#289 Day Translations CEO Sean Hopwood on Building a Language Solutions Integrator

0:00Sean Hopwood:We've been using our profits to create revenue, and it has helped us stay lean. It's helped us not over bloat our company into hiring too many people.

0:15All right, and welcome to SlaterPod. Today on the podcast, we welcome Sean Hopwood. So Sean is the founder and CEO of Language Solutions Integrator, Date Translations. Hi, Sean, and thanks so much for joining today.

0:26Sean Hopwood:Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. So where in the world are you recording this from today? What part of the world? I'm in Tampa, Florida. It's in the middle of the summer. It's pretty warm. Yeah. I don't want to start talking about the weather, but we had the most recent episode where we were complaining about the weather here in Zurich and in London. And yeah, same here. It's crazy. But you guys are more used to it than we are. So you have air con. We don't. Oh, yeah. That's one thing I read about. I was like, well, how can you all survive without air conditioning? We have no air con.

0:56Sean Hopwood:It feels like actually when you open the door in Florida, it feels like the heater, like you're opening an oven. It's pretty crazy. Same here now, except that if you go inside, you're inside the oven. There's no escape. There is no escape. All right, look, let's get started. We want to learn more about day translation. So first, I want to ask you a bit about professional background. You've been an entrepreneur for a long time. So tell us a bit about that, your background, and maybe then transition to just give us the kind of day translations pitch in a nutshell before we go and start talking about a lot of other interesting things.

1:30Sean Hopwood:Oh, sure. Yes. I've been an entrepreneur for a long time. I've been running this business for 20 years and I started, I actually studied entrepreneurship in college. I always thought that I was going to do something and start my own business. I actually did some things like, even when I was little, I used to wash cars. When I was in college, I used to deliver flowers as like a business. I used to, but I used to do all types of stuff. But whenever I graduated college, I was always interested in languages. I studied languages from when I was really little. When I was eight years old, I started learning Spanish.

2:02Sean Hopwood:I started learning French when I was like 14. I started learning Laotian and all these different languages when I was in high school. And so naturally, I thought that it was a good idea to start a translation business. I would go speak to people around, just around my own city. I would go to different networking events and they would start asking me to do translations. So I would do that. And eventually I learned coding. I learned how to start my own website. I learned about marketing and I started day translations. I focused initially on Spanish, but after that I decided let's just do all languages.

2:40Sean Hopwood:So yeah, from a love for languages from when I was really young. And an entrepreneurial spirit is how I started Day Translations. What's the history behind the name Day Translations? Is it like in one day or? That's a great question. It's the most important name for me in the world because it's my grandfather's last name. His name is Francis Joseph Day. He was a guy who inspired me from when I was really little. He would send me to, he sent me to computer camp when I was like 10 years old in Massachusetts all by myself. He sent me to all different kinds of camps, like learning how to survive in the wild.

3:20Sean Hopwood:I was a Boy Scout too. So I was so inspired by him. And so I wanted to keep the family name. And so I chose Day Translations Plus. It's obviously a very simple, easy, easy thing to remember, you know, Day Translations. And so we've surrounded all of our branding around that name, Day Translations. We use the sun. We try to make sure that, you know, and a lot of people do get that idea that we're open all the time it's always daytime so we we are open all the time now just because because of that you know we're open 24 hours a day and even on weekends so that's something that has really been helpful for us you mentioned laotian so i i spent some time in asia i haven't been able to go to laos but like how how would you like why what is like what what's what type of language is Laotian like and and why would you start studying Laotian well that's interesting because my best friends in high school are from Laos you know so I that's one of the reasons but I just take any opportunity to learn a language if I'm around someone from Bangladesh I'm gonna start wanting to learn you know Bengali or Bangladeshi language I want to learn you know any opportunity I get to learn a language I'm gonna I'm gonna learn it so the people that were surrounding me when I was in high school, I had a very diverse set of friends, but a lot of them were from Laos, and I would go to their family's house, they would cook for me, the parents would always speak to me on Laotian, and it was, and I got okay at it, I could have basic conversations, but the writing, I never really got that, the writing like Khmer, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai, all those language, all those scripts are pretty difficult, but one day I will, When I get the time, I'll learn those.

