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Elting and Shawe's hopes rested on a basic premise: that the increasing globalization of business and the growing use of information-systems technology would vastly ramp up the demand for foreign-language translation. Before entering NYU's Stern School of Business, in 1990, Elting had worked in the marketing department at Euramerica Translations Inc., a large translation company also in New York City. She remembered that some customers had grumbled about missed deadlines and poor quality, and she believed that there was room for competition.

Euramerica was an exception in an industry known for mom-and-pop companies. In launching TransPerfect, Elting, who was then 26, and Shawe, who was 23, were unlikely entrants into the market, and they plunged into it with an unusual strategy. Neither was a linguist. Elting's specialty was international business and marketing. Shawe, who had worked at Chemical Bank, had experience in finance, as well as risk management and marketing. Rather than translating foreign-language materials themselves, they decided to outsource everything. They would position TransPerfect as a company that would do its best to accommodate any language, any turnaround time, and any volume of work, relying on professional translators, editors, proofreaders, desktop publishers, and interpreters--all hired as temporary workers for each job.

The virtual company they created consisted of little more than a rented computer and a fax machine (total start-up costs: $150 to cover the first payment on a leased PC and to install a second phone line), plus themselves.

The work came in dribs and drabs, as Shawe cold-called Fortune 500 companies with overseas operations and Elting worked her contacts to recruit freelance translators. But in 1993, Cyprus Amax Minerals, a large mining company, seemed to call the partners' bluff: could they translate a 600-page mining feasibility study to be presented to the Russian government in nine days? Shawe and Elting scrambled to line up nine native Russian speakers with mining expertise. Installed in Elting and Shawe's apartment, the translators labored in eight-hour shifts. "One was at our kitchen table, another was on the couch, and another was at the desk," recalls Elting. TransPerfect finished the project on time, leading to $400,000 worth of additional business with Cyprus Amax.

TransPerfect has grown into a $15-million company with 85 employees, mostly account executives and project managers, scattered among its 11 offices in the United States and 3 in foreign countries. (A fourth overseas office, in Paris, is scheduled to open in September.) But the vast majority of the company's workers are still freelancers.

Donna Fenn is a contributing editor at Inc. Researcher Anne Marie Borrego provided additional reporting. For more on bootstrapping, see "Shameless Ploys," below.

The Accidental Bootstrapper

One way to start a business without spending a lot of money or agonizing over strategy is to follow Michelle Lemmons-Poscente's example. Not that you could set out to follow her example; she started her company pretty much by accident.

Seven years ago Lemmons-Poscente was a struggling independent film producer in Los Angeles, scrambling for a second job to pay the bills. She answered a classified ad in Variety placed by two people--a humorist and a tax strategist--who were both looking for an agent to market them as public speakers. Although Lemmons-Poscente had no experience of the kind, she talked her way into the job. "Selling comes naturally to me," she explains. She succeeded in booking several engagements for the tax strategist, earning an hourly rate plus commissions. Then in September 1992 she moved back to her hometown of San Angelo, Tex., to help care for her father, who was critically ill. Reckoning that she might still earn some bread money as a booking agent, she borrowed $1,000 from the tax strategist and bought a cheap computer.

Operating out of a spare bedroom in her parents' home, she cold-called state associations and chain businesses, still hustling to cover expenses. "It's a small town, so I could set up accounts," she recalls. "If I had done this in L.A., they never would have printed my letterhead without my paying for it first." To earn a bit of quick money, she gathered pecans from her front lawn for sale at a local farmers' market.

Slowly, her work as a booking agent caught on--her first break was signing Charles Kuralt to speak at a Super 8 Motel conference--but she viewed the work as a way to make ends meet while looking after her father. In 1993, a few months after her father's death, Lemmons-Poscente moved to Dallas. She kept a hand in the film business while frugally expanding her speakers' agency.

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Donna Fenn

Inc. contributing editor Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Both this blog and the book examine the ways in which GenY is changing the entrepreneurial landscape with new approaches to starting, growing, and managing their companies. Learn more at http://www.upstartsrock.com/.

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