Local Growth Translates to Lower Costs

Richard W. Antoine’s health-care translation business blanketed the market for California medical providers, he had to make a decision: Would he continue to grow his business by expanding out of state? Antoine knew that establishing satellite offices would be costly and time-consuming. So he found a way to sell additional services to his existing clients. Antoine was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.

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Shortly after I opened my business, regulations went into effect that said government-subsidized medical services must be provided in the patients’ native language. We doubled our business the first year and have done so every year since as we got contracts to translate health-care forms, consent forms, applications, marketing materials, benefit summaries, member communications and many other communications.

We work for health-care providers such as Blue Cross, MaxiCare, Delta Dental and many other major health-care providers, translating materials into Spanish, Russian, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese, Chinese dialects, Hmong, Farsi, Armenian and many other languages.

Once we had covered the market and were working with all the major health-care providers in the state, I considered expanding into other areas.

But the largest population of immigrants in the U.S. lives in California. We could expand into some of the large cities such as New York and Chicago, but I foresaw a lot of command and control issues coming up. I would have to spend a lot of time and money opening remote offices and hiring managers to run them. We use very expensive computer equipment to make the translations, and we would have to make large investments to equip those new offices.

Instead of expanding geographically, I started thinking about related services.

For one thing, we noticed that as competition started being introduced into the subsidized health-care field, our clients were creating marketing materials to try to draw in patients. But their English-language advertising campaigns did not translate directly into other languages.

Slogans, double-entendres and plays on words just do not cross language and cultural barriers well. And if you don’t understand cultural values, you may offend people with an ad campaign that’s supposed to attract them.

I realized that with our language and culture knowledge, we could offer an advertising agency that would specialize in creating marketing campaigns that would be applicable across the languages. Instead of just translating an English-language campaign, we could create a campaign that would be consistent for various language groups and for the bilingual market.

So one year ago, we officially launched Magnus IA--International Advertising. We broke even this first year and noticed a lot of synergies not only because we know the languages and cultures, but because we have been translating health-care materials for so long we know about the providers’ programs and our clients don’t have to spend time and money bringing us up to speed on the services they provide.

Financially, it’s much less costly and easier to sell new services to clients who already use us and trust us, so we don’t have to spend a lot of marketing dollars attracting them.

Another new service we’ll be launching next year is a customer call-in center. The idea is that we will create an ad campaign and then provide a place for potential customers to call for information, service, help and to sign up with operators who speak their language.

Basically, we want to continue to double our operation every year by positioning ourselves to help our existing clients across the board.

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At a Glance

Company: Margnus

Owner: Richard W. Antoine

Nature of Business: Multilingual / multicultural communications

Location: 1313 N. Grand Ave. #280, Walnut, CA 91789

Year founded: 1993

Employees: 6

Annual sales: $800,000

Overall Top Companies

Year-to-date share of video sales market through Dec. 27 and top-selling video for each company. *

If your business can provide a lesson to other entrepreneurs, contact Karen E. Klein at the Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016, or send e-mail to [email protected]. Include your name, address and telephone number.