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Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Besides that differentiator, how do you acquire customers?

Kristin Quinlan: A lot of our growth has been through outreach from our sales team as well as from leveraging the relationships with one entity and being recommended to others. We are really good at what we do and we have got an exceedingly strong reputation for being the best. We also have companies white-labeling our service. We put a lot of language companies into the business of on-demand or over-the-phone interpreting services by being their back office. It’s about 20% to 25% of our overall revenue.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of language services businesses are these that tend to white-label a back-end from you?

Kristin Quinlan: Anybody providing any range of language services other than on-demand interpreting. Generally speaking, those in the document translation, localization, and globalization sphere. >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 1)

When Art started Bullhorn, the first idea didn’t stick, and much of the venture capital raised during the first dotcom bubble was exhausted. Read how Art pivoted out of that bind, bootstrapping his way to success.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story?

Art Papas: I grew up in the streets of Weston, Massachusetts, which is one of the most affluent suburbs. I grew up in an affluent town where the high school parking lot was filled with BMWs and Mercedes. Both my parents were doctors. From an early age, they were into teaching me to value earning money and work. They were both incredible workaholics themselves.

When I got my first guitar, they told me that if I wanted to buy an amplifier for it, I’d have to pay for it myself. I would go down to the Westin Country Club and caddy. I was a 12-year-old carrying golf bags that were almost as big as I was. Early on, if I wanted something, I had to work >>>

Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You came on board in 2000. The business was about $1.9 million.

Kristin Quinlan: Yes. In 2001, it was about $1.9 million. We had a slow incline. We’ve never had a year that has gone down. Every year has been an increase from the previous year. The first early years were very slow.

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights in terms of milestones or major strategic moves in building this company between 2000 and 2006 when you took over as CEO?

Kristin Quinlan: As I was working my way through the ranks and ascending to managing the company, the vision of the company was to continue to leverage advancements in technology to do connect as many interpreters in as many languages as our clients were demanding in the fastest amount of time. Better, faster, cheaper was our on-going mantra. >>>

Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We’re doing an Entrepreneur Journey story. We’ve got to focus on a bit more chronological telling of the story of how you put one foot before the other. I realized that you didn’t become the CEO of the company until 2006 but I do need to capture some of the beginning story of the company to get to 2006.

Kristin Quinlan: I understand. I was hoping to give a blanket overview of what our company does. We’re not a very common service. A lot of people don’t have an understanding of what an interpreting company is.

Sramana Mitra: When you got involved, that was in 2000?

Kristin Quinlan: Yes. >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have now?

Patrick Kerpan: We’ve got more than a thousand connected customers. We don’t get visibility in some of them because with some partners, we only get the net dollar. We used to be able to track every customer and knew every use case they were doing. We just got too big for that visibility.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you in terms of revenues?

Patrick Kerpan: We’re running at that $5 million run rate. If you go to a VC, they’d think that you have to sell $5 million again next year, but I’ve 90% recurring revenue. >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We are huge believers in content marketing. That’s the only kind of marketing that we do.

Patrick Kerpan: We clearly lost some opportunities but for a small company, we would never hear from customers until they were POC complete. They’d go to Amazon. They’d use the free edition. They had tried it and they probably have something up and running. Now, they needed to grow it. We put in place a mechanism where we didn’t want to hear from a customer unless they were close to completing proof of concept. Rather than having big, wide funnels, we would have 15 leads at 60% probability.

Sramana Mitra: In general, any kind of inbound leads are very good news. If it’s an inbound query or request, you’ve won half the battle.

Patrick Kerpan: Right, but you don’t have that kind of pipeline where you put everybody you’ve ever met in the pipeline and they’re all a million dollar deal with 10% probability. You just get killed with all that talking. The other thing that’s different is I think we got the pricing right. There’s some competition now. >>>

Bootstrapping an Evergreen Business From Oregon: Kirstin Quinlan, CEO of Certified Languages International (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

There is a trend among entrepreneurs wanting to keep running companies without seeking an exit. Certified Languages International (CLI) is one such evergreen company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Kristin Quinlan: I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I went to school at the University of Oregon. My children are also there. One is graduating from there now and my daughter is currently enrolled. They are fourth-generation University of Oregon attendees. I spent a year of my education in Amherst, Massachusetts. Other than that, it’s all been here.

Following graduation, I was floundering for a bit. I taught skiing and worked in a ski shop. I did that for about nine months. After that, I was hired by a distributor for Pioneer Electronics. I didn’t know a thing about consumer electronics, but I dove in. I worked in sales for that >>>

Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? You’ve had one successful exit. You’re in a financially comfortable position. You’ve built a second company that is also bootstrapped and very profitable. You’re still fairly young. What do you want to do with your business? How are you thinking about your choices and options now?

Fred Hsu: For me, it’s all about people. From a business perspective, I want to make sure my founders and the employees who stuck around see similar success to what I’ve seen in the past and also take enough knowledge from what they’ve learned here to their next startup. On a personal side, I have two children. They’re three and five. I want them to see daddy work. I don’t play golf. I’m not going to be home in my bunny slippers. I don’t even have slippers. Probably work, life normalcy, and high aspirations for my co-founders, employees, and my kids.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to continue running this company and growing this to a much larger scale? Or do you want to exit this company and start another one? >>>