5:04What part of the day translation's volume mix is Laotian? Like 0.01 %?

5:09Sean Hopwood:Probably, yeah. 0.01%. We get those, but we'll do all the rare ones. We even get like Hakachin, which is like, you know, I believe a language in Myanmar. So we get that and we'll do it. So a lot of people come to us for those things because, you know, we like they know I'm passionate about languages. I'm not going to reject anything. So, yeah, we do. but we do Laotian for sure and especially for immigration so that's something we always do. Was it a curse or a blessing to speak multiple languages when you went into the translation business because sometimes like that the passion for language you know kind of gets in the way of the business of language maybe?

5:48Sean Hopwood:Definitely that's a great question because I there's some people I know who are linguists and they just keep their company like medium-sized and they just you know stay within their niche and stuff like that. Luckily, I do have a background in business. I have a master's in business administration. But it has been, just like you said, it's been a blessing and a curse. Like, I love languages. But little by little, I've learned the corporate side of things. You have these big companies that come in and they have, you know, finance teams. They have, you know, they have venture capital and stuff like that.

6:23Sean Hopwood:That's something I wasn't really familiar with. And so I've kind of just grown my company little by little from the revenue that we make from clients. But little by little, I have learned we've actually hired a business analyst to work at our company and a strategist who knows these things. And she has helped bring our company to the next level. She's helped us turn into more of a corporate company. You know, when we having things like KPIs, you know, employee reviews, you know, standards, getting an ISO certification. We became an official government contractor last year. We do HIPAA training every three months for all of our employees.

7:04Sean Hopwood:So these are things that are like really corporate that I had to learn. And, you know, but when you talk about languages, I can talk about forever. When you talk about the corporate side, it's been a little bit more challenging for me. but I've definitely evolved. So how has the customer mix evolved from the early days since you said on the kind of corporate strategy and company side you've staffed up and you have people now running some of these aspects. But on the customer side, like from the kind of individual requests maybe early on to now like enterprise, language solutions, corporate accounts?

7:38Sean Hopwood:It's crazy. I have some people who have been in my company for actually 19 years. So they've seen the evolution. And I like to keep people there so we can actually share that journey together. But yeah, I started off. My first translation was for a church. It was for this church from the Bahamian Synod of Tampa. It was some pamphlets for the church. It was just like 500 words. I did it myself. And then we did some love letters. I haven't heard love letters yet. I've had all kinds of others, all kinds of others kind of early translations. Love letters? No. Yeah, there was this couple. one was from England and the man was from Ecuador.

8:17Sean Hopwood:And they were writing back to each other these love letters for like years. And eventually they met up and they took a picture of each other together and they sent it to us. And it was like every translation we did was like maybe like a$5 translation or something like that. And we just kept doing them. And eventually like the reward that I felt is like we saw them together. It was really nice. They took a picture. And then we had to just, like I told you, I got that strategist at our company. We went more into the corporate. We kept doing, you know, all these translations, these bigger translations.

8:51Sean Hopwood:We got requests from franchises. We got legal requests. And luckily, I was actually a legal translator at a law firm. So I was really familiar with the certification process for court and everything like that. So that became another one of our big niches, doing certified translations for court. and I was also a medical interpreter and a trainer at this very prestigious hospital in Tampa called Moffitt Cancer Center and so I knew the medical side and I knew the legal side and interestingly enough those were like our two biggest you know our two biggest fields so we started growing in that and then I realized we have to get you know we have to get certified These companies like certifications.

9:32Sean Hopwood:They like compliance. So we started getting all of our important compliances, like ISO certification. We're getting SOC2 certification next week. So, yeah. When you get into these big RFPs, right, you need to have these certifications to check the boxes to even kind of get past that first hurdle before you even get to do the offering. Definitely. Those have been challenging, you know. But we've won a few of them. Why don't we talk a bit about automation and AI? 10 years ago, NMT, Neuromachine Translation, was the big disruption around the time when Slater started. So today, it's of course all AI.

