Insights from 19 CEOs of the Fastest Growing Language Service Providers (LSPs)

The secrets of Sustained Growth: Insights from LSPs that achieved the fastest growth rate for three consecutive years.

Annual Growth is Noteworthy | Organic Growth is Remarkable | Sustained Growth is Exceptional

From the 18^th edition of the "Top 100 Languages Service Providers: 2022 and the regional rankings ,19 CEOs from Asia-Pacific, the Americas and Europe with revenue from USD 937.02 million to USD 1.28 million share their insights. We are grateful to them for taking the time to contribute their advice and experience.

Growth Data and insights from our in-depth surveys are reserved for clients, but you can access our pro bono survey data on our open-access resources page

Note: at the bottom of each picture, we used the CSA Research logo to identify LSPs listed in our rankings, the "Organic growth" green logo for LSPs that grew organically without acquisition and the "Appears on 2022 Inc. 5000 ranking" for companies listed in the inc 5000.

Growth is one of the goals that unites all businesses and, to state the obvious, it requires a focus on customers beyond anything else. Actively listening to customers and using those insights to shape solutions which will meet and exceed their needs must be a priority for any company.

We seek to differentiate ourselves in a number of ways. Our values shape our behaviours with respect to growth as they do all other aspects of our business. We seek to partner with our clients, with each other and with our suppliers to make sure we design localization software and services that truly live up to expectations. We pioneer new technologies and ways of working to shape those offerings. We always aim to progress solutions when, as they inevitably do, changes happen or challenges arise. Finally, and importantly, we always do our best to deliver to our clients by being obsessed with meeting the promises we make to them and to each other. 

In line with our values, we also believe in investing in the future. Since RWS’s foundation, we have welcomed businesses into our Group where they bring talent or capabilities that we think our clients will need. Where we can’t acquire capabilities through buying businesses, we build them ourselves. Having recently completed our largest acquisition, that of SDL, we are now embarking upon a record period of organic investment.

All of this is brought to life by our diverse global team who operate with a spirit of “disciplined entrepreneurship”. This means we combine creativity and responsiveness with good governance, reliable processes and sustainability. Anyone can grow quickly if they don’t take care of their margins, their people or the world around them. We are always striving to balance all of these things.

September 2022

New realities, new strategies. 2022 is once again showing the need for flexibility and confidence in response to critical and changing global circumstances. Virtually every organization is dealing with some mix of economic or business-specific challenges: rising inflation, supply-chain strain, energy costs, globalization, talent retention, or even the future of traditional workplaces. 
Despite the challenging conditions, Acolad has seen continuous growth in recent years. Our customers recognize more and more the advantages of having a partner that not only understands their business models and industry requirements but can also act as a growth enabler supporting their business to scale across geographies. As customer’s needs evolve, so must the profile of the traditional LSP – keeping translation at the core, but expanding into a full-service multilingual content partner. It’s all about understanding their needs and striking the perfect balance between portfolio innovation, delivery, and market expectations. 
One could say that our “secret sauce” for success is in the combination of technology and people, and more precisely in our human capital. Overall, technology can make things faster, easier and in some cases, even cheaper, but only the right teams can help you to nurture the all-important customer intimacy. 
This emphasis on technology, automation, and upskilling existing workforces has also been supported by a broad and well-balanced global footprint. Over the past seven years, Acolad has been successfully integrating new companies, while preserving its entrepreneurial and agile model. Our strategy is driven by the way our service and solution offering harmonizes with extending our investments across the content lifecycle - without losing the focus on our core translation and interpreting activity

September 2022 

The ongoing globalization and pervasive digitalization give rise to three major trends in the language service market: more diverse technical demands, more digitalized service scenarios, and the need for less centralized services. Accordingly, we are investing more of our resources in technological innovation and management automation. In close collaboration with industry verticals, we strive to offer a diverse and ever-evolving range of language service solutions that help us—and our clients—navigate the market and the environment. While identifying new growth opportunities, we are shifting our focus toward the creation of value for users, with sustainable growth at the core of our business strategy.

