 Welcome to the LCL panel about linguists and entrepreneurship. We have three panelists with us today who have each started their own businesses. And I think I will introduce them in some random order Stephanie Rosenbaum, founded Tech Ed, and she divides her time between Michigan and Palo Alto. And I know she's going to talk about lots of things related to this, but the reason she's here is she got her bachelor's degree at Berkeley in philosophy of language. Yay, go Bears. Actually, actually, that was even it's even more complicated because that was the master's and the bachelor's was was in something called unified science and the honors college University of Michigan. So there you go. It's, it's, it's a dual kind of education kind of right from the get go. Got it. Okay, let me introduce everybody and then I'm going to come back and let Stephanie introduce herself more thoroughly. And so Nina founded a company called pixel loom to help develop websites for others. And last but not least we have Samantha from Memora. And this is her new company that started about five years ago, is that right, something like that. And where she has taken her degree in linguistics and turned it to help industry with quality, how to process and understand and analyze qualitative results to surveys. And I'm sure you're branching out and doing other new things and so we can talk more about all the ways you've grown. So, thank you so much for all of you for showing up and Stephanie tell us, because I think you've been in business longer than most of us. Nina, Nina's Nina's a pretty close runner up. I was tickled to see, but okay, so kind of how did I get into this. I got into this because Margaret need the anthropologist wanted to find out whether in this is now in the 1950s wanted to find out whether anybody who wasn't a PhD electrical engineer could understand these new things called computers. So, you know, this is this takes you back to the dinosaur age but that's what it was. And she got the National Science Foundation to set up a course for teenagers, where at Columbia, where Columbia electrical engineering professors lectured an IBM donated a time on what was then $1,000 an hour computer that Watson labs that used a vacuum tubes. So this is, this is, this is really the dark ages but what it did was get me started in what could what was possible and computing early. And it showed me something very early that took a lot of other people a lot longer to see, which is that they were people that were working in this brand new field. They were people, they were some of the nicest people in the world, and they were some of the worst people, worse communicators in the world. They a language was a computer language language didn't have anything to do with people. So, from that experience, I started going back and forth between the communication world and the technical world. When I worked my way through college, some of some of it was in biochemistry labs, and some of it was working as a content developer. So, when I started my company, it was basically as as translation between engineers, and it was had I started the company just as computing was starting to make its way into the business world. And these people needed translators from from engineering ease into a real qualitative language. So, that was that was a place for it. And that's, that's what I did. Oh, what is I don't know is that the right kind right level of star. I think that's a great place to start. Thank you, Nina. I have the feeling definitely are on our sort of the same generation. I took my first computer class my freshman year at Wellesley College it was taught by professors from MIT who came out on the Wellesley MIT bus. We had to punch cards, we had to punch cards, and they got put on the Wellesley MIT bus and run into MIT to be run. And then you got them back you know and, and you had a syntax error and it had to wait another two days, but there was the terrible time when some of the, the card boxes went to the back of the bus and weren't found for a couple of days. And so it was just a really different way to learn programming than anything we might do now. But I also was at Michigan for my P my masters and PhD in linguistics. And then I worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey doing work that really was sort of related to linguistics it was all the same sort of stuff. And so in the talking about we were working on trying to provide feedback to technical people about their writing with computers, and that went on until the best teacher came and that all got clobbered. And then I worked there for another seven years as a basically as a computer high level computer programmer. My husband just got a job at UCI out here in in Irvine. And Bell Labs was falling apart. It was just a really depressing place to live. I meant to work, because everyone was getting fired. Well, laid off. I mean they were just closing department after department. I didn't believe even though I still had a job. And we came out here and that was a 94 we were using the internet on mosaic, but nobody was. And a few years later in 1999, some friends of mine and I started a company to do websites. And which was pretty, pretty radical at the time. And I'm still doing it. They've all gone by the wayside they've all retired but I'm sort of stuck with this hosting company that I run and I can't say I'm making a lot of money at it at these days but I still have clients that I feel like I have to keep going for. That's that resonate. That's really does. What years were you in Michigan. Before you I think because it was my undergraduate so I was there in the early 60s. Okay, and I was there from 70 to 76. And so by then I was out in California. Samantha, tell us about your, your, your route from linguistics into private industry. Well, hi everybody. My name is Samantha and I am the CEO and founder of member language services as Nancy has sort of already stated. I've been doing this actually for about three and a half years. And I always can remember because I have a three and a half year old son and it's sort of like coincides with his birth. You know, the founding of the company so I know that's sort of like how I keep track of how many years it's been. But so I, and actually, having my son is sort of part of the reason why I was motivated to start my own company I was on the PhD track and I was about to finish my masters. And so I decided to stop after the masters, you know when I had him but also because you know I had this idea of applying some of the, you know, socio linguistic research techniques that were part of my program in sort of a novel way, an industry. And so, you know, four years ago I feel like the company culture boom was sort of starting you know we're all of a sudden that phrase and people were talking about you know company culture and how important it is that sort of started. It was right, you know when I was thinking about starting this business and so, you know, coincided well that way where I thought you know linguists study culture through language, all the time, and they have been for decades, right, or socio linguists do. So why can't socio linguists then also study company culture through employee language