Wendy Pease is a Language Translation Expert and the President and Owner of Rapport International, a global communications company specializing in translation and interpretation. Wendy is a Board Member of the Boston Chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. She has an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a bachelor’s in foreign service and international politics from Penn State.
Kerri Garbis is the Founder and CEO of Ovation, where she helps transform professional presence and guides professionals to reach their full potential. She is a professional speechwriter and is certified by the Professional Speechwriters Association, a certified etiquette expert by the Emily Post Institute, and certified by the Hay Group as an emotional intelligence expert.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Wendy Pease shares the origin of her appreciation for communicating in different languages
- How the pandemic reshaped communication and human interaction in the workplace
- Ways to use technology to support your sales and business
- Why you should have a structured process for managing collections
- An in-depth look at launching a global website in multiple languages
- Kerri Garbis discusses self-awareness when targeting international audiences
- Wendy describes a story about untranslatability
- Kerri talks about creating a place to refine your professional presence
In this episode…
How can you harness the skill of captivating and effective presentations? Is it possible to make your brand culturally relevant without fear of mistranslating from one language to another?
Kerri Garbis has experience helping others improve their presence and creates a space for clients to practice presentations and use feedback to enhance and improve their abilities. When you’re confident, you can tackle any “what if” that comes your way. Helping brands off the stumbling block and avoiding improper idioms is at the core of Wendy Pease’s work. All cultures have their own idioms, and knowing how to translate your product details effectively may be why your brand stands above the competition.
Join Dr. Jeremy Weisz of Rise25 in this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast as he sits down with Wendy Pease, Language Translation Expert and President and Owner of Rapport International, and Kerri Garbis, Founder and CEO of Ovation, to discuss enhancing your professional presence internationally. Together they talk about how technology can support human interaction and communication in the workplace, launching a global brand in multiple languages, and avoiding untranslatability.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Wendy Pease on LinkedIn
- Rapport International
- The Global Marketing Show
- The Language of Global Marketing: Translate Your Domestic Strategies into International Sales and Profits by Wendy Pease
- Kerri Garbis on LinkedIn
- Ovation
- Speaking of Events
- Presentation Skills For Managers by Kerri Garbis
- Studio G
- Dr. Jeremy Weisz on LinkedIn
- Inspired Insider
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization
- Andrea Heuston on Inspired Insider
- Andrea Herrera on Inspired Insider
- Verne Harnish on Inspired Insider
- Carrie Santos on the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast
- LastPass
- HubSpot
- Phantombuster
- TextExpander
- Slack
- Proposify
- Basecamp
- Grammarly
Sponsor for this episode…
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
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The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.
We make distribution easy.
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Co-founders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
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Contact us now at support@rise25media.com or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.
Rise25 Co-founders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:02
Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.
Jeremy Weisz 0:13
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder and host of INspiredINsider.com and the co host of Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. And this is going to be a great episode with Wendy Pease and Kerri Garbis. Before I formally introduce them, you know, Wendy and Kerri I like to mention other episodes people should check out of the podcast and Andrea Heuston, founder of Artitudes Design, who is actually in EO, and also in Seattle. So women of EO I think they have an event actually coming up soon women of EO and Andrea Herrera of Boxperience in who’s in Chicago, also had on the podcast, who is a women woman of EO as well. And Verne Harnish has been on the podcast that was a great episode, and my business partner John featured Curie Santos, as well on the Rising Entrepreneurs, so check those out. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25 and at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. And we do that by helping you run your podcast we’re an easy button for people to launch and run their podcasts. You know, for me, you know, Wendy and Kerri the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And over the past decade of podcasting, I found no better way than to profile the people and the companies I admire and respect and feature them in their stories on the show. So if you are a business author and you’ve thought about podcasting, you should hands down. If you have questions, you can go to Rise25.com and email us we’ve been doing it for over a decade at this point. And we I’m sure we could hopefully pretty much answer any question that you have. I am super excited. We have the CEO and founder of Ovation Kerri Garbis, who’s trained 1000s of business professionals from companies such as Walt Disney MasterCard for Verizon. And she does this she helps them with presentation skills storytelling, etiquette, emotional intelligence, she actually wrote a book Presentation Skills for Managers. It’s been published by McGraw Hill, you can check her out at getovation.com And she’s got some great stories some great tips for us today we have Wendy Pease is the President Owner of Rapport International, a translation and interpretation services company specializing in marketing translation. And, you know, I, I listened to her book, she’s the author of The Language of Global Marketing. And you can learn more at rapporttranslations.com, and they really opened my eyes to you know, oftentimes, I only think of US. So when I read a book, it just it just opened her eyes. There’s so much more outside of this from a cultural and business perspective. So I encourage you to check out her book. So thank you both for joining me.
Wendy Pease 3:01
Y’all are right. Yeah. I’m honored to be with Kerri and you’ve had some incredible other EO women on so it’s nice to hear all I have to go back and listen to them. I didn’t realize
Kerri Garbis 3:12
those four guests you’ve mentioned I’ve met two of them and spoken to all three the except for the last one was John Santos. Santos Carrie Santos sorry. And yet how could I forget this was their name was Carrie but because I feel like I’m the only one the Andrea and and Verne. all amazing.
Jeremy Weisz 3:36
I want to start off on Kerri with you and just talk to people about what to get Ovation does and what you do. Sure, so that
Kerri Garbis 3:46
it’s truly Ovation. I just have a catchy URL of get Ovation. I love the EO. And thank you. And we’re communication skills training. So anything under the umbrella of professional presence and speaker development. So we’re working are partnering with HR and l&d departments on the corporate side coming in to help with anything from presentation skills to storytelling to overall communication within teams. And then on the event side, the speaker development side, which is a lot of fun, and kind of my favorite, don’t tell the l&d and HR people that will get 100 1000s of speakers ready a year to present at their conferences.
Jeremy Weisz 4:31
Yeah. And so we’re going to dig deep on that because especially in this virtual world, people are probably presenting maybe more often than they would in the physical world. So now we’re getting back to physical and virtual and this is applies to if you’re on a podcast if you’re doing a presentation or if you’re doing a webinar. So we’re going to dig deep on that. And Wendy, talk to people about you and what you do.
Wendy Pease 4:55
Sure, well, we take it beyond just presenting in one little