Christian Arno (Lingo24)

Christian Arno - Founder and Managing Director of Lingo24 and Winner of the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (2003)

Armed with a degree in languages from Oxford University and a passion for e-business, Christian Arno founded Lingo24 (www.lingo24.com) in 2001 as a 22 year-old, from his parent’s home in Aberdeen.

With the help of a £5,000 loan from the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust, Christian’s aim was to create the top online brand in translation services.

“Spending money on office space would not have been a cost-effective way of running Lingo24 in the early days. I was trying to build a reputation, not an overdraft. Consequently, we were able to offer major clients prices up to 30 percent cheaper than many of our competitors.”

Being an e-business also meant that Lingo24 was able to attract recruits who were home-based and opened the doors to a wider array of talent, including those with families who lived in remote areas who needed a flexible and secure salaried position.

In 2003, Christian won the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which catapulted the company to new levels.

“Winning the Shell LiveWIRE award was fantastic for me. Many of the people I met through the competition and subsequent events became very useful contacts or clients and the publicity became the impetus for a whole raft of new business.

We opened another virtual office in New Zealand shortly afterwards and another in China the following year. Having operations in different time-zones allowed Lingo24 to offer a true round-the-clock service, meaning we could accept a translation request at 5pm UK time, and have it back with our client by 9am the following morning.”

In 2005 Christian made the strategic decision to open physical offices, starting with Romania.

“I chose Timisoara as our main base because it is a multi-lingual city – most people there speak at least two languages - and it has a distinguished technical university, so that we could draw on a multiplicity of skills”, says Christian.

The same factors governed Christian’s decision to open an office in Panama, which opened the doors to some big clients throughout the Americas:

“It was vital to establish a presence linked to the US and Canada, both in terms of their economies and their time-zone”, says Christian. “Panama is a cosmopolitan, multicultural country which attracts business from all over the world because of the Panama Canal.  For Lingo24 it strikes the right balance between skill-sets and cost”.

To complete the triumvirate of central offices in key locations, Lingo24 launched its Edinburgh office in August 2008. “We’ve come a long way in the past seven years”, says Christian. “When I won the Shell LiveWIRE award we were an e-business with five employees and a turnover of £250,000.  Now, we have operations in four continents with a hundred full-time employees and a turnover of £3 million.  But the most special move for me was opening our offices in Edinburgh. Scotland is Lingo24’s home”.