use. And so at first I sort of looked around to see if someone was already doing this because it didn't occur you know I didn't start out thinking, you know I really want to be an entrepreneur I just had this idea and then I was like oh somebody must be doing this. And I couldn't quite find the exact right fit there, there are of course lots of companies, you know that I analyze survey results but not necessarily using a socio linguistic framework. Right, using other types of language frameworks. And so then I decided well, maybe I should do it. And then of course I had my son and I was like, this is the perfect time. I can start my business sort of slowly and let it grow organically as like my child grows and be home part time with him and so that's sort of why I started it and how I started it. And now four years later it's, yeah, sort of just a rock and roll and business you know I have clients and it grows every year and it's just a real it's been a really exciting adventure and of course though it has changed some of the things that I'm doing have changed you know from what you originally think when you set out right because you're that your idea that makes us with client needs. And as clients bring needs to your attention you're like, is that something a linguist can do and then of course you want to say yes it is just one because you're a business owner but two because you know as a linguist it's important to be flexible and thinking how can I bring my skills to this challenge that a client has and so that's been part of how my business has evolved over the last four years. Excellent. What do we want to take up next. Stephanie you want to tell us a little bit about some of the issues, well how how has your business changed I guess. Yes, absolutely because it's a big shift right. Yes, it's made a huge shift, because when I started the company, we were basically we were right when I started the company we're writing help systems for mainframes. Right. And then we started writing help systems and user guides and instruction doing instructional design for many computers and micro computers when they came out. But it got increasingly increasingly frustrating in that it's, you can only achieve the matter how good your help system is no matter how good your instructional design is. You can only do so much trying to explain a user hostile system, because what you want to start doing is changing the product or system, so that it's not so to lower the bar for the for the target audience and the user community. So, we realized that, and started, basically, we sent people to conferences we sent people back to school. That was actually when my philosophy of language. Academic background which I thought was never going to be of any use to me whatsoever in in the business world or real life I was studying it because I loved it. That's what I began to realize that that that the all the boundary the edge cases and the boundary things and the fuzzy sets and all the victim time that I'd studied, you know, had an had a place in in the world of trying to organize information and get user interfaces to be better. That's the way from doing pretty much 100% of content design and development with, you know, the attempt of the conversations with developers to say, you know, if you would make if you would change this this way. It would be a lot, you know, people would find it easier and it would only take a sense to tell people how to use it instead of a page and a half. And we certainly did that. And one of the funniest things in fact did was writing a user guide for an early piece of accounting software. We realized they must have had two or three different development teams on it who didn't talk to each other, because about half the commands, you had to enter a carriage return for them to take the effect take effect. Yeah, just took effect the second the string went in. And when we pointed this out, they wouldn't believe the company. They find we sat them to look. And they kind of went, Oh my God. Well at least they recognize that it was an issue if you had not a common syntax for your command line. Yes, yes, commands right. Exactly. Anyhow, so what we started doing was more and more interaction design, more and more information architecture which was we've been doing all along, but more interaction design and a great deal more user research because we realized that it wasn't enough, even for us to say no we know how to make this better. Because we were usually not didn't usually have the same profile, you know the socio part as the target audience. And what we needed to do is get real data about the target audience so from having a practice that was like 90% content design and we now have a practice that's probably 75% user research about, you know, and the rest is split between interaction design and still content design and develop. So it's, it's, but we, it puts us much more central to what's up. Yes, now we now we have the cat the picture. That's all right, but just much more central to where we go. We don't have a small child. We have will, we have willow who needs to be part of every conversation. Of course. So I know you have just thrown out a bunch of terms that we've introduced but I'm going to wait for the audience to ask you to unpack them again and I'm thinking of things like interaction design information architecture, you know, and all that kind of stuff. Okay, that's that's new words they've only heard them for the last week and a half a few times. Okay, and user search. I gave the user research talk this morning but I'm sure there's more to say there. Okay, so what would you like do you want to audience demand something more from us I'll let Nina take a turn and then we'll come back okay. So Nina, how, how did you organize your business to start with you said you had collaborators that you were working with, but now they've fallen to the wayside so it's all you. Can you talk about that kind of stuff or anything that was inspired by what Stephanie said. Well we started with three partners. And we would never have formed the company except for one of them who said she would do sales and convinced me and a friend of mine who was a graphic designer that we could do build websites. Although she's sort of a remarkable person we would get in elevators and she would introduce herself to everyone in the elevator which I just amazing because I'm really high. She eventually left and I got another partner and then the graphic designer left and we got another partner and eventually the other the last two basically retired. So we started out as just a company and then after a couple of years we, we managed to get we switched to being an LLC. So that we could protect our personal assets from any kind of suit or whatever. Because we live in a litigious society. We also had a lot of insurance for a very long time I've dropped it all now but we used to carry a million dollars of insurance. So if somebody's website stopped taking money for their product, you know and they suit us. We would have insurance. The website business changed so much over time. I mean, HTML changed everything. When we started it was hard to do websites and you had to have, you had to have a Mac and you had to