Three Myths About The Translation Business
There are countless languages in the world, most of which have many thousands and some even billions of monolingual or bilingual speakers. The laws of statistics would seem to dictate, therefore, that any attempt to set up a translation business is futile, if only because the number of potential competitors is overwhelming. However, once you have begun your translation business you will realise that serious competition – i.e., from rivals with business acumen and the nerve to question translation myths – is in fact comparatively scarce.
Native speakers are generally held to be indisputable authorities on translation issues. This leads us to the first myth about the translation business: the native speaker is infallible. When you start up your own translation business you will soon discover that most customers, especially the more knowledgeable ones, will demand that the translation be done by a native speaker, on the assumption that a native speaker is automatically a good writer. Not so. While there may be over a billion native speakers of English worldwide, only a fraction of them can be relied upon to possess the judgement it takes to decide whether a translation is linguistically sound in a given business context. We should not automatically assume that a native speaker is a good writer in his own language, and even less that he is a good translator. For one thing, translation requires thorough insight into the source language as well as the target language. When you hire translators for your business, you should never forget that while a good translator is usually a native speaker of the target language, not all native speakers are good translators.
The second myth about the translation business has to do with client priorities, and the assumption that more than anything else, clients want quality. People can be excused for taking this myth seriously. Anyone in his right mind would expect that the client’s main concern when engaging a professional translation agency is to get a high-quality translation. Not so. Studies have shown that most clients are in fact more interested in speed than in quality. This is not to say that your client will be pleased to accept any trash as long as he gets it fast; the point is that quality standards in a business context are different from those in an academic context, and may be overshadowed by practical concerns. University students are trained to achieve linguistic perfection, to produce translations formulated in impeccable grammar and a superbly neutral style. Yet the fruits of such training may not be quite to the business client’s taste. In fact, there are probably as many tastes as there are clients. A lawyer will expect you first and foremost to build unambiguous clauses and use appropriate legalese; a machine builder requires technical insight and authentic technical jargon; and the publisher of a general interest magazine needs articles that are simply a good read. What all clients tend to have in common, however, is a reverence for deadlines. After all, when a foreign client has arrived to sign a contract, there should be something to sign; when a magazine has been advertised to appear, it should be available when the market expects it. In a business environment, many different parties may be involved in the production of a single document, which means that delays will accumulate fast and may have grave financial consequences. So, starters should be aware that ‘quality’ equals adaptability to the client’s register and jargon, and that short deadlines are as likely to attract business as quality assurance procedures.
And if you manage to attract business, you will find that the translation industry can be quite profitable, even for business starters. The third myth we would like to negate is that translation is essentially an ad hoc business with very low margins. Not so. Various successful ventures in recent years, for example in the Netherlands and in Eastern Europe, have belied the traditional image of the translator slaving away from dawn till dusk in an underheated attic and still barely managing to make ends meet. It is true that the translation process is extremely labour intensive, and despite all the computerisation efforts, the signs are that it will essentially remain a manual affair for many years to come. Nevertheless, if you are capable of providing high-quality translations, geared to your client’s requirements and within the set deadlines, you will find that you will be taken seriously as a partner and rewarded by very decent bottom line profits.
Fester Leenstra is co-owner of Metamorfose Vertalingen, a translation agency in Utrecht (The Netherlands). After having worked for several translation firms in paid employment, he took the plunge in 2004 and incorporated his own company.
For further details about Metamorfose Vertalingen, visit:
http://www.metamorfosevertalingen.nl
http://www.scandinavie-vertalingen.nl
http://www.medisch-vertaalbureau.nl
Collection Agency Secrets for Collecting on Bad Debt
Getting worried that one of your clients, customers or patients will never pay? Have you given up on a customer who’s essentially said he won’t pay? Congratulations–being stiffed by a customer or patient is a milestone in the growth of a business or medical practice. But even the most hopeless of bad debts can sometimes be collectedcollection agencies have been doing it for years. Here are six of their secrets.
1) Don’t just call, write.
According to a leading collection agency, you’re much more likely to collect on bad debts when you send a series of collection letters. Deep down, you probably know why collection letters are better. It’s the same reasons that would make you uncomfortable placing such a call in the first place: 1) if a debtor knows why you are calling they will avoid your calls; and 2) if you do get them on the phone they will most likely have a bad attitude, or just make excuses like ‘the check is in the mail’ to get you off their back.
2) Don’t ask if, ask when.
This leading also recommends that you try to get your debtor to set a date for paying you back. The people who owe you money may have been saying to themselves that they will get around to paying you any day now. But tomorrow never comes, which is why you need a specific date. When you call, start by asking to be paid today, then negotiate from there.
