I have already shared with you what Doug and I believe about picking your business niche fully in line with your passion (Why You Should Build Your Business on Passion).

Did you notice the fine line between passion and addiction? What separates them is our perspective, really. How we look at it and what we admit seeing makes all the difference.

When I launched my translation company not many people thought I can ever successfully compete with a well-established translation company with a long track record and a huge crowd of semi-professional and professional translators and interpreters working for them full time. Yet I did not have the smallest doubt that in the long run I would win. My friends, classmates, buddies, and acquaintances had outstanding language skills and an eagerness to work together. Their superb flexibility gave me a solid basis to believe that our team would outperform the gigantic competitor. Take deadlines – a crucial aspect of any translation assignment. That was where we would beat them.

And we did!

The firm belief that we would win and at some time take over leadership in the market was based on my passion and… playing style. (By the way, today the company is the market leader in the country). So, now is the time to make a confession: I am an avid Scrabble player. Some call me passionate, others addicted, but the matter of fact is I find immense pleasure in this crossword game and spend a lot of time playing it. I enjoy many things in it, and I find it difficult to refrain from telling you about Scrabble for hours.  (I realize you may not be interested.)

Still, what I learned from playing is this: a game is neither won nor lost until one of the players placed his or her last tile on the board.

Even if you are lucky and have tiles with high scores; even if during the game you place your tiles strategically even if you have a great vocabulary AND you understand how to double or triple your letter score or word score; even if you get 50 bonus points by using all of your seven tiles in one go – at the end of the day, you may be the one who loses.

How many times it happened to me that after a lucky start and fast build up of a strong lead, I got carried away and continued the game half-assed (OK, half-heartedly), and as a result, my partner won in the end. Soon, the same happened the other way round: my partners sometimes became cock-sure after the first moves and were not paying close attention to what I was doing, focusing too much on their own coming glory – and WHAM! I systematically built up my victorious plan, leading to my triumph.

Fortunately, when it comes to business planning and business management, I have the same perseverance and stubbornness. The same passion. I would never give up. I would stretch it to the maximum, and even beyond because losing to competitors is not an option. Not for me.

My confidence relies on my strong conviction that we are more focused and more determined than anybody in our line of business. We are ready to take that extra mile and keen on finding creative solutions. (I always laugh when people are encouraged to ‘think out of the box’ because as far as I am concerned, I never think inside the box.) When an issue comes up and requires a solution to advance our business, we know no boundaries and obstacles. We love what we do and never mind spending long hours on the job…

…Because our translation company is our true passion. Till the very last tile.