10:11You've been through the first wave of disruption, the second one now. What's the same? What's different from your vantage point?

10:19Sean Hopwood:Well, evolving is fun. Evolving with the industry is fun. the first wave nmt was interesting because even before i started the company i used this software that you might be familiar with cistran or cistran soft yeah that was that was what i i was always using that was what i used at a law firm and and then google translate was around and then of course all these nmt companies you know i was i was not really using them as much as i should have. We were really, really priding ourselves on a human translation company, 100 % human. And we used machine translation maybe 10, 15 % of the time. And then, but when AI came along, I was already really into it.

11:03Sean Hopwood:I had been studying, you know, different things. Like I worked with DID, D-ID, Eleven Labs. I worked with Hugging Face trying to, you know, I always knew a lot about AI. And I had a lot of friends around me who were really interested in artificial intelligence and we would have meetups and stuff so i was like extremely prepared i even used this uh this company lyrebird to it was a company like even before the ai craze lyrebird l-y-r-e it was um never heard of it was yeah they would just copy your voice and they and they would you could say anything with your voice you know so i was really into it and so when the ai came craze came along and it's not just for the translation industry obviously it's for the whole world.

11:46Sean Hopwood:I mean, law firms, hospitals, transcriptionists, everything. So I was really prepared for that. I was really prepared for that. And so we have implemented a lot of translation workflows in our company. We've actually created our own LLM, a large language model we have. And so that's another thing we've done because a lot of the RFPs that we've applied for, they kind of require you to have your own LLM. So that's something we've been doing. And we have a really good tech department. So I'm really into technology. Is it mostly used for like in-house productivity games or have you productized some of that for the clients?

12:27Sean Hopwood:The LLM, we are productizing, but it's something that we read some RFPs many months ago that said you should have your own for these like large government projects. So we created it for that and we're going to be productizing it also probably within three to four months. Got it. Our own LLM. We've got a genius at our company and I'm like, how did you guys do this? But yeah, it's pretty nice. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's moving so quickly, right? I mean, there's also a bunch of like open source stuff that one can customize and yeah, very, very hard to keep up for everyone. Yeah, it's hard to keep up, but that's kind of like everything in life.

13:11Sean Hopwood:You have to stay keeping up. With your diet, you got to keep up. As soon as you start eating bad, it takes a lot longer to catch back up. Exercise, stuff like that. When it comes to learning, it's a nonstop process. Once you stop, it's hard to get back on there. And so I've observed other people in my whole life, even when I was really young. you know some people who like kind of let go and just that's that's not a good idea never let go I mean you can never rest you can maybe take like a three-day vacation maybe once in your life but in this world now you have to constantly be learning it's it's it's it's a lot of pressure but it's Sean you're talking to a European here three three-day vacation well it's a I don't know this American people say that I have a very I work a lot I haven't taken many vacations but when I do I always make sure it's like a work vacation so I don't feel guilty which is really people say it's it's bad but like I'll go to a conference like in New York and then I'll take a vacation at the conference and stuff like that or something like that for a day yeah take a walk in Central Park you know I'm like that was my vacation because I I feel so like there's so much work to do so I feel like you know I don't like to take really long vacations so in terms of work to do I mean, like, yeah, the language industry, language solutions, AI, it's super competitive, like hyper competitive.

14:33So like you in leadership, are you also taking part in marketing and sales? Are you doing kind of sales calls yourself? Are you meeting clients like on a regular basis or you'd like other people to do that? Or you'd like to build the systems that bring in the clients?

14:47Sean Hopwood:I do a lot of the sales myself, actually. I love doing it. I love speaking to the clients. And we've gotten to a good place where I kind of know my position. We have a sales team, of course, but I'm always on the call with our clients. And then they're actually learning from me in the way I speak. And I tell them, be bolder. Understand that you can change the price or understand what the client needs. When will we be needing machine translation? Will this client need AI translation? We have to know how to adapt. So, yeah, I speak to a lot of the big clients. I actually, I do about two sales calls per day and our team obviously does a lot more, but I'm involved.