3) Be nice.
Courtesy is important because: 1) it lets you keep the moral high ground; 2) it makes it likelier that you can establish a cooperative relationship with the debtor for getting the debt repaid; and 3) there are very strong laws against harassment in the collections process and you do not want even to approach their limits.
4) Be cooperative
Remember: you and your debtor have one thing in common: you both want this debt to go away. In particular, you both want you to stop having to make all these calls and send all these letters. With that shared goal you and your debtor can work together to create a repayment plan. While a repayment plan may not be what you had hoped, it’s better than holding onto a bad debt.
5) Know the value of your time
The one thing that is probably keeping you from collecting on your supposedly bad debt is your fear that the time you spend collecting the debt may not be worth whatever you will recover. This fear is justified; your time is valuable and maybe it would be better spent on getting new business.
But don’t just let this fear linger in the back of your mind, fighting with the little voice that says you want your money. To get a rough idea of how much time you can afford to spend collecting the debt, and whether you have the time to do it at all, sit down and write out a rough estimate of the value of your time, the likelihood of collecting, and the amount you are owed.
For instance, let’s say you are going to assign this task to an administrative assistant whose time is worth $15/hour. The debt is $1000. It is owed you by an old customer who is three months behind but has never been seriously delinquent before, so you say you have a 50% chance of getting the money, making the value of the collection about $500.
You divide $500 by $15 and find that your assistant could spend 33 hours collecting the debt before it lost your company money. However, you’d probably still feel a little unsure about whether it was all worth it. Your feelings would be correct: there’s still the opportunity cost of all the work your assistant won’t be doing to keep your business moving. To be safe, you can also estimate the opportunity cost at another $15/hour, which means you can only really afford to have your assistant spend half as much time, or 16 and a half hours. If you’ve already spent that much time already, it’s time either to call it quits or call in the professionals.
6) Get a collection agency
The one secret the collection agencies know about collections is the value their services deliver clients. Unfortunately, businesses do not usually agree to write testimonials for their collection agencies or even recommend them to a friend. If you didn’t know that there are small business collection agencies that will collect your bad debt for under $20, you have to admit that leaving your collections to the pros is a pretty good business secret. In short, you don’t want your bad debt to cost you twice: once when you lose it, and again when you waste a lot of your or your people’s time going after it. Going with a collection agency can help you avoid either outcome.
Steve Austin is a regular contributor to Let No Debt Remain Outstanding (http://www.let-no-debt-remain-outstanding.com/), a website with articles on choosing a collection agency, along with recommended the best collection agencies.
What Are Debt Reduction Agencies
If you are looking to borrow debt consolidation loan in order manage your unbearable debts and get your finances in order, debt reduction agencies can make an excellent choice for you. They are companies that offer various debt consolidation services keeping in view your specific financial requirement.
What does a Debt Reduction Agency Do?
The debt-reduction agencies do personal counseling for you – in most cases, free of cost, and they show you the way for how to reduce the heavy burden of your debts. They first review your current debt and other financial situation, and then keeping in view your future financial goals, they give you some valuable piece of advice and help you make a debt management plan. After discussing various financial issues with you, they will even plan your budget in order to avoid being caught in such an unpleasant scenario again in future. The debt consolidation department of these agencies will even try to negotiate with your lenders in order to get the interest rate and the monthly payment reduced. Most of the time, the debt consolidation brings for you an easy repayment term and a low interest consolidated singly monthly payment.
Freedom from hassle of Dealing with your numerous creditors
The debt consolidation loan provided by these debt reduction agencies follows a very simple procedure. All you have to do is to make the consolidated low interest single monthly payment to these agencies, and they will take the charge after that. They will divide that amount among your lenders as per the new terms. Obviously, they charge a reasonable fee for this service, but it is worth paying that much in comparison to the freedom you get from all the hassles of dealing with your creditors.
Overall, debt reduction agencies provide some excellent debt consolidation services that can help you reduce the unbearable burden of debts easily.
Gibran Selman takes care of http://debtconsolidationcenter.net a website dedicated to gather information, on and off the internet, about debt consolidation and other related subjects.
Visit the website at: http://debtconsolidationcenter.net for hundreds of articles and other resources about debt consolidation.
Selecting A Collection Agency
If you run a business, you are sure to have some customers who require a lot of follow-up before they pay you. Often you spend too much time and energy to collect money that is rightfully due to you. Giving this task to a collection agency will help you:
Concentrate on your core business rather than on non-core tasks like debt recovery. Increase your debt collection and reduce bad debt.
Selecting A Collection Agency
You must consider the following factors while selecting a collection agency:
1. Experience
How many years of experience does the collection agency have?