have a PC had to have all the different browsers and they all look different and you had to code for all of that. And now none of that matters and there's so many high level programs it's a lot. I mean mostly if we do works websites now we do WordPress. So it's just, it's a very different system but as a linguist, what I found was that computer languages are just another language. And I mean, I learned, as I said I took my first programming class as a freshman and I kept taking programming at Michigan when I was getting my PhD in linguistics. And at Bell Labs I ended up being a programmer. So that was just, it just fell out from the fact that what I liked about linguistics was grammar. I mean, I went to college thinking I was going to major in French because I love taking French in high school and after my first term in college, it turned into literature. I was just appalled because I never cared about I wanted grammar forever. So, I think a lot of linguists who may not know that they could do programming, probably should think about it. So you recommend learning to program. I mean it was so much easier when Stephanie and I were coming along I mean women were programmers or there was no, but I understand now that, you know, it's women are very low percentage of people in computer science now but when we were there it was just normal. I mean, there were a lot more men than women but it didn't matter. I mean, you could at this point then they needed these skills so desperately, the field needed these skills so desperately that, you know, you could have stripes in the tail and it wouldn't matter if you could program. Willow could program. Yes, yes. Almost said that they decided this was too cutesy and I wouldn't say. So Samantha. Yeah, you have more to say Stephanie did I interrupt you. Well, it's just just the, Nina was talking about evolution size wise and I've had sort of a similar thing in that we started with basically with just me, and a couple of contractors, and we grew and we grew and we grew at our largest we had 42 employees. Wow. And that was just too much that was too many layers of management that was, you know, it was it was inefficient that it wasn't much fun. And so we started letting attrition take hold. And now we're, we're, we're a much, we're much smaller and doing stuff that's fun for me later in my career and not not management which is less fun for me. Right. Okay. I didn't realize you'd been up to 42 that's oh my God. I don't want to say it was dreadful but it was a challenge. Yes, I would say most of the time most of our huge period. We were some but we've been someplace between 10 and 20. Yeah, and that's what I would have guessed and so tell me Nina what we think. These were real employees, not country. They were. Absolutely. In on the neck. I mean we had an employee for one year and, and I was just so much paperwork. Yeah, I mean now we've we've actually say Wade so that now we're much more heavily contractors, because it makes it a little easier to to flex and, and because we've had built up relationships when you say contractors and and the, and people immediately go oh temporary you don't know that you just grab them from somewhere. No, some of our contractors have been with us for 20 years. Some of our contractors have been with us for longer than that. So it's, it's, you know, they're 1099 folks because we don't necessarily need their particular skill for every project, but it's a very, it's a lengthy and robot relationship. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Samantha have you tackled the employee or contractor challenge yet. Um, no, I mean I do have. I do work with contractors I work with a developer and I work with a graphic designer. So I, I do have that but in terms of like hiring contractors to help do the analytical work that I'm doing the linguistic work I haven't gotten there yet, but it sounds complicated. It can be. Yeah. Yeah, but a good kind of complicated right because growth is what you hope for so. Well, you know, and indeed it's expensive I mean you have to have the edge. I think actually I'm still carrying that million dollar insurance because liability because some of our clients require it. So, there you are. The insurance is one of our biggest expenses actually. I mean, next to people next to actually paying for people to do things. Right, so the labor costs are first and then insurance is another big one. Yeah, yep. But and you'd have physical offices. You know, we gave them up during the pandemic and I think everybody's happier. We had physical we've had we had physical offices for for 50 years and in the middle of the pandemic, we finally said this is ridiculous. They're expensive nobody's nobody's going there where we don't just fine. We don't need it we're working just fine remotely we're scattered around the country anyway. So, so we gave it up. And unfortunately some of the stuff is now still in my library. We added a lot of stuff, but because we've only get you know it's only been six or eight months since we hit the bullet and gave it up, but I think we're all happier actually. Good. So, somebody asks Samantha in the chat. What's your corporate structure. Are you a sole proprietorship or did you pick another. I'm an LLC as well. Yep. So, I think probably probably similar to what Nina is now, not what she started out with if I'm understanding correctly but yep and that's for the same reasons to just the right kind of protections for your assets. And, you know, I think an LLC, a lot of small businesses choose to be an LLC because it's fairly simple and yeah the protections are all there but it all depends on it depends on a lot of different factors what you choose. So, I'm seeing a question yeah. Yeah, I stayed a sole proprietorship for quite a while, and then shifted all the other direction and we're not we're a C corporation. Well, in California, if you make less than 250,000 a year, an LLC is cheaper than a S Corp. And we never made that much so it wasn't wasn't a wasn't hard for us to choose. Okay, yes, yeah, and I think it's really common for businesses to switch to you know you might you start out as something and then as as you grow and as your needs change you can switch. It's always easy to switch everything but usually worth it if you have to write. So how do people find out about your work, anybody and how do they choose you over whoever else might be available. Well, I can start with this one. So I found that, well, okay so the, the problem that I was that members solves is essentially workplace communication analytics, and I put it under the umbrella of people analytics because that's the term that businesses are using a lot. Right so they, they conduct all these people analytics on their workforce, and usually the type of data that they're using is demographic data and performance data. You know, we have X and X number of women, you know, of, you know, whatever race, and this is their performance data and they sort of collect this. People analytic data for, you know, whatever their, you know, human resources purposes are right for hiring for performance assessment and things like that. So what my company proposes is that actually language should be another data point in that under