September 2022

The past 2 years of Covid got us to reflect on what is most important for our business and that is our customers. It was really a time for us to take a step back and re-calibrate our priorities and unique selling propositions. With the explosion of data, social media, and the changing trends of the industry, our teams sometimes got lost in the web of 'noises' and forget the real tangible reason why our teams exist and the core value that we offer our customers. We know that we need to do less of things that do not matter, and do more of the things that matter, especially for our customers. We need to always keep our teams aligned to our customers’ expectations and needs of the times, understanding what works and what doesn't in the various global markets. We must always look at ways to continually innovate, create, and add value for our customers. Only then can we achieve true sustainable growth for our businesses.

September 2022

At Argos, growth is a must. Growth enables us to keep our talent and give our employees more opportunities. It is also a catalyst for creativity as we constantly develop new solutions and new services for our clients.
 In the uncertain times we are living, we believe growth is our primary resilience muscle. 
 Sustainable, profitable, and inclusive growth is a conscious choice we have made, and it is the basis for decisions we make across the business. 
 Growing a company consistently does not come easy. The language industry has been primarily a general contracting sector that has become more commoditized over the years. So, to grow, we know we must add value to our clients, every day. We decided to explore and invest in opportunities adjacent to our core business.
 Our new strategy, launched mid-2020, aims at evolving into a global content company, rather than focusing solely on localization services. It has meant creating an enhanced go-to-market plan and starting new service lines. This has only been possible because of top talent, with a mix of new hires and a significant HR investment to develop an upskilling program, made up of training, mentoring, and coaching.
 Two acquisitions in 2021 allowed us to enhance our portfolio with specific services (Quality Services and Data/Machine Learning). Argos now serves enterprise clients along the entire content lifecycle from content creation and optimization to publishing. Integration was a key strategic focus and we are expecting 30% organic growth this year.

 September 2022

PGLS has experienced exceptional growth year-over-year since its inception. In the early years, we focused on growing our house accounts, deepening relationships with our customers, and learning as much as possible from and about them. Eventually, this business growth allowed for investment into diversification, technology, talent, development, and acquisitions. We made it a point to remain lean while concentrating organizational resources and capacity on areas with the most significant ROI. While leniency may come at a cost, we believe in a calculated approach to our risk-taking. Knowing that sales cycles take time, we chose our hard after giving it careful thought and consideration. Seeds we planted nearly half a decade earlier began to bear fruit. Ambition and patience proved to be paramount.

Our inorganic growth has been beneficial in supporting our continued organic growth. In the past three years, we have acquired several businesses, the first during the early stages of the pandemic.

It's hard to discuss sustained growth without mentioning 2020. Like many businesses, PGLS suffered in the early stages of the pandemic. Current operations were affected and a pipeline of new business that had been methodically cultivated was massively disrupted. However, 2021 was more than a bounce-back year from the pandemic. It was a breakthrough. We took the stairs down, then we took the elevator back up. Our recipe for growth hasn't changed much, but our scale certainly has.

September 2022

Global challenges like COVID variants, inflation, and slowed economic growth have proven our industry to be, to a degree, recession-proof. Organizations continue to need language services to expand into new markets and to ensure communication access domestically. Our industry is primed for growth.

Organic growth depends on an LSP’s ability to scale rapidly while maintaining excellence across the organization in both processes and people. Creating an environment that has been recognized as the best place to work, the strength of our business model, the commitment of our team, and the trust of our customers have all helped us chart a path to sustainable scalability. This has allowed MasterWord to become the fastest organically growing LSP in the world.

Now, emerging trends in technology and revisions to industry standards require continued innovation. The mass adoption of MT has increased the need for buyers to differentiate translation services, so they can make purchasing decisions fit for purpose and suitably priced. With both ASTM and ISO working on incorporating translation grades into quality assurance standards as early as 2023, we will see a major shift in the way we talk about buying and selling language services.

