 Hello everyone. Today, I want to talk to you about what I want to talk to you about. It's about using your friends, not using your friends, using your competition, basically using your competition to find more clients and to make more money. Look, the problem that a lot of us have and if you're starting off as a freelance translator, it can be very hard because say you're a German to English translator and you're looking for someone, you know, and you specialize in legal translations, right? So you're going around and say you're contacting a bunch of law firms and you're like, oh, do you need translations, do you need translations, do you need translations? And you find someone who needs translations, but they need, I don't know, English to German or they need German to French or they need Portuguese to English or they need, you know, some other variation. And the chance that you find a law firm who specifically needs German to English translations in this timeframe are pretty low. So what else can you do? Well, you can try to maybe you're like, okay, I only want to find companies that need German to English translations. So only contact companies in Germany say that deal with an English clientele or something like that, right? So you do that, but then what are you going to find? You're going to find, oh, you know, there's some hospitals that need that, but they need medical translations, which you really can't do or some engineering company needs to translate a really complicated user manual or something, which you can't do either because you do legal translations. So it can be very hard to do this. And let's face it, translators have this a lot more than many other people. If you're a website designer, you know, you can switch it up, you can do a you can do a website for a business, you can do one for a wedding company, you can do one for someone's blog, you can do one for a foundation, people who make websites they'll specialize in something, but let's face it, you can kind of do a bit of everything, both translation, you can't do that. If you speak German, and I've had people do this to me before, they're like, Oh, yeah, you're a translator. Good. I need these things translated into Japanese. I'm like, Yeah, okay. What am I, how can I can help you there? And anyway, so how, how can you deal with this, right? Because you are really searching for this kind of niche. And it's hard. And so what a lot of people do is because they can't spread out for language. So people spread out for the specialty. And they're like, Yeah, I do legal, but I'll do business, I'll do marketing, I'll do this, I'll do that, I'll do history, I'll do fiction, I'll do nonfiction, and they kind of spread themselves too thin many times and come up with subpar translations and et cetera, et cetera. So a solution to this, and this is something that actually I never did, but I wish I'd done when I was starting up. And I've seen it in various forms throughout my career. And including, I did something similar, but yeah, I never did this anyway. And basically the solution that I'm thinking of here is to get together a team. Because what you can do with a team of translators is you can have a bunch of different languages and or specializations. And so if someone says, Oh, I need this translation done in French to English, then you have someone on the team to do it. Or if you find someone who needs German to English, which is what you do, but they're like, Oh, but I also need, you know, German to French and German to Italian, then you can have people on your team, you'll be like, Oh, don't worry, you know, I can handle all that. And that's a lot more powerful to tell a prospective client, then I can only handle the German part, you're gonna have to find someone else for the other parts. So how do you go about this? Well, there are various ways to go about it. And I think, and so I think there are various things you should keep in mind. First of all, how should you set it up? Should it be as a team? Should it be as a company or organization? Should you set up a system? Should there be a commission system? Do you help each other find new clients or not or how? And so these are my recommendations for setting this up. Again, I haven't done this, but I have seen it in various forms throughout my career. And so these are just my recommendations, because I do think it can help a lot. If you have access to people who work in a bunch of different languages and or specializations, then you can offer prospective clients a lot more. And so how do you go about this? The first thing you should do, I think, ideally is find other translators who are in your position, but all at a similar level. Remember, as a team, as an organization, you're all going to be only as strong as your weakest link. So you don't want to have any weak links. This is natural. If someone has a bad experience with a translator you recommended or put them in touch with, that doesn't give a favorable impression of you. And look, we're all the same. When you give a bad rating to a company on pros or one of those websites, it's not like, oh, the person who dealt with me or the person who deals with romance languages or the project manager for this was bad. No, you're like, that company was bad. And you associate them all together. So you do want to make sure that you're all at a similar level, I would say, so you can all feel adequate, but you're all so all pulling your weight. And so then how do you set up the system? Because there are a lot of issues that you'll see can happen. So let's say you're a German to English translator, right? And you're trying to find this new client and you're in touch with Mercedes and you got in touch with Mercedes, you're like, oh, that's cool. That's awesome. How do I get Mercedes? And then you get in touch with someone. They're like, yeah, we do need a translation. We need someone who does French to English. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's no problem. I have someone on my team. So you get them in touch French to English, Italian to English. And, you know, so everyone's happy, right? Except the French to English translator gets paid, the Italian to English translator gets paid, but you're sitting there forwarding them emails and giving them contacts and you're not getting paid anything. So how do you settle that? There are various ways to settle that one is, you know, well, you wait for them to find you someone and hope for the best, which I don't recommend. Another way is to divide everything equally. So everyone who's part of this team, no matter who gets the job, you all get divided a piece equally. The problem with this obviously is that you have some other trends. Say the guy who does, you know, Swedish to English translations, he's some lazy ass who just sits there playing video games all day and he still gets to collect a percentage from what other people are doing. And that's not fair either. My solution to this will be to institute a finder's fee of a certain percentage. I recommend doing a percentage, say something like 10%. So if you send a client to a French to English translator, the French to English translator is going to make a thousand bucks off of it. You get paid 100. If you get sent something and they make 10 bucks off of it, you get one buck, you know, and that's how it works. And I mean, you can have a scale that varies depending to on volume. You can look up stuff like Lehman scale, stuff like that. I would just keep it at a straight percentage at first, because quite frankly, I mean, why complicate life? And the fact is 100 bucks might seem like a lot for someone to give just for forwarding an email. I mean, although you did find the contact, but that person's still making you 900 bucks, they wouldn't without you. So I think it's good to take the 900 bucks and give you 100 bucks. But again, figure out what works best for all of you and come up