that people analytics umbrella. So if you really want to know how your workplace is how your teams are working together and how your employees are performing, you should be using language data from them as well organic language data. And so this is usually when I a new concept for businesses, because even though a lot of businesses have a lot of language data, especially since the pandemic when all of their businesses are recorded right, but even before the pandemic, you know, with just in general online online chat services on internal like internal chat systems, and things like that. They have a lot of usually have a lot of language data sitting there, right from surveys interviews things like that. But they've never considered, you know, using that as a part of their, you know, workforce analysis. And part of the reason for that is because they don't have a linguist on their team right was it's I can't believe that. Well, you know, it's so hard to analyze random language sentences if you're not trained to do that right how can you take you know, just even someone with a general communications degree and say like okay here's 1000 sentences from 500 employees, tell me something about how this team is working together from this data. That's a big task but a linguist can do that, as long as you set up the right research framework, you know, and you're sort of, you know, going by a system that's been established right. Anyways, the way that I get clients is that I have to explain all this to them first right because they don't know they've never considered it they don't even know necessarily that their people analytics are lacking because I'm sort of the one telling them hey you have you have a problem and I'm going to tell you about your problem and then I'll solve it for you. So that's a slow way to grow. Because the problem isn't necessarily obvious to them but once they see the potential of you know all that data that's there and then they realize. Oh my gosh, if we started analyzing language data we wouldn't have to survey our employees every six months, or we wouldn't have to, you know, like bug them, and doing like, you know, check ins as much right we were just collecting the data that's been there every day in the workplace, and, and using that as our metric in a systematic way. And so usually that goes well I have, I tend to have a really positive response in that first conversation and then it's just all about figuring out you know the best sort of project project arrangement but for me that makes that means that I my, my sales process right from the sales cycle I guess you would say from start to finish is slow, because I have to reach out to them. And I usually vet companies ahead of time so I'm always the one reaching out first and doing all of that sales work. I guess I should say that now I'm in year four right and so companies do reach out to me now. But in the beginning, I reached out to them, and I said hey I have this really cool thing that I'm doing I'm a linguist. Let's talk about it. And if they said yes that was a good sign and then you just go for it and propose it, and you get a lot of knows but you also get some yeses and all you need is a few yeses to start. And so I put in something that nobody was talking about before, right, like linguistics for people analytics, because becomes something that people are like oh yeah I heard about that or. Oh yeah you work with so and so didn't you right. And so then it sort of happens that way. So it is a slow process and I don't have do any other kinds of formal marketing at this point, because I've been intentionally sort of growing it a little more organically and as I said I've been home with my children part time. So I wanted it to sort of happen naturally like as I was ready right to transition to more. It's much harder if so you had a really hot sales person, getting you lots of new business, and I noticed Polina has a question and I want to be able to take that and then I'll come back to Stephanie. Hi, yes, hi. I actually wanted to ask what you were kind of describing, but so I will like to make a like a deeper question of like, after you talk with them and then say like okay let's give it. Let's start a trial, or like, how can you fully convince them that your product is worth it. And at the same time, how do you convince people to work for you when you're just starting. I know they would be in different process you will not just try to collect everybody like have 100 employees at the same time that you just started, but I wonder how you start becoming like there's also about like, oh now I need to maybe hire people to help me. This is something that you cannot just do alone. Thank you. Well, I will either Stephanie or Nina take the hiring questions since I've never hired. But I can say that, you know, in terms of like when you're selling something. One, I learned that you never want to give your services away for free. And that's like the bad, don't do that right so no trials no free anything. You know, you want to be genuine and in, and as long as you're, you're fair, you know, I think that's sort of the key thing and the other thing is to have examples of previous work right. And I'm able to say, you know, here's an example of a project I did, or, you know, testimonials from other clients, that's all great. That helps convince the business to go for it. But I think one way to get around giving away things for free is to have some smaller scale project options. So for me, because what I'm doing is brand new and the company's never heard of it and they're like a what's linguistics and I don't think we want you to analyze our like internal company chat, because that's, you know, they have some, like there's just a hurdle to get over there. You know, we can start with something really small, you know, maybe one team, or one person, right or one meeting. And not for free right, but a small project that helps them say like okay we're curious about this we want to try. We do have a budget for people analytics, let's see what linguistics can bring to the table, and sort of have that as part of your proposal process right it's sort of about scope and scale. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, and the other thing I think that's convincing in addition to samples work samples which are very, very convincing. The other thing is to have a clear and convincing the correctly convincing proposal that isn't just full of adjectives but makes makes describes the process and helps the people that are read that are reading the proposal, understand what they're going to get and how it's going to work and how it's going to play out because, you know, it is less so nowadays in, in user research and interaction design but you know, 20 years ago, hardly nobody knew what that was either. And we were having to go through exactly the process you describe. Now it's much, much better known. But I would say who. So indeed, as the chat comment said, you were describing business development and the other thing that I've always done is spoken at a lot of conferences because it's a combination of sort of paying forward whatever I've learned I'm, I'm sharing it with with other professionals and other people, and it also makes us visible. So we get, you know, we get a lot of inquiries as a result of that. But even then it's a funnel. And then this is probably a classic sales thing and I'm not a classic sales person but you know, I, I use I'd say I used to talk to 100 people to get to write 10 proposals to one project. And, you know, talking to 100 people can be, it's, it's challenging. But if you don't talk to them, then they can't get to the next step. So you need to do that. Cool. Yeah, that's really well said Stephanie. Yeah, the developing that funnel takes a lot of conversations but it does, it gets easier over time right like the heavy lifting is is in the beginning. And then once you get that funnel started it starts to take off on its own. Yes. And although it and people cycle in and out. So you get where you've got a lot of refer the more you do, the more referrals you get, but then people change jobs and you have a recession. You know, you're not quite starting all over again but but it's, you know, three steps forward and two steps back and then three steps forward, cyclic cycles. Yeah, yes, very much so. Ashley, I see you have your hand raised I assume that means you have a question. Thank you, thank you. I've appreciated hearing from everyone. And part of some of the confusion that I've run into with some business ideas is a bit of context and history on how what I'm trying to do has been done. So, I hearing from Stephanie and Nina, it sounds like you're more so saying that the, the, the services that linguists can provide have been being offered for quite some time, but it's a matter of them finally being recognized, but then from I'm kind of hearing that this is kind of something new and completely innovative, and I'm having a hard time finding where, where really the the truth might be there or how I can better approach companies in saying this is kind of how this has evolved over time, and where I'm kind of picking it up. And it's being confused by the fact that there are there are probably 10 different professions that overlap in different ways I've seen some very good visuals about this, about how no content design and development how that overlaps with user interface design how it overlaps with information architecture how it overlaps with with textual analysis, and there's bits of all of these different professions in what we're doing. So, again, it's a, you know, we have a communication challenge to help solve our clients communication challenges. I think, and in adding to not want to add something to what Stephanie has just said, Samantha is providing a service which probably wasn't provided before and exactly this way to an audience that hadn't been tapped before. So Samantha's audience is the HR departments at companies that are big enough to have budgets for this kind of analytics, whereas Stephanie's customers are companies who are developing products that they need to make sure communicate between the developers and the end users. And so that's where she started but she's still in product side and not in HR side. Yes, different clients that you can attract that your business can attract depending on the services you're providing. Does that help? We get an occasional HR client but mostly you're right mostly it's in product. Right. So it's the service or service that that linguists have been contributing to businesses and setting up businesses to help other people. But they've been doing it in a variety of different ways. Right. Yeah, I'll help Ashley. Anna, and to add to that to Ashley Anna. I found that from a sort of textual analysis side that the product world has been is sort of a head right of the company internal world. Right so if you're if you're looking at like products that are out there. You know that you can sort of like purchase for textual analysis to different things or like software products and things like that. Those are sometimes like more advanced than what a company might consider like using internally for you know their own workforce it's sort of like a, I guess, half of what I'm selling is sort of the idea that it's important to apply some of those same approaches right internally and then what the value of that is. So, yeah, like Nancy said the customer or the audience is is different, you know, for the product side and the company internal side. And I didn't even address Nina there so Nina, what size companies or organizations come to you to get help with their website design. We primarily did websites for small companies or single single users. I mean, you know lawyers, dentists, that sort of thing. We did originally. When we first started we were doing quite a few websites for groups at UCI. It was great. It was quite lucrative. But then things got a little easier to do and all the bit and the UCI had a whole UC system had a big budget crunch and so department started using graduate students to do their websites for free. So all that. Well, I don't know if they were free but they didn't get paid anything like what we got paid. Right. And I'm guessing also that that was part of the evolution of universities realizing that they had to control the websites in some way so that they all look like they come from the same organization. So there were higher level standards being put on people. Yeah, that was even later. And there was the push to have them be websites that each. So each department in the, in the big group would have a website that looked similar but they would be able to update it themselves and I'm not even, I mean now it's all WordPress as far as I know. And that's interesting though. We have mostly TechEd has mostly commercial clients but we actually have a lot of hospitals and a lot of universities. And it's mostly for user research so that the colleges, the University of Michigan is one of them but not alone by any means. The colleges have people that as, as Nina says that are doing it themselves. But if they're perceptive they recognize that they still need to be informed by user data. And so they'll come out to us because they don't have staff or they don't have staff for research. So when you do research what kinds of questions are you asking. Okay, we're, we're basically observe well depends on what kind of research, but most of the majority of the research we do is observational. So it's kind of it's kind of applied anthropology, and we're watching we're observing people use whatever it is whether it's the university website, or somebody's software product. And we observe, we observe people and we see what kinds of problems they have using a product or service. And then we, we watch several of them not just one, because people are different or a lot of individual differences. And then we go back to the client and, and we describe and we basically tell stories we describe the problems people had, and, and often will then go on and say, you know if you organize your menu this way. Then people will find the things they're, they're looking for right away, instead of struggling. And that's of course a vastly oversimplified realization, but I mean I remember working with back when they had standalone terminals, no dumb terminals. There was one that that took half a dozen people to find out where the on