Does it have experience in the debt collection services you require, such as commercial, medical or check collection?
Can it collect debt for your kind of account balance?
Can it give references?
2. Professional Collectors
Are professional collectors in the collection agency well trained to deal with your customers? Remember, they are going to represent you and tempers may run high in debt collection. One bad conversation can spoil your relations with the customer.
3. Expertise In Local Debt Collection & Debt Collection Laws
Debt collection agencies use many techniques. These include skip tracing and written communication.
Does your debt collection agency have enough local sources for skip tracing or finding people who are avoiding you?
And does the agency have good knowledge of local debt collection laws so that they don’t go beyond legal boundaries?
Breaking laws for collecting debts can prove more harmful to your business than bad debt. If your customers are spread across multiple states, it is better to select from collection agencies having offices in those states.
4. Options
Does the collection agency offer you multiple ways of debt collection and will it follow only ways approved by you?
5. Value-Added Services
Does the agency offer value-added services such as advice on contracts and legal documents and eliminating customers having bad payment histories?
Collection Agency Services offers you a wealth of information on how to select the best collection agency for your business.
Strategic Marketing For Medical Staffing Agencies
The Power Of Leveraging
Let’s talk about strategic marketing and how it relates to the medical staffing industry.
How can a medical staffing agency create an environment to promote a strategic marketing effort from its staff to increase productivity and profit? The strategic marketing effort needs to transcend old habitual routines. The strategy within the power of leveraging will produce more profitable and larger results than otherwise would. What are the drivers, the path and the basic formulation to begin the power of leveraging to take hold the strategic marketing effort?
Let’s take a journey to illustrate this very important question. Because the question above will be the difference between growing your medical staffing organization verses your organization dying a horrible death.
I have identified and refined these drivers using my experience, actual field research, and the great canons in the field of business growth.
Lets take a look at the primary driver, and let’s examine how this driver directly relates to the medical staffing business.
STRATEGIC MARKETING
It is amazing how many medical staffing agencies are unaware of the power of leverage marketing within this environment. It is so simple, yet so unwisely used. The cost is fixed within your effort, expense, time and opportunity costs.
How? A recruiter or a business development representative (In many cases it’s the same person) whether he or she secures one appointment or twenty a day, It will cost you the same fixed amount. The same fixed amount maintains itself regardless if you or your staff secures one contract or ten a day. The fixed amount stays the same if you secure four new accounts or five a month.
The opportunity cost, effort and expense to place an ad or walk into a hospital whether you secure one account or ten are the same. If you close a new account 10% of the time or 50% of the time the fixed costs are the same. If the contract you secure produces $2,000 a year or $200,000 the initial fixed costs are the same for the new account.
Your costs are the same within your effort, expense and time to run a mailing campaign that may produce 0.5% response or 6% response. It costs you the same to attend trade shows or visit colleges to recruit new candidates whether they convert 2% or 20%. The fixed costs are the same whether you spend $10,000 on your marketing budget to attract 5 clients or 500 clients. The costs are the same to secure new contracts whether you close 1, 5 or 10 out of 100.
I think you get the idea of what I am talking about. Being able to strategically leverage yourself to pull in more per effort spent will increase profitability. The power of leveraging ideally allows you to pull in 1 out of 3 instead 1 out of 20 new accounts. This can dramatically increase the bottom line. The power of leveraging allows you to transform an account from $1,000 a week to $3,000 a week. Getting contracts to increase the number of placements from one shift to three a month. If you can get customers that were not referring anyone to you begin referring five new customers a year is a strategic marketing leverage that will increase growth substantially. This is the power of strategic marketing for medical staffing agencies.
You must recognize and respect the power of strategic marketing and the role it will play in the success of your medical staffing agency.
How do you form a strategic marketing plan?
Create an internal analysis of your current marketing efforts. Make sure to identify all the activities, processes and tasks, and then determine the best avenue to improve upon them. Lets examine how you go about finding them.
1. Find the recruiter or business development representative that has achieved better results than anyone else. If it is you, then identify the areas you have excelled on. Create a modeling effect on those individuals. Apply those skills to everyone in your organization and make sure everyone understands the importance of this new avenue. Write the processes down and use as a blueprint. Don’t horde the information for fear of people stealing your methodology.
2. Find other staffing companies within the same field who have shown success and are better at doing what they do than you. Borrow their success and make it your own.
3. Benchmarking: Go outside your industry, find companies that have proved to be great in there area of expertise. Look at their business practices; how the people interact with clients, what makes them successful. Uncover and refine there business practices, what makes there ads so great? How do they secure appointments? How do they close a deal? What is there presentation style?