September 2022

Over the years, we have worked diligently to assist our clients in achieving their goals. Despite a dynamic language services market and ever-changing business environment, we remain true to our original aspiration and continue to step up our efforts to grow into a leading language services provider in the fields of ICT, intellectual property, finance, and medicine. 

To achieve this, we follow a balanced approach between the Inside-Out and the Outside-In strategies. We continuously build our inner strengths and capabilities by organizing regular training sessions, encouraging learning and sharing, developing and deploying tools and machine translation engines in vertical fields, and building the knowledge base and corpus management system. We also further expand our adaptability to change by adopting innovative technologies and systems, including the Plunet translation management system and others. 

Creating value for customers is the key to success. We will, as always, leverage the strengths of talented people, tailored processes, and innovative technologies to help customers achieve lasting success.

September 2022

For over 20 years, Yaxincheng has focused solely on medical translation services for the life sciences industry. This laser focus has significantly contributed to our consistent growth, even during the prolonged COVID-19 period. I feel that there are several reasons why over 600 medical brands now trust us, the biggest of which are our highly talented teams, international quality management system tailored for medical translation, and self-developed Translation Management System based on our massive medical corpus and terminology bank.
Yaxincheng’s progress is also driven by innovation. We continue to invest heavily in developing our Medical Neural Machine Translation System and Computer-Assisted Translation System, with over 10 million RMB, or 7% of our total turnover, allocated to R&D last year. Such exploration of cutting-edge technologies is what enables our successful delivery of scalable and cost-efficient translation services.
And finally, talent is our number one asset. As more than two hundred projects are being processed every day, and this number keeps growing, ensuring adequate medical translators are available is our primary challenge. With the concept of “people-oriented and connected development,” we will continue to attract and retain industry experts to meet our ideals and values and enable employees to make an extraordinary impact in the life sciences field. 

September 2022

The word ‘innovation’ is getting a little overused in our industry and risks being a victim of semantic satiation, as it seems everyone is innovating something. At XTM, we’ve placed a premium on getting innovation and it’s timing right. We made early bets on TMS technology as we foresaw a few critical things: it had to be a complete end-to-end solution (which would become a platform), it had to be on the cloud, and it must have open connectivity. 

At the time, we were seen as unique amidst a market focused on BPO solutions and client-server technology architectures. Organizations have now become more content-oriented and want direct ownership of the content technology stack IP (which now includes a TMS). A connected content technology ecosystem is of enormous strategic advantage for enterprises nowadays, and our TMS was built to meet these needs from the beginning.

As a result, we’ve been able to grow at significant rates year-over-year, while building and enabling talented teams and listening intently to the evolving needs of our growing customer base. This growth also made us attractive for private equity funding, and we’re thrilled to have the partnership of K1 Investment Management to continue fueling growth.

By maintaining our focus on building an innovative culture, getting innovation timing right, and enabling the success of our users and our employees, we’ll be able to sustain growth and continue to be a disruptive force in our industry.

September 2022

In 2021, the OXO Group achieved around 60% growth in revenue. While most of this growth came from client referrals, we have implemented different concrete actions to make sure we would continue attracting new clients and retaining those we already had. Our strategy was based on three pillars: 1) the implementation of a client success program to upsell services and languages to the current accounts and reduce churn by strengthening relationships with key stakeholders; 2) larger investment in marketing with rebranding, website revamping, content generation, SEO, and SEM, alongside brand repositioning with the help of CSA Research; 3) continued development of our M&A strategy and consolidation of acquired and merged company operations, improving the performance of all the entities and the Group as a whole. This has brought us the growth we had envisioned for the period and will allow us to maintain sustained growth for the years ahead.