off switch was was on the back of one of the legs. Oh, yeah. And, and there are a lot of there are an amazing number of things like that out there still. In fact, there are, there are a lot of companies I can, I can list them and you probably heard of me too, who are saying, we need to make our products delightful. And I would love it if they were delightful but I would love it even more if they wouldn't put all kinds of terrible barriers between the target audience and the product. So, I'm all for delightful let's try to solve the usable first. So that's that's my own hobby horse I think is is don't try to make this because don't try to make it fancy until you've made it work. Right. Right. So, Ashley, I see your hand again, please. Yes, thank you. I did want to say thank you. You're asking me if that did clarify that really did answer my question very well. Okay, all I did want to ask Alex also Alex Johnson I wasn't sure if you were still part of the panel, because in the room, she can talk. You had introduced your, the company that you had and kind of what you were the services that you're providing beforehand. And I was curious how you approached or how the company that you were working with approached clients to do that type of work, where you considered HR, or the different part of the company. Thanks Ashley. So, when you're starting a company I've started my own company called strategic language solutions and I've worked with another boutique, meaning small couple of two people to do work with different clientele and when you're so small you do all of that work yourself. And you are just working your network you're reaching out to people you are connecting with people telling them what you can do for them what problems you can solve. And in our case, my case and with my other consulting work, we don't work with HR and larger companies we find it in our case to reach, it's more effective to reach out directly to two managers and people in C suites who are decision managers and control budgets. So we focus on that level when we are selling our products which are curricula on presentation skills and relationship management skills and leadership development and intercultural communication. So, you know, there are there are many ways to to go about business development but you can't get around just talking talking talking and meeting with as many people as possible to build up that network and to circulate what you can do, and thank you for defining that. Yeah, no I was so glad that you said it because we are having the first linguist in the C suite that I know is going to talk to us next week. Wow, there's a woman who's got a master's from MIT and did her undergraduate there too, who has become the CEO chief operations officer at for technology at Salesforce, and tech writing falls under her purview and she started out in tech so here we have a lot of examples of tech writing and then moving on to other directions within the same company or, you know, to expand to include that as well as other specialties. So thank you for introducing that term I think I've used it already but I wasn't clear that the audience knew that expression. Thank you. Paulina, tell us what's on your mind. Miss Stephanie sorry I have issue speaking to you in English. You were talking about not not like at the beginning like trying not to keep it a fancy to be like working detail like and like with the proposal be very descriptive and give a very good job. I was wondering, particularly Nina and Stephanie that have like a longer career, how has been your way to manage your money without asking specifically how like the amount, but when you start you have a limited budget. Did you have managed to make it work for you to expand your business in a way that is profitable. And then in a way that let you move forward. That's I would like to hear your stories. I had two business partners, and we all three were married to UCI professors who provided health insurance and had incomes. And I talked to a woman and when I was networking one time he told me the only way to be successful in a business was to really have to be successful. You know, it was your only source of income and you were going to starve on the streets if you didn't make a big deal of it. And we never did that. We never, we never had to, and I don't think we really wanted to I mean we were doing it sort of. I would say it was a hobby but and we were perfectly happy to make money but we didn't have to make money. And so, since we were partners. Basically we just took the same amount of money out that we made for each of us. And if we didn't make money we didn't take money out of the company. It's not like having employees who have, you have to pay. So it's just different so if you want to be successful I recommend having to be successful. It's a challenge it was it was it is stressful, because you, you hesitate a long time before deciding to hire someone, because you need to try to see the stream of projects coming in, but people don't make up their mind I mean it's, it's sadly still rare for us to get, you know, a year long there are our average project is probably two to three months. So, and you can't predict how long people will take it to make up their minds. So you're talking this is this 100 people talk to and 10 proposals. Okay, now you've got your 10 proposals, and they're all out there and you have no no idea when they're going to say yes or if or when they're going to say yes or no. So, we, there were times that we have actually 15 or 20 proposals actually out as, and none of them had said yes or no yet. So it's still you know all these years later, I still go, if you're going to say no please say it quickly. So there's there's there's definitely stress there. It's easier in the sense of financial stress. It's easier if you have contractors than employees because you don't have to pay them and don't have them. But on the other hand if you're trying, one if you're trying to do professional development with your staff members they need to be, they pretty much need to be staff members and send people to conferences and send them to courses and do continuing education for your employees. And two, if you need to be able to respond very quickly to people with rush projects, those, and then three, if you want your teams to be really embedded together and work really well together. All those things argue for employees. So it's a trade off and, and, as I say we segue it from not never having a contractor to now probably having more contractors than employees. And I think, I think a balance is actually good. You know, if if I were earlier in my career I would still be trying to maintain about an equal balance if I could. So that you're tempering the risk. You're not paying for all the employees to be, you know the horses sitting in the stable eating hay even when they're not racing or whatever. But, but on the other hand you have a continuity. And you have, and you have the fact that you're doing continuing education with them so you know what your people know and, and, and you see them increasing and improving their skills. I know is that does that help. I want to follow up on a different thread that we've been pulling on and that