15:30Sean Hopwood:I'm always trying to be involved in the larger ones and I would like to be involved in all of them if I could. But yeah, I'm really involved, you know, because I just, I know everything about the industry and it makes the clients feel comfortable. Is it a hundred percent remote these days or do you still do like in-person visits to some key clients? I do in person sometimes, and I love it. I love it. I'm going to go to Houston coming up very soon. I went to Miami. I went to Tampa. I went to Washington, D.C. I would love to take a vacation and go to Mexico maybe. I've always wanted to go to Mexico City.

16:06Sean Hopwood:I've never been there. And there's a lot of business in Mexico City. So hopefully I'll be able to go to Mexico City soon and take like a half vacation. There you go. Yeah, no, it used to be in my like prior language industry, the side days, we used to have like a target for salespeople, two in-person client meetings a day. But that's when you all, like that was in the mid 2000s, right? Early 2010s. That's when like a remote call was like kind of odd. So you would have to meet people like anywhere based in at that time in Singapore and Hong Kong, which like you could just take an elevator and go like 10 floors up and meet another client, so it was more feasible.

16:46But now it's so much, I mean, everything's remote. It's kind of, yeah, unless you're in a very tight city. Hong Kong sounds nice. Can we talk about interpreting? You launched an interpreting app back in 2019. That seems like good timing, kind of a remote interpreting app prior to the pandemic. So can you just tell us a bit about the difference between kind of running a text translation business and then branching out into opi and and and maybe your thoughts around like how ai may may be changing the interpreting in the future yeah we did start it in 2019 and it took a

17:23Sean Hopwood:while to catch on but we did we did market it at the right time we did start it at the right time again i was actually a translator and an interpreter so i knew um it was very helpful in training the interpreters you know because i knew what to tell them i knew that I would tell them, you have to have a glossary, you know, that you study before every interpretation. And some of the interpreters would say like, oh, I don't want to study before the interpretation. I'm like, well, then we can't work with you. You know, you have to study before the interpretation. You have to create a, if it's something about some difficult, you know, subject, like something talking about cerebrospinal fluid, you know, that's probably a hard word to translate in many different languages.

18:04Sean Hopwood:You have to know that word if you're going to be, you know, doing an interpretation so we trained all the interpreters the platform we made I mean we we have an we have an app in the iPhone store and as well as the Android store as well as our app integrates with Zoom and Microsoft Teams now and I believe it's in the chat GPT store there's like an app store in the chat GPT store now and I think that our app is in that one so we have the technical expertise. I believe the day interpreting app, it's because we're called day translations. The app is called day interpreting for interpreting. That app is really sophisticated.

18:44Sean Hopwood:I mean, you can get an interpreter within 10 seconds. But when it comes with, as you had mentioned with AI, we already have that ready. So, you know, if it becomes compliant or if the hospitals ever require, if there's a client who requires AI interpreting, which I don't think they're really comfortable with right now. But if they do, then we have that as an option too. And there's actually a button. You can do AI interpretation and then you can click a button to actually speak to a human when you're actually on the call. So we have that ready already. What should we call this? AI interpreting or AI speech translation?

19:25We keep thinking about it.

19:27Sean Hopwood:Yeah. I don't know. AI interpreting. Some people call it live translation. you know right because you know us in the industry we call it translation translation we call interpreting interpreting but you know the clients out there they call it live translation or they'll call it phone translation so we have to kind of like adapt to the words that they use sometimes but if if i have the chance to talk to them like well interpreting is spoken and translation is written but you know yeah i i go with ai ai interpreting yeah interpreting now where do you see most demand in your business? Is it mostly healthcare or schools or government or what type of areas for interpreting?

20:06Sean Hopwood:We have a lot. The volume is mostly legal. Mostly legal for us, but the revenue, I guess, would be higher in medical. In medical translation and interpreting, the revenue would be higher per client. And with government, the revenue is the highest, but like we're talking about those RFPs, we're trying to get them filled out correctly. We're trying to comply with all the things they're requiring, you know, such as these ISO compliance, SOC 2 compliance, all these different trainings they want us to do. So, yeah. So volume would go in order, like legal, medical, government, but revenue in order would be government, medical, legal.

