SME Founder/Director with 20+ years of experience as Managing Director of AST Language Services Ltd. I studied German language and literature for my BA and lived in Germany after my studies. I also speak French, Greek and a little Spanish. After founding AST, for 15+ years I worked at establishing our client base in Switzerland, Austria and Germany. Later on I used this as a springboard for building and supporting our SME client base in the UK with an extended range of 200+ language pairs. I now have a successful track record of managing long-term client relationships with large international companies, UK SME exporters and European sub-contract clients.As ever the key to moving from successful startup to mature service provider has been recruiting and retaining competent colleagues. I’m lucky to have worked with some really excellent people, many of whom (in addition to the ones still at AST) continue to work for us as freelance translators and project-managers.I’m proud of the culture my colleagues and I have co-created that puts people first and effective use of technology a close second. This comprises a set of values that, I believe, effectively convey our shared passion for languages and for helping our clients meet their translation objectives easily and cost-effectively. Despite the recent incredible advances in AI and AI translation tools, I believe that humans will always need other humans to reliably translate context and cultural nuance in a consistently fluent and readable way that fully respects the intended audience. I'm also a tree and forestry enthusiast and run a small not-for-profit organising corporate tree-planting events for local businesses, see treesfornottingham.orgAREAS OF EXPERTISEManaging and growing a translation company | Talent recruitment and retention | Experience with a wide range translation technology | Overseeing database and IT integration projects | Service and technical problem solving | Reorganising / restructuring translation departments | SME strategy and planning | Fluency in 3 languages