is more on this business development stuff. Namely, are you generally successful at getting a phase two project and a phase three project from the same client. Meet all of us. Yes, anybody who wants to jump in absolutely I mean if it weren't for that, it would be impossible. You know yes indeed I mean our, our, our best client, you know our best projects are the second or third or fourth or 10 project for a client. You know there are some, there are some, some of our clients we've been working for for more than 20 years now. I think that's really important so that means that at the end of your project when you say here's what we learned about this particular thing here are recommendations and should be let's let's check the following things that we didn't have a chance to do before. And when can we start on that. And sometimes it's a big we've got one we were working for one professional society in San Francisco, where there'll be a gap of two years we've been working for them for more than 10 years. And we're not doing a project all the time because they need a year or so did I just one set of research that we've done. So we're typically doing one research project every couple of years but but the continuity is there. Right, so that again is another, you know, balancing act about employees versus contractors if you've already worked for the ACME Society. Now some new staff members going to come in who doesn't know the history. Is that an issue. Yes, even though it's the same department right right yes. Yes, exactly. Now having long time contractors as I do helps that. That's why I'm able to do more with contractors now, because some of them have been with me a lot longer than many of our employees have been right. Anybody else have questions that you would like to address Nina do you have anything more to say about follow on projects. We can have a whole lot of that. All my clients, I'm hosting their websites. I rent a whole server in Michigan. And so I am not and I just do, you know, little changes for free you know you move your office I'll change the address on your website. Right. So it's sort of party or hosting fee. I've always liked the hosting because it's making money while you sleep, whereas everything else was, you know, making money or not, while you're struggling to get something done. Alex, did you have a question. I wanted to, you know, present another kind of encouragement for people who are thinking about starting their own businesses and thinking about business development and how to get that first client with respect to follow on projects because so often, delivering that first product or service is that that test of how you mesh with that company, how you align with that company and the value that you deliver you can put into place some metrics that will help you you can always include feedback you can try to develop relationships with champions within that organization this is why my organization targets the C suite executives who have the budget decision making and also manage teams who they want to develop so we're in the talent development business and getting somebody on your side who can champion your work within an organization with that type of decision making power can also can often lead to those follow on projects and in one or two, you know, very successful cases we managed to get on retainer with the company. This is like the golden, you know, Exactly. Because that means that they're paying you, you know, a certain number per every month to have you just at the ready to work with employees you get constant income that can kind of balance out juggling a portfolio of proposals that are out there and then coming in at various staggered timelines. So just wanted to throw that out there. Yeah, thank you that's a great model and I had forgotten that but I have I know people who've gotten those kinds of relationships going in it. It's lovely, and it may not last that long. I mean, the one example I'm thinking of is somebody who used to work for Stephanie, who's on her own was on her own at that point, and came in. This startup, well, not a startup, I shouldn't say that this company had like transformed itself and said, Oh, we were on this New York Stock Exchange, I guess we should have a customer experience department, which they'd never had, you know, like the CEO was trying to master Photoshop to get the stuff to get it was crazy. Anyway, they weren't they were in business for 16 years and finally formed a customer experience group which included a user experience group with a staff of more than one designer. And so they hired this experienced user experience with professional to come in as the UX manager was saying well how many designers should I hire before I get a research manager in here. How many, how do I get a writer in and when, when should I time that. And so some of those decisions about when to do things how to how to write staff descriptions that wouldn't overlap too much, and things like that so she was on retainer for probably, I don't know, two years or something, which was great because they didn't even call on her for, you know, I think it was quarterly she was getting paid and so I said, When I got there and I know her and I said, Okay, for this quarter can I ask you to do the following tasks because I don't see anybody else calling on you. Can you demo how to do this methodology technique with our, our department staff and so that I got to benefit from the fact she was already on retainer. So that's great. People are getting exposed to these ideas today and I hope that they will have many more opportunities to meet more linguists among the people that are yet to meet that I'm just pulling out of the top of my head, who have run their own UX business or communications business or something. I'm going to talk to Kevin badison who's going to be on the program with me tomorrow morning. We're not talking about his business, although he could have easily been a member of this panel as well. And if you want to grab him at one of the mixers or just message him on I'm sure he'd be happy to talk to you about that he was based in Sweden for a number of years like 30 years, and was working then with European audience largely but occasionally other parts of the world as well and had he had a long relationship with the Canadian embassy or the Canadian business development people in Sweden. Dana Chisnell had her own business for a long time and she co founded a nonprofit that I ended up working for for a while and she's currently with the US digital service but she could talk to that issue as well. Anyway, there's a there's a bunch of other people who have either currently are or have run their own businesses as linguists and industry. They may not call themselves linguists, because as we've heard from Samantha and others. Linguistics is kind of esoteric. I don't know what linguistics is are. Oh, how many, how many, your linguist how many, right, that's the question. And at right right away you know how naive they are so I think this is another issue is that we don't know how to hide our linguistic skills and knowledge, but we don't necessarily lead with it because it's not terminology that's familiar to the audience. Although