September 2022

A key factor in our growth has been hiring and retaining exceptional staff. We have a strong team of individuals who are committed to the work we do, strive to succeed, and share our company values. Our staff collectively share in the company’s success – when Eriksen succeeds, our team succeeds. By retaining good people, we gain our clients’ trust and become strong partners.
The company has made a conscious decision to focus our sales and marketing efforts on specific verticals, even when this means saying no to prospects that are not a fit. We want to work with purpose-driven organizations, including nonprofits, cultural institutions, and city and state agencies that make resources accessible to local communities. Working with the most distinguished museums in the country is a differentiator for us, in that it attests to the quality of our work and the high-touch service we provide.
We know what we do well and we pursue opportunities that are a good fit. Our focus enables us to win work and provide outstanding service so we can retain and grow with our clients. This retention fuels referrals, continued growth, and a strong reputation that in turn helps us recruit new talent.

September 2022

We have not returned to “business as usual” as we expected to at the beginning of 2022. Many people are still getting COVID and inflation is creating other more significant issues than we had during the pandemic!
The economic situation in Europe remains split in two: while industrial clients, especially in Germany, are impacted by rising gas prices, other sectors (such as exhibitions and tourism) are recovering fast from the COVID crisis.
We are also not back to business as usual because most B2B services employees are still working from home, which creates new challenges for employee motivation and retention.
The unemployment rate is even lower than before the pandemic, which makes talent recruitment even more difficult. As managers, we have to adapt to this new situation and increase staff productivity and satisfaction in order to retain the key people.
The language market is concentrating and our goal is to participate in this development and to always offer a better service to our customers.

September 2022

Change is not for the faint-hearted, and change to business models, to workflows, to markets, to clients’ expectations and deliveries is what has been happening in the language industry - and Pangeanic - at an exciting rate. 
 
I don't like to talk about "the localization industry" or how "better it was positioned than most" but about the Language Industry and an inherent, horizontal market need. Most savvy LI companies put their money into some kind of machine translation workflow to create hybrid production teams. Some also distributed their workloads setting up production teams in other geographies. We have completed our transformation in 2022 by entering double digits with a mixed offering that rests mostly on AI-enhanced language solutions, from anonymization services to governments and institutions such as the EU, legal offices, Ministries, to classical MT users requiring hundreds or thousands of pages to be translated and what we call "boutique services" (the human touch). 

The one thing I do love about our industry is the people and their vision. As the Language Industry becomes more of a "Computational Linguistics" field, there's cross-fertilization with many new, fresh ideas and areas of research. This is particularly interesting for an organization such as Pangeanic, with strong academic links and historically a deep R&D component. 
 
After a short period of internal reorganization, re-instating our mission and values, recruiting and re-branding (our new website will be out in September), Pangeanic has enjoyed the strongest first-half year performance ever, beating our own projections. Clients can now use our ECO platform to machine translate thousands of pages, anonymize content, use our API for NLP functions like relevance analysis, data classification, MT, and of course translation services using our own online editor. Strong alliances with strategic partners secure a good path for steady growth applying NLP to build and deploy solutions in traditional and non-traditional markets.

 September 2022

Our continuous growth over the last two years is the result of many years of work striving to improve corporate management. We started planning our company growth not just in terms of money and clients but also our people. At the same time, it all comes down to our valued clients. 

Since 2008, we have been implementing the lean management principles, and in 2020, we were able to create and use value-stream mapping as a working tool. Optimizing any process within the company now takes less time, and we have control over the value of the services rendered.

Our focus was on the gaming market: In 2019–2020, we sold all of our business lines that did not fit into the video game market. Firstly, this allowed us to process larger volumes of orders during operations, and secondly, we could really focus on our clients.

Since 2018, we have tried to add more Asian companies to our clientele, and 2021 brought us the fruits of our labor. The volume of orders from some of our clients was larger than we imagined, but it was a nice surprise.

We are now working to improve corporate management even further, reduce risks, and add new services for our clients, ensuring that our standards of work and company values remain an integral part of what we do.

