Tracking Data to Create a Business Plan

Most Mondays find me paying last week's bills, invoicing the work I did the previous week and generally inputting financial data into Quickbooks Pro. A few weeks ago I added another step to my weekly finance session: filling in a spreadsheet with the money earned during the previous week. For this purpose, any work submitted during the week counts as a project for which the money was earned that week. The spreadsheet is divided by currency (US$, Euros, Swiss Francs), with formulas to create US$ totals (using approximate average conversion rates) for the week and month, and a running US$ total.

This spreadsheet, along with a daily planner divided by half hour increments where I try to track how long I spend on various projects (including administrative chores, marketing, etc.) is an attempt to get enough data for an actual business plan. I can (usually) estimate reasonably accurately how long a given project might take and I know what money I have (or don't have) in the bank. But since payments for projects arrive a long time after the work has been completed and since I regularly transfer money from my business account to the family account, I don't have a good sense of how much I actually earn for the time I spend.

Hopefully this system will eventually give me enough data to figure out what I'm actually making per hour, both on average and from specific clients. That should help me create a realistic business plan. Let's see how it goes ...

How do you approach business planning?

ATA Conference Boston - Review of Sessions II

This is the second part of my session summaries from the recent ATA conference. You can read Part I on sessions dealing with technical translations/terminology here.

• "The Entrepreneurial Linguist: Lessons from Business School"
• "Translating Digital Media: Marketing 2.0"

"The Entrepreneurial Linguist: Lessons from Business School" by Judy Jenner

Ms. Jenner emphasized that even a one-person translation business run out of one's home is a business that must be run professionally. This includes maintaining a well-designed website, a website-specific e-mail address, a separate business telephone number and marketing materials that advertise the value one's translation services add to a client's business instead of a resume that looks like a job application. Since networking and a personal connection are important in obtaining business, a professional photo of the translator is important on the website and other marketing materials. As sellers we set the price of our services; that price should include a minimum charge, as well as annual adjustments for inflation and surcharges for working on weekends and holidays, Ms. Jenner said.

"Translating Digital Media: Marketing 2.0" by Jon Ritzdorf

Mr. Ritzdorf spoke about translators who can market themselves to direct clients in ways that go beyond traditional translation and interpreting services. He focused on three areas: video subtitling, mobile applications and search engine marketing. Translating subtitles for marketing videos may require first timing and transcribing the original text and adjusting the translated text to fit the timing of the original video. The interface for mobile applications not only needs to be translated, but the application itself also must be tested in the target market. Translators here can act as in-country experts who ensure that the application functions as intended in the context of the local infrastructure and can communicate any problems in the language of the application's producer. Keywords used in search engine marketing not only must be translated, but also adapted for the target market, since customers in different markets may not search for the same terms, even in translation. As a user of local search engines, the translator again can act as the in-country reviewer/tester who can also communicate in the client's language.

These are just some of the sessions I attended. I may implement tips from a presentation on using speech-to-text software (specifically, Dragon Naturally Speaking) later (and blog about it).

One of the nice things about language-related conferences is that not all presentations are in English. This gave me a chance to attend lectures presented in German, as well as Spanish, which exposed me to current German business language and honed my Spanish comprehension skills in a dialect I was unfamiliar with (Argentinian, it turns out).