After two years of being forced to work remotely due to the pandemic, a lot of small business owners are experiencing significant resistance as they try to get their employees back into the office. Should we take this as a sign that it’s time to forgo traditional business practices in favor of the new work from home model? If your answer is “yes,” there are a few issues you’ll need to address before making this permanent shift at your business. In this episode, Jon Aidukonis and Gene Marks, along with CSH Translation CEO and Founder, Carolina Sanchez-Hervas, discuss how small business owners can build a strong foundation that will sustain their new work from home culture.

Podcast Key Highlights

• A Three-Step Guide to Hiring Qualified Contractors
  • Begin your screening process with an initial review of your prospective candidates’ work portfolios.
  • If you like the samples they’ve provided, they can move unto the testing phase, where you administer a formal exam.
  • Once they successfully pass the test, invite them for a final round of interviews to determine whether they are right for your business.
• Work from Home Strategies for Your Small Business
  • To help establish an effective work from home culture, small business owners need to set some firm ground rules and have a clear system in place.
  • The key to running a successful remote business is to have reliable staff members who will still hold themselves accountable without constant micromanagement.
  • Sometimes it helps to add a personal touch when communicating with your employees or clients, whether that be through a coffee date or a handwritten letter. These small gestures help humanize your interactions and foster a sense of community.
• The Benefits of Running Your Small Business Virtually
  • One of the advantages of moving your business online is that you don’t have to deal with the additional overheads associated with a traditional brick-and-mortar storefront.
  • Another benefit to working online is the convenience; you can work directly with any client, regardless of their proximity to your business.
• The Best Platforms and Apps for Running Your Online Business
  • CAT tools
  • Wordfast
  • Wave Accounting
  • CRM
  • Squarespace
  • Mailchimp for newsletters.
  • Canva
  • Google Business Suite
  • LinkedIn
• The Best Phone Services for Your Online Business
  • Virtual PBX
  • Grasshopper
  • Google Voice

Links

• CSH Translation

Transcript

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are for informational purposes only, and solely those of the podcast participants, contributors, and guests, and do not constitute an endorsement by or necessarily represent the views of The Hartford or its affiliates.

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Gene: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Hartford, Small Biz Ahead podcast. We’re really happy to have you here. My name is Gene Marks and I am here with my friend and cohort, Jon Aidukonis. Jon, say hello to the fans.

Jon: Gene, how’s it going? People of the internet, how are ya?

Gene: Yeah, it’s good. It’s good to have you back talking with me as well. And Carolina, our guest, when we get to her, she’s in the food industry, Jon, and I know you love that stuff. Anything restaurant related.

Jon: I’m excited. We get to talk about food culture, I think a little bit of Miami today. So all the things I love.

Gene: Very, very cool. So our guest is Carolina Sanchez-Hervas. Carolina, did I pronounce that right?

Carolina: Yes. You did a good job.

Gene: Yeah. Pretty good, huh? Like I said though, I’m a Jewish guy from Philly, so I’m doing my best here. It is a pleasure to have you on. You are the CEO and founder of CSH Translation down in Miami, Florida. And Carolina, just so you get the inside joke, if you listen to episodes of these podcasts, Jon is a restaurant guy. He’s worked in restaurants, he eats in a lot of restaurants. He’s all into it. So whenever the topic of restaurants and the food industry gets brought up, he gets all excited. So just so you know, that’s what’s going on here.

Carolina: I love it. Thank you so much for having me on Jon and Gene. Really excited to be here.

Gene: Well, we’re glad to have you on here. So let me, first of all, I’m going to read out your introduction and then I want to dig into you and your company. So you’re the founder and CEO of the award-winning translation company, CSH Translation located in Miami, Florida. You hold a BA in international studies from Rhodes College and an MA in food studies from NYU. She has lived in, or you have lived in several countries around the world and speaks five languages. You’re passionate about a plant-based lifestyle. I particularly like meat, but you also enjoy playing tennis and swimming, which I also enjoy as well. So that’s your background. Tell us Carolina, first of all, about CSH Translation. How did you start the company? How did you get here? And where did you come up with the name CSH Translation?

Carolina: Wherever could I up with that? So, thanks for having me on. And, yeah, so I started the company in 2014. I went to graduate school, as you mentioned. And after finishing grad school, I sort of thought I would have to go into corporate America and do all of that. And I was looking at positions and there was nothing that really fit my interest. My husband’s an entrepreneur and his whole side of the family are entrepreneurs. So he really encouraged me to do my own thing. And it wasn’t something that I had thought of until that moment. And I thought, why not? And so I gave it a shot and growing up, I grew up bilingual. My mom is from Spain. My dad is from Cuba. So I grew up bilingual and speaking Spanish at home was always very important.

And I’m very happy that my parents instilled that in me from a young age, even though as a child, you kind of push back and you just, no, I want to speak English and no, but I’m glad that they made sure that my sister and I learned Spanish and it was so important. I played tennis, as you mentioned. And when I was in high school, I had the opportunity to go train in Spain at a tennis academy. And I lived with kids from all over the world. And that was my first experience away from home. And I was living with kids from all different countries, China, Poland, Hungary, everywhere. And I remember hearing so many different languages and wanting to speak them all. I wanted to learn something from everybody and we all sort of exchanged our languages with each other.

And so that was kind of my really first experience with all of the languages and had that feeling of wanting to do something with that. And so I went on to study international studies and that’s where that came from. And then I studied Italian in college and lived there for a while in Italy, studied over there. So yeah, so then I started the company after grad school and I used that talent for languages and passion for languages to do something that I loved already. And that, in a way I’ve already been translating my whole life in a way. So when people, friends, acquaintances started asking me, oh, you’re the language girl, can you help us translate this or do something? I said, sure. And I found, I really loved it. And I started to pursue that. And that’s where CSH Translation was born, which is the acronym for my full name.

Gene: Yeah, I gotcha. Well, it’s funny, the name of my company is The Marks Group. So I’m even less creative than you. Who are your customers for the most part? Are they individuals, companies, who do you serve?

Carolina: So we serve both companies and individuals. We specialize in financial and legal translations. So we work with a lot of financial services, companies, banks, mortgage lenders, and then a lot of law firms. We do a lot of immigration work as well, especially here in Miami, usually on the individual level. We’ll translate documents for individuals who need documents for the United States immigration services. So yeah, for both customers, both on the corporate and individual side.

Gene: This conversation though is about running a virtual company. And I thought maybe we could share notes a little bit. Again, before I turn this back over to Jon, your company is virtual. It’s always been virtual, is that right?

Carolina: Yes. It’s always been virtual. All of our core business has been virtual. Although we do offer in person interpretation services, but the core business has been virtual.

Gene: Okay. Do you have employees or contractors? I have 10 employees and about a dozen contractors. What is your general makeup of the business?

Carolina: So we work with contractors, freelance.

Gene: Right.

Carolina: Translators that are all over the world. So we have a pretty big network of translators and five continents that we work with on a regular basis. Yeah.

Gene: Okay. That’s great. And, I have some selfish reasons for asking this, my wife runs a nonprofit and