with a system there. And then I also think people should be pulling their own weight even because of the Swedish English translator, you can say, Oh, he's not doing anything, but he also doesn't get paid. It still brings about ill will if you guys are taking this seriously. And it seems like other people aren't. And so you do want people who kind of pull their own weight. And that's why you want serious people who can do this. And so yeah, that would be my ideal structure. And how so this is the way that I would recommend setting it up, because then you're thinking about well, how do I get in touch with these people? How do I form this team? Do we set it up as a company or as an organization? What do we do? I would keep things very informal at first. And in fact, what I would do at the beginning, if you're thinking of doing something along these lines is to contact someone that you work well with. And in fact, so this is what happened to me. In fact, I was someone contacted me, they needed this German to English translation done or English to German. I can't remember very technical, I couldn't handle it. But I knew someone who could. And so I told him about I would like, I have this, do you want me to, you know, send to you. And he's like, Yeah, you know, I'd be happy to do something like I can pay you 10%. We can set up a system like that. I'm like, Oh, yeah, that'd be great. That'd be awesome. And so we had this and it worked very well. So I would propose doing something like that contact someone when you have something already like the French to English translator, you say, look, Mercedes here, they need French to English translations. Is this something you could probably help out with? And, and he'll be like, Yeah, that'll be awesome. And be like, look, why don't we set up a system, you pay me 10% of whatever you make. And then I'll pay you 10% for anything you send me my way. And you know, why don't we set up this reciprocal system like this? And I think they'll be happy to do so, especially since you have a guaranteed job for them, maybe try with one person or with two or something like that. Once you have a little bit of something going, then you can try talking to them, you know, see, ask them, Hey, how about expanding this a bit, and then try expanding it and including different translators and just make it I would again, at the beginning, just make it very informal because you really want to make sure it works before you set anything in stone. First of all, you want to make sure that no one's job overlaps with someone else. You don't want to French to English translators because they're going to be competing, or at least if they are French to English, one specialized in medical and one in legal, say, again, so everyone's exclusive. And ideally, you can have a team of people all completely exclusive and they all adhere to the system. And what I would do is contact them and say, Hey, look, let's try this out for three, six months and see how it goes. That way it makes it very easy in case, you know, the Swedish translator isn't pulling his weight, you can always decide to drop him after three to six months or something and then concentrate on the other people and, or, you know, anything along those lines and then try to make something work this way. And I do think what you can do is take advantage of economies of scale this way in that any client, any potential client that any one of you contacts can become a client just because you have access to all these languages that you can't all do yourself. But, you know, you can always say, you're like, look, I don't handle Portuguese, but I work with someone, you know, on my team who who's very good at this and so they can handle it. And especially if the clients worked with you before or something like that, they'll be very happy to do that. And again, you know, if you're part of this team, then that client can deal directly with that translator. You don't have to be a go between they deal directly, pay that translator directly, you don't have to deal, but you get your finder's fee and and everyone's happy. So yeah, that's that's it in a nutshell. And I do think it's pretty viable. I would keep it very relaxed. Don't set up a company or anything like that. Also, because then if you set up a company, then you're a translation agency already, which brings about a whole bunch of other stuff. So I would do this as a freelance translator, but just as part of a team, think of yourself as a team. And if your prospective translator, you know, if you, or your prospective client, sorry, you're talking to them, you can always just say, look, I, I work on a team and we deal with all these other languages as well. And so we can help you out with all of them. We're all at the same level. And so we can definitely handle whatever translations you have and see how it goes. If you have done something similar to this, by the way, let me know, I'd be very curious to hear about it. I have heard about things like this in various guys's, let's say, throughout the years. But just from the snippets of information I've gathered here and there, this is the structure that I would recommend most basically to set it up to, sorry, no, not basically to set up basically to contact one person, start with them, maybe contact two people, see if it works well with them. And then from there, kind of expand and try to create a group of people. If you already have some people in mind, making sure it's all mutually exclusive so that you don't infringe on each other's languages or territory and then taking it from there and seeing how it works, again, with a finder's fee so that you get paid a percentage for every job you send someone else's way. And yeah, so yeah, let me know if you've done anything similar and or if you think this is something useful that you can try because I do highly recommend it. And especially if you're finding it hard to find jobs and to find new clients at the beginning. Once again, by the way, this works with end clients with prospective end clients with translation agencies, not really because translation agencies, they just need someone in that one language, you know, they don't need people in a bunch of different languages. And that's one of the big problems with trying to find end clients. And one of the big problems with trying to transition from translation agencies to big clients is big clients have very different needs, including they have to deal in 23 different languages, and they can't deal just with 23 different people and having to deal with all the issues there. That's why they hire agencies. But if you can already offer a certain number of languages as freelance translators, you know, that can be very attractive to prospective clients. And so anyway, something to keep in mind. Look, when you deal with end clients, and this is for another video, but there are a lot of other things you have to deal with as well. Remember that that agencies don't deal with you kind of have to explain stuff to them. They don't know what source word or target word means. They don't know that even things are charged per word, and they don't know, you know, any of that. And so you kind of have to walk them through it. Anyway, that's for another video. And I think in fact, I've done another video about that. But in terms of setting up a team and using these other translators who you might be in touch with but or might know and, you know, but you figure they're competitors. But actually, you guys can help each other get more business for everyone there. And I think it's a good way for all of you guys to work together and to help each other out. And so yeah, I hope you found this useful. And I will. Oh, and don't forget to click like if you do find it useful. So I know which videos are useful and which aren't. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't. And I'll see you in the next video. Okay, thanks. Bye.