Thebigword launches plan to be "as big as Facebook" before IPO

THEBIGWORD has unveiled its big plans for the next four years which it hopes will see its work reach one billion people and the company float before its 40th birthday.

The strategy, to have as many people using its technology as currently use Facebook, forecasts the Leeds translation services company will nearly quadruple revenues by 2019.

It was founded 35 years ago and today it has annual revenues of £47m, a client list which includes 80% of the Fortune 100, and works in 235 languages. It employs 600 people in “a dozen or so” countries and relies on a network of 8,000 people in 73 countries.

Its four-year plan, announced to stakeholders and suppliers at its conference in Leeds, sets out a path to achieve sales of £175m in 2018-19 and going into public ownership. But its mission is grander: “To eradicate the final barrier to global trade and communication by creating the most accessible and scalable language service organisation in the world.”

Founder and managing director Larry Gould said: “Sometimes people can see us as a translation language business but we are more than that, we are a communications business.”

The company operates in fields as diverse as with the army in Afghanistan to hospital maternity wards – and Mr Gould is proud of the company’s role as a people business that helps individuals communicate to resolve difficult situations, such as a teenage girl in labour who can’t understand the doctors’ instructions – but its growth is predicated on technological innovations.

“We have taken a significant calculated risk,” said Mr Gould. “By bottling our magic potion, the technology we are using internally to automate will be available to our clients as licenses.”

That shift is the beginning of the next phase of the company’s development, which is encapsulated in a simple idea.

“We have the knowledge and the experience to transform this industry with technology that we already have by integrating it with technology that already exists,” he said.

Joshua Gould, chief operating officer, explained the details of the strategy that has been tagged “operation billion”.

“The potential is truly massive and we are at the start of that journey,” said Joshua. “It aims to see one billion people on this planet using thebigword’s technology to communicate in various ways.”

He added: “One billion takes us to the usage size of Facebook and twice the size of LinkedIn.”

Instant email applications, which translate messages in an inbox at the click of a button, on-demand translations by humans, responsive mobile applications providing machine translations and voiceovers and a community interpreting tool that creates an online marketplace for linguists are some of the key pillars that are behind the target to grow organically by 60% by 2019.

It also plans to acquire businesses that will add £100m of annual revenue and recruit an additional 150 people in Yorkshire in the next two years to support the growth.