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Are you ready to bring your company to new levels of success? Do you want to outshine your competitors more than ever before? There are many avenues you can take to achieve this, from revamping your public relations strategy to spending more on digital advertising, to launching a whole new product or service. However, there is one surefire strategy for maximizing a business’s potential that is often overlooked: mastering a foreign language.

There are so many benefits, both business and personal, that you can gain just from learning a new language. Here are a few ways that becoming fluent in another language will help you and your business succeed.

Reach a Whole New Market of Consumers

Are you looking to expand your business on a global scale and offer your goods or services to consumers in another country? Learning the language and culture of this nation will be key for a successful international expansion. If you market a line of products, you will be able to better negotiate contracts with owners of local stores. If your business offers a service, you can hire and train people in the new country to become representatives who can offer the service to local citizens.

Learning the country’s language and culture will also help you network better with local industry professionals and know which marketing strategies will resonate the best with the nation’s consumers. To get started on your journey of learning the new country’s language and culture, enlist the help of one of the many online tutors who are available 24/7 and adaptable to your schedule. The professionals at livelingua.com who offer tutoring sessions via Skype are one great option for busy entrepreneurs.

Learning a New Language Will Bring Financial Freedom Post-Coronavirus

It may be counter-intuitive during the COVID-19 crisis, but people will have financial freedom once they start traveling again. Many of us have been working remotely since the start of the pandemic, and companies have seen productivity and work satisfaction (assuming employees’ kids are not home) go up during this time. This means the work-from-home policy may continue for many of us. However, rather than just stay in the same place and work from home, you can peddle this into a 400%+ increase in your spending power if you learn a new language and are willing to be adventurous.

How? The answer is easy: just relocate to a country where the cost of living is a fraction of where you live now. If you reside in a major city in the US and are willing to move to Mexico or Latin America, your money would be worth 400% more overnight. This increase in your spending power can allow you to further invest in services that will help your business. Also, instead of running your company in an expensive city, you could manage operations between surf sessions in Brazil. Instead of spending $50.00 US for your lunch, you could enjoy a full meal of tasty tacos in Mexico for about $5.00 US. To make these moves, feel safer, and really make the most of your experience living in another country, learning the language and culture is key.

Maximize Your Potential as an Entrepreneur

As business owners, we are always looking for ways to improve our abilities. If you want to experience the most personal development and growth, it is vital to continually challenge and educate yourself. Therefore, mastering a new language can be crucial in helping you become the best entrepreneur you can be. Here is how:

It Physically Changes Your Brain for the Better

Our brain has the ability to constantly change due to environmental impacts, thoughts, emotions, or brain exercise through learning. Moreover, learning a new language greatly affects brain plasticity; it changes the brain by building many new neural pathways and connections that form white and gray brain matter. The changes in the brain that learning a new language brings have been studied for years. It has been confirmed that by becoming fluent in one or more new languages, the brain develops seriously enhanced cognitive abilities, multitasking abilities, and improved memory. All of these improvements can help you become a more successful business owner.

It Will Give You a Morale Boost During Difficult Times

There’s no doubt that running a business can sometimes be very stressful, such as when problems with inventory or manufacturing arise. That said, if you are ever feeling depressed or defeated, it’s essential to participate in activities that will give you a much-needed positivity boost. Bolstering your morale can help you stay motivated and uplifted while you’re managing the day-to-day operations of your company. If you have been feeling sad or hopeless, mastering a new language is a logical, holistic, and natural approach to easing symptoms of depression.

Prolonged periods of stress and worries decrease the levels of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins, which ultimately results in negative emotions that induce and amplify symptoms of depression. However, achieving something so great as becoming fluent in a foreign language will make you feel happy and satisfied with the accomplishment. These feelings of self-appreciation and content will help make you happier and physically impact your mental state. Through learning a new language, you are also opening a door to meeting new people and widening your horizons, which can help spark new ideas for your business.