Samantha I think is doing a great job of educating her clients to ask for linguistic services. Yeah, I think it's a good balance on to introduce the tech like linguistics as a technical term with something that they are already familiar with because it does give you credibility I mean linguistics and communication. You know, can be described with the word communication but linguistics is also more than that. And so it's important to say, you know my skills here go beyond, you know what you might associate with communication, right. And that's an important value add that you bring as someone who's doing work for a client. Great. So this Aubrey has a question in the chat so if Aubrey want to ask it you want me to ask it either way. It's about data security in some cases case but maybe others have comments about that too. I do see the question. So Aubrey asked, how do you handle the security concerns with analyzing user data. Yes. And so that is that is a concern for some clients. Luckily, when you're when I'm analyzing typically internal communications. So the, the data stays inside, you know the company, and it's only company internal data so you know teams. I typically never analyze transcripts of meetings or you know, things that involve any of like the, the clients clients, right or anything that involve you know another third party. So they're sort of that like restriction. And then it's sort of up to the company I of course have insurance as well. We were talking about insurance earlier in the, in the conversation. But I think you know the way that we handle the security concerns is just with the level of the level of comfort of the client. Some clients want to include a lot of demographic data along with a, with a language transcript because you can learn more. So for example, you know I've recomended that oh I'm sure it's anonymized. And actually, yes, no names, but sometimes it's not anonymous in any other way because they want to know that they need to include that demographic information in order to really understand how their teams are working together I mean, if you have. What's a good example like the only woman on a team. Yes, exactly or to take a random example yeah. And to know, you know, the, who basically, you know that that person is a woman, right. And sometimes it, you know the company does want to know who that woman is because if you, you know, or who that person is, because if you're analyzing the language, you know you want to use that data to improve business outcomes and these are your employees. And that can be important. And so as long as the data stays within the company, usually companies don't have a huge issue with it. But that's another reason why I typically don't analyze email everyone always asked me about email right away they're like oh so email so you analyze emails. And actually not usually because emails are complicated and they go, there's a lot of external uses for emails, right, and you can filter for internal emails only. But typically what we're trying to do is actually you know internal meetings internal chats, things that are truly you know exclusively company internal to keep that secure data secure and private for the company. And you know, most employees don't think about this but you know your employer owns your chats and your meeting transcripts and actually your emails to right so um you know even though it might feel like a violation of your privacy. That's something that your employer actually owns and so they get to make the decisions about that. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good. And how aware are the employees of your work. You know, I actually haven't had. I haven't had a lot of employees or people, you know, who are sort of the team members right express concerns about privacy usually like any privacy concerns are sort of addressed with the person who's sort of doing the purchasing or the person that I'm like selling to. And once it's been done, sort of the sale, the teammates who are participating in the analysis or the language that's being analyzed those individuals are usually just really excited about it because it's just something new, you know and interesting. People love to learn about their own language patterns. And it feels, you know, like something special that a company is doing to sort of, I don't know, like really, really, you know, take notice of how their team is performing. Excellent. So thank you all very much. I know that we're coming up to the hour mark and we have another talk that starts on the hour. So if anybody has some closing remarks they'd like to make something that I didn't ask about or you didn't ask one another about be happy to hear some of those. That's a great question that almost that is does is a really nice wrap up question. Excellent. So let's talk about it. I'll try not to pull my headset out again. Hmm. So, are there any so I'm going to read out the question from Andy. Are there any recommendations of where to start when thinking about starting our own business, especially related to our linguistic skills. So, send them off with some fabulous recommendations. I think try. I think think I guess I would say, look for problems that you can address or solve. Think about, think about what needs attention in the context of what you know how to do. Think of examples of experience, think of examples of experiences, which are painful, which could be improved by applying related skills to them. And then, I think I, I feel like one has a better chance, looking for a problem and saying you can solve it, then building a better mousetrap because somebody might not want a better mousetrap. Nina, any closing thoughts. Well, I certainly wouldn't start a website company at this point there. I don't have any and so much as so much easier to do than when we started so I don't know what to say other than that. And I think you're a great example of somebody who started a business to maintain your, you know, interest and lively hood but it wasn't the primary source of your family's income. And I think that's true for a number of businesses that they're not all interested in giant growth. So it may be that Samantha is going to turn into a whole industry, because she's tackling a problem that we hadn't even addressed before from a linguistic point of view. Stephanie's shown a wonderful example of how the growth of your business might be organic because of the changing needs the changes in technology, and so on. So that you've grown, and now you're coming down a little bit. And I don't, I don't know whether anybody's going to take up your mental when you decide to retire, or, you know, then you have a choice. Are you going to close the business or are you going to sell the business. That's those are indeed some of the upcoming questions, right. It's such, you know, it's such a challenge that that most, most people don't want, most people don't want some to do something that hard. Right. So there you go. I like hard problems. What could I say, great. Well, we certainly appreciate your spending some time with us today. And I'm hoping that if students have the participants in our program have further questions they can be in touch with you in the future. It was a pleasure.