Eight Things a Translator Can do Over the Summer
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- Jose Henrique Lamensdorf
- I live in the Southern Hemisphere (Southeastern Brazil), so my Summer starts just a few days before Xmas. However the title here struck me, as I realized that I made all my major business policy changes in January. Hence... 9. REVIEW YOUR BUSINESS POLICIES My history... I. January 2009 - The USD suddenly dropped 25% relative to my domestic currency (BRL). No, I didn't do it myself, I'm not THAT almighty. However I immediately realized that I'd be losing a considerable part of my income on every foreign job I took. So I'd be favoring local currency jobs, albeit not relinquishing the global market. I'd wait to see the USD recover its value. II. January 2010 - No change in the USD exchange rate. I braced myself financially, and raised my international rates by 20%. I expected my demand to drop significantly. Of course, I immediately lost forever all those clients that I always doubted whether they were worth keeping. I explained the situation to my good clients, they understood and agreed at once, and I am still with them today. However to my surprise, I was immediately approached by a new breed of clients who thought it was impossible to get the quality they required for my previous rate, and these are still with me today as well. In order to make it clear, my domestic rates (in BRL) have remained unchanged since 1994; advances in IT having made that more than possible. III. January 2012 - The USD recovered those 25%. Should I lower my international rates to the previous level? First, I checked on Brazilian interest rates, about 10% per month (sic! - still today) on bank overdraft, while they are a (small) fraction of 1% in my foreign clients' countries. Considering that 30-day payment was tantamount of me granting a loan to a client for that period, if I needed that payment to cover my bills in the meantime, 10% would be the interest I'd be paying. Then I checked the so-popular PayPal, owned by and devised for eBay. They charged no fees to the payer, however they deducted 6.5% in fees from the payee (me!), plus overtly adopted a 3.5% lower-than-market exchange rate to pay me in BRL. Another 10%! So I decided to keep my rates at that same higher level, however giving discounts for faster payment, as well as for payments via bank transfer instead of PayPal. A couple of cash-flow-impaired clients stuck to their 30-day terms, in spite of the higher price, and gradually vanished. Most clients realized that a loan in their own country would take years to accrue that much interest, and gladly went for the discounts. IV. January 2013 - I took longer vacations, two weeks instead of the usual one. I went online once a day for e-mail only. Upon my return, my to-do inbox was stacked sky-high, with many requests demanding high priority. I used to have a rush policy drawn from the BR law on sworn translations, surcharging 50% on weekdays, and 100% on weekends for top priority/faster service. Okay, so one client was willing to top it with 50% to be served first. When I explained this to another one, he offered 80% extra for the rush, which raised a red flag to me. Hey, I can't honestly waitlist a 50% extra rush job because another one is paying 80% extra! Some quick thinking led me to realize that these rush surcharges contributed more to havoc in my schedule than to my income, so I decided to abolish them for good. As a temporary solution, intended to cut through that pile of work, I decided to prioritize jobs on the shortest payment term getting served first. It worked so amazingly well, than I still keep it in full effect. 97% of my clients nowadays pay me COD to have priority service and enjoy those discounts as well. Clients who stick to longer payment terms can't get service from me, as they'll never rise up to enough priority. Rush? All that anyone wanting top priority has to do is to pay me in advance for the job. I'll take only ONE prepaid job at a time, and will only drop it after it's done and delivered. The beauty of it is that nobody can time-travel to prepay earlier after someone else has done it. For the record, I have only had 2-3 prepaid jobs per year. For the record, I still hold my record (pun intended)... NO translation job delivered late since 1973. My summer-decisions on policies have worked so well that if any ideas come up through the year, unless they really must be implemented forthwith, I'll procrastinate them until the next Summer!
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- 23/07/2015
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