September 2022

The greatest challenge we have faced since starting this company is growing it without sacrificing its culture. Terra Translations started as a mother and daughter endeavor, and our first few hires were within our circle of friends and family. This created a very special atmosphere within our team that we were able to maintain throughout the years and many more hires. Our company culture is based on “family first” values that are extended to every member of our team. Supporting our employees’ whole being serves as the basis of a strategic, financial, and successful human capital strategy. This has resulted in employee loyalty an extremely high retention rate. Leadership in our company are thought of as ambassadors of our values and make a constant effort to listen and value each employee, promote this culture for new hires, and constantly share the history and vision of the family business. Some of the decisions we have to make to safeguard the culture of our company are not easy and potentially impact our profitability. However, time has shown us that if we support and value our employees and our community with a broader focus than just profits, our company continues to grow stronger and, ironically, more profitable. 

September 2022

The framework conditions were particularly challenging for us over the last two-and-a-half years (pandemic, supply crisis, etc.). We are grateful and proud to have achieved marked organic growth despite these circumstances. For example, we won two big tenders that we were invited to thanks to recommendations by longstanding clients. We also registered significant growth from existing clients. General growth in the medical technology sector definitely played a role here as well as increasing digitalization in marketing and sales. However, our sustainable contribution to the value creation of our clients may be the decisive factor of our success. With our “external internal team” strategy, our knowledge, our experience, and our creativity are brought to bear to such an extent that our clients realize significant benefits – for example, by quickly adapting processes to changing requirements. This flexibility combined with our careful attention to quality is much appreciated and leads to the wish for more comprehensive and new services by Gemino.

 September 2022

It is an honor for us to be once more in this ranking!
We think our growth over the years is deeply connected to our initial purposes. From day one, a little more than 10 years ago, we had “training” as a core concept. This would include not only our internal team but also our network of vendors.
The reason for that is we kept listening and adapting to the client's needs. They want us to be specialists in their products' terminology to be able to deliver precision and fluency in translated content. So, we needed to constantly train our team and at the same time develop and deliver agile services to meet their needs and processes.
Lately, we also observed a tendency of some key clients to work with continuous localization, which can lead to a huge number of small projects among others with big volumes.
Only with innovation, including proprietary technologies, automation, and a specialized and evolving team was it possible to keep delivering well and to grow our volumes. Besides, we also grew and expanded our offerings of several services, including Interpreting and video localization.
We continue to focus on innovations and on striving to provide the best services to our clients to help them with their internationalization goals.

September 2022

We are tremendously proud to be the first LSP from Ukraine that is included in CSA’s Sustained Growth Ranking. Despite the war which has so dramatically affected our country, Task Force has not only managed to continue operations but we have been able to further strengthen and broaden our activities. 
I am convinced that our extraordinary resilience to the dramatic and unforeseeable external events that have blighted our country’s economy is the result of our long-term efforts to build a truly sustainable company. Thanks to the strong structure our company has come to be known for, when Russia started the brutal war against Ukraine in February of this year, the management at Task Force was still able to stay the course and to pursue its overall strategy. We merely had to adapt our tactics. 
Since 2019, we have been focusing on creating a predictably successful organization. We started from a clear vision: to be the #1 choice for our clients, for our vendors, and for our employees. We really do attach the highest value to our relationships with customers and partners. We then identified our key industries and segmented our clients depending on their actual profiles. Researching our clients to best understand their current and anticipate their future needs is something we do on an ongoing basis. As part of our day-to-day activities, we maintain and execute specific plans dedicated to the development of our business relations, together with our clients; we regularly measure net-promoter scores, and we prioritize requests according to the loyalty matrix. 
Our organizational structure is built specifically to support the achievement of our strategic goals. We have set up a company board, a budget committee, and a clients’ committee. Our employee motivation system is completely transparent, result-oriented and based on clear key performance indicators – our experience has shown that this is an essential factor in our employees’ exceptionally high engagement towards our company’s success. Our people ops team concentrates on strengthening the sense of collective achievement as a core element of corporate culture at Task Force. Our management methods closely follow continuous improvement practices, with very tangible outcomes. As a result of all the above, until the war hit our country, we were growing at an annual rate of around 50%. Despite the huge challenges we’re facing today, we have absolutely no intention to leave the path of sustained growth.

 September 2022