20:48You mentioned kind of the bootstrapping element of day translation that you've probably been approached by some of the, you know, I don't know, private equity funds or other kind of financial funds. So how do you think about taking on, or not, right, outside funding, working with one of these funds? And how was it over the years to kind of finance the development of the company just from internal resources? I mean, I'm sure there was temptation of taking on an outside investment, maybe like in the 2021, 2022 days when the investors would just look at any business that turned a profit and wanted to invest.

21:26Sean Hopwood:Yeah. I got a lot of emails like that. I got a lot of messages on LinkedIn about those things, you know, private investment. But I never really entertained those ideas. I would. I mean, if they were the right partner and they really knew how to help our business grow into, you know, something we really wanted. Because I would grow into further than translation. I would grow into staffing, BPO services, you know, medical transcription, all those things. but we haven't I haven't had the right person actually contact us about that with the bootstrapping it's interesting because I would just it's just like it sounds you know like you make money and then you use that money to grow to the next level and then you save up money and then you use that to go to the next level and that's what we that's what we've constantly been doing you know we've been using our profits to to create revenue and it has helped us stay lean it's helped us not over bloat our company into hiring too many people because we always have to stay within a certain budget in translation generally i at least in the earlier days like it was relatively easy to like scale up and scale down if you you know if there's some cyclicality to the business you you know it doesn't have a ton of overhead i guess is what i'm saying yeah because with the translators you know they're only we're only using them when whenever we need them same thing with interpreters um and With the internal team, we try to keep them compact and lean as much as we can.

22:54Sean Hopwood:But yeah, it's always important to stay within budget, and that's what we try to do. What are your thoughts around general scale in the language industry? We're seeing some of the large ones doing well or at least surviving in a current environment. Some of the very small ones just being super nimble and adjusting, but some of the mid-sized ones are really... Like they have achieved a certain size, but now need to be like super nimble, super fast. Like what are your thoughts around like which size works in this industry? Well, I know some people who have these small organizations and they do it kind of like a hobby and they're very comfortable with it.

23:34Sean Hopwood:For me personally, I think you have to constantly be growing. You know, we have these midsize companies. I guess it's possible to stay the same size. you know you don't take any risks you're like you're just you know I don't want to really they don't take a lot of risk but I think actually constantly trying to grow is the best way to do things because eventually there's going to be disruptive things like neural machine translation AI all these other things and you have to be constantly learning there could be something new there could be you know alien translations come up one day and you have to translate for aliens so like what if you're not prepared you know what if you like you have to always be prepared so you have to always be ready to change you have to be ready to adapt and that's my philosophy i i've i've i know people that their their philosophy is to stay the same size there's restaurants that are there have just been one restaurant forever for and they've been owned by the same people mom and pop restaurants and they're happy and they retire when they're like 70 and and they're happy but i would be the kind of person that would just be franchising the restaurants and making multiple restaurants there have actually been franchises even in the translation business but i don't think they really worked so far like i think a few people tried in the u.s to franchise yeah but we've kind of tried to we've had multiple offices and we made we made manuals for those offices but they were kind of like you know within still within the company So it was like a partially owned franchise.

25:07All right. Let's move away from the business and talk about like kind of global multilingualism since you're a polyglot. I want to get your take on what's – maybe you start with like just the English centricity of the world generally. Like what are we gaining? What are we losing? You know, like English is not my native language and like half the planet now speaks English as a second language. What are we gaining with this, that English is so dominating? And maybe what are we losing here?

25:40Sean Hopwood:We're gaining a lot of internationalization. And you sound like your English is perfect, so that's pretty good. If that's not your first language, it's actually really good. But we're gaining a lot of internationalization, localization, but I guess a little bit of culture gets lost in that. But then again, in a way, when you have a multicultural society, they actually learn each other's cultures and new cultures are created. So it can be very interesting. You have places like Europe with so many different languages. And obviously, it's been a while, but when they created the European Union, the travel between countries was a lot easier.