Article How teaming up with colleagues could turn around your business

Gone are the days when we viewed colleagues as competition. Now, collaboration is the name of the game. In fact, colleagues are the new clients.

And the benefits are huge.

Think about it. Your colleagues know the challenges you face, they value your skills and they have zero interest in low baller rates.

By teaming up you are doubling your client base (and your knowledge base), as well as gaining a much-needed support system for when life happens and you find yourself under pressure.

There are different ways to approach colleague collaborations. Here are a few of our favourites:

Translator + proofreader pair

Like we said above, the days of viewing colleagues as competitors are behind us. However, this rivalry used to be particularly prevalent between translators with the same language combination and/or specialisations.

Finding a colleague with similar skills and marketing yourself as a translator-proofreader pair, you can actually offer a more comprehensive package of services to clients, whether they're direct ones or agencies.

Why would this be appealing to them?

Well, it makes their life easy by allowing them to kill two birds with one stone: they don't need to find two people to do the job and they get a better result.

Afraid to commit and market yourself as a team?

You don't necessarily have to, you can team up behind-the-scenes. This way, you can still benefit from each other's network, but to the rest of the world, you'll appear to be two independent freelancers.

Whether you choose to talk openly about the collaboration with clients is up to you, but the benefits of teaming up still stand:

• You have someone to talk to when you're struggling with something, whether that's a tricky word or a tricky client.
• Rather than turning down client work when you're too busy, you can accept a project and outsource it to a colleague you trust.

Working with an "opposite number"

Find a colleague with the same specialisations, but who works in the reverse language pair, especially if they live in a country where people speak their native tongue. Why? Because there's often a demand for your language combination in their local network. Of course, this works just as well in reverse.

A great side benefit of this is, once you find a partner who you trust in your reverse language pair, you can share information and attend conferences and trade fairs in both your native countries, safe in the knowledge that, whichever language combination attendees might need, you've got them covered. Bonus: these trips will be tax deductible ;)

Celebrate the differences

There's one last option for colleague collaboration, and that's working with a colleague with a different language pair, or with a different area of expertise. This isn't one that will always come up, it's more an extra option for you to consider when you see there is a demand from clients.

Once again, this simplifies things for your clients, because you're offering them additional services that they need. All while making money for you, and your community of fellow translators.

How LSP.expert can help

Whichever option (or options!) you go for, you can use LSP.expert's outsourcing feature to make your own life easier, by being able to keep track of outsourcers' language combinations, rates and availability.

There's also a team feature for those of you who want to take collaboration a step further and hire an assistant or a project manager to help you organise your translation business.

With the team feature, your team member has their own log in details within LSP.expert, and they're able to add jobs, create invoices and update client details, among lots of other useful functions. Try it out!

Whichever option you choose for collaboration, you'll enjoy the sense of camaraderie and shared purpose that comes with working alongside colleagues you can rely on and who value your skill set… they sound like dream clients to us!