You can then adapt, use and apply those processes to your medical staffing agency on a regular basis. Make it a common practice to continually do what works, review what you are doing then make sure it is still working. Review what you are doing and determine what can be added to the strategic marketing plan to leverage your actions. Eliminate the under performing activities and increase the activities that produce the higher returns.
Using the strategic approach to marketing and leveraging your actions will allow your medical staffing agency to grow faster, more effectively and with less effort on your part. The number of clients will grow along with the amount charged per client. The key to generating leveraged revenue lies within the power of strategic marketing.
Recognizing that Strategic Marketing is one of the most important facets of growing your business will allow you to reach upside potential. There are 9 other drivers that relate to the growth, profitability and competitive superiority within Strategic Marketing for your Medical Staffing Agency. To receive these and many more simply sign up for our weekly newsletter by sending an email to royvera1@gmail.com with the subject heading “weekly newsletter” and begin leveraging your time and increasing sales.
Roy Vera, MBA is a successful medical staffing consultant. His business focus is on Marketing and Profitability for medical staffing agencies. For more information you may contact him at royvera1@gmail.com
Starting Your Own Nursing Agency Business
It’s no secret that the United States has a nursing shortage, one that promises to grow to alarming proportions. Too many nurses are retiring, and too few are entering the profession. To compound the problem, within the next 5 to 10 years, over 76 million Baby Boomers are scheduled to retire from the workforce, with only about 44 million Generation X’ers available to pick up the slack. This will soon place unprecedented demands for services on a health system that is already stretched thin.
This shortage of allied healthcare professionals, especially nurses have a created a new boom to the nursing agency registry business, supplemental staffing agency for medical professionals, permanent placement medical recruiter, or starting a business in homecare and staffing pool. The medical staffing industry will continue to grow because of the upcoming baby boomers, and the current supply of nurses are dwindling. The average age for nurses are in the forties, and they are not being replaced by the new generations. Entrepreneurs have made lucrative business in nursing agency, nursing registry, homecare business, medical recruiter recruiting, or as independent contractor in their own field.
The time is now for entrepreneurs to start a nursing agency,nursing registry business, operate a homecare business, or as a medical recruiter or just become an independent healthcare contractor. By being an independent healthcare contractor, you are bypassing the agency and are self employed. Healthcare facilities are the clients. Homecare are regulated by all levels of goverment from local to fedeal level. Homecare levels of regulations depends on the category of service provided to clients. Homecare services ranges from providing just companions or the more medically needed clients such as terminally ill clients. Homecare services can be in the form of social service, non-medical, and medical services.
Florence Gale
author, “How To Start Your Own Nursing Agency”
http://www.nursingbizguide.com
Why A Collection Agency Is Your Small Business’s Best Friend
Does the term “collection agency” put you on edge? If you’re like many small business owners, the mountain of debt you accumulated during startup might have been enough to make you worry about collection agencies every time you answered the phone. But your feelings toward collection agencies are eventually going to change, if they haven’t already.
While no one wants to hire a small business collection agency, it’s a sad reality of doing business that not every customer feels the need to pay, or has the ability to pay all at once.
If you want to stay in business, you’ll need to collect that money. When your most polite and not-so-polite reminders to pay have failed, you’ll need to start getting serious, which means going to an agency.
Collection Agency Services: More Benefits Than Costs
Professional collection agency services will certainly cost more than just writing letters demanding your money back. But the amount of money you’ll collect, not to mention the time you’ll save, will more than pay it back. In fact, when you consider the hourly rate of your employees, or you yourself, collection agencies’ fees really can be quite a bargain.
Let’s say you have an assistant your business pays $10/hour, effectively costing your business $15/hour once you count in employment taxes, benefits, and the overhead of your office. You would be lucky if that assistant spent just five hours total on each debt, and managed to collect half of them. But you would have sunk $150 into each successful collection. Plus, there’s the opportunity cost: $150 worth of time you haven’t spent in growing your business. So the net loss is $300, and probably more if you’re a profitable business that gets a good return on your people’s time.
But if you refer your delinquent debts to a collection agency for $75 each, and they collect three-quarters of them, you’ve invested only $100 per debt collected. Once you factor in all the money from all the debts the agency collected for you that you couldn’t have collected on your own, the return on investment is huge. That’s not even counting the saved opportunity cost, or all the stress you’ll save yourself and your associates.
In the end, your small business has to focus on doing what brings in the money: your core business. Leave your taxes to your accountant, your office repairs to your building manager, and your collections to your small business collection agency.
If you have a small business, medical practice or facility, and you have customers, clients or patients that are not paying you within your stated terms – you might need the services of a small business collection agency.
About The Author
Steve Austin
Free Collection agency information at http://www.collection-agency-information.com