To Wrap It All Up

As company founders, we are always on the lookout for ways to improve our startups. Becoming fluent in a new language can be the ultimate solution for helping you on your journey to achieving greater business success. Learning a new language will help you reach a whole new market of consumers and experience more financial freedom post-coronavirus. It will also help you grow as a person and become the best business owner you can be. Embark on your journey of learning a new language today by connecting with one of the many skilled language tutors who are available online.

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Ray Blakney is the CEO and co-founder of Live Lingua, a renowned online language learning platform. Live Lingua offers a unique and immersive approach to mastering a new language, as it pairs users who want to learn Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and more with their own hand-picked, certified, native-speaking tutor for online teaching sessions. An award-winning, Filipino-American entrepreneur, speaker, and podcaster, Ray builds and helps others build 6- and 7-figure businesses on a bootstrap budget using SEO. www.livelingua.com

Those “silos” that often pop up in large organizations – where departments fail to share information, tools and priorities – can prove especially vexing when a product’s global success depends on translating information into other languages.

Because of silos, the same information might be translated separately by every department, costing the company thousands in extra (and unnecessary) translation costs. A product’s packaging claim could conflict with material the marketing department is sending out. Or trouble could begin brewing over translations that weren’t vetted by the legal department and inadvertently violate another country’s laws.

“Silos can land a project in marshy ground and create major, costly delays,” says Ian A. Henderson, author of Global Content Quest: In Search of Better Translations and co-founder with his wife, Francoise, of Rubric (www.rubric.com), a global language-service provider.

Here’s just one real-world example the Hendersons encountered: They were hired by a U.S. company that planned a European rollout of a new personal hygiene product. When Francoise Henderson began working on the translations, she noticed the ingredients list planned for advertisements differed from the labels on the bottles.

It turned out the formula had been changed because some ingredients were banned in Europe.

“No one told the marketing department, though,” Francoise Henderson says. “Translation is about communication, and yet communications breakdown happens way too frequently in the world of translation when someone’s not overseeing the big picture and making sure the silo effect isn’t undermining the larger effort.”

Why are silos so common and what can be done to address the problems they create? The Hendersons provide these observations:

Company culture. On occasion, it is company policy or company culture that leads to the emergence of silos. For example, Francoise Henderson says, company policies may be in place to avoid breaking antitrust laws, or keeping up walls might help prevent conflicts of interest. “Company culture and policies can be the hardest thing to change,” she says. “Encouraging communication is a good start.”

Empire building. While sometimes silos just happen in the natural course of things, in some larger corporations, the building of silos is deliberate. “People might harbor concerns that a more streamlined process will make their own jobs obsolete,” Ian Henderson says. This could result, for example, in a marketing team in Belgium refusing to communicate with the marketing team in Japan. One way companies overcome this problem, he says, is to have a central communications hub that all information flows through.

Basic confusion. A company may have up to five separate sources of content, such as marketing, communications, technical, legal and packaging. “Each of these areas may have no sense of where their work intersects with the others, and how there may be redundancies in translations and beyond,” Ian Henderson says. “This can lead to confusion and even unnecessary work through duplication.” Companies should make sure each department has an understanding of what other departments do, and that they regularly interact with each other, he says.

“Silos are not a new problem, and they are not going to disappear overnight,” Ian Henderson says. “But when they are approached with foresight and experience, they can be dealt with and eventually dismantled.”

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About Ian A. Henderson

Ian A. Henderson (www.rubric.com), author of Global Content Quest: In Search of Better Translations, is chief technology officer and co-founder of Rubric, a global language service provider. During the last 25 years, Henderson has partnered with Rubric customers to deliver relevant global content to their end users, enabling them to reap the rewards of globalization, benefit from agile workflows, and guarantee the integrity of their content. Prior to founding Rubric, Henderson worked as a software engineer for Siemens in Germany.

About Francoise Henderson

Francoise Henderson is chief executive officer and co-founder of Rubric, overseeing worldwide operations and Global Content strategy. Under her guidance, Rubric has generated agile KPI-driven globalization workflows for its clients, reducing time to market across multiple groups and increasing quality and ROI. Francoise has over 25 years’ experience in corporate management and translation.

How Learning a New Language Can Help You Boost Business Success

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