m trying to kind of say, well, everything’s happening so quickly, go broad, and you’re saying, no, wait. There’s actually also a strategy where you just go super niche and you double down on what you already know, and you’re going to beat your competition that way.

Jordan: 100%. Lionbridge, TransPerfect, they’re all competing with the little guys, as much as they invest in brand. Our customers are so fragmented. It’s not like they wake up and know about Coca Cola or Pepsi. They have no idea. Maybe some of them do. So if you can have an edge that the big guy doesn’t, therein lies the area for growth. You can add more value for dollar spent by the client. That’s where I want to be controversial, is look at your customers and do lookalikes and say, hey, these 10, like really good, we’ve got long term relationship, we got the right margins, we got the right team and services. So rather than retooling and refitting our whole organization, let’s go find 10 more lookalike customers. That’s the lowest hanging fruit, is you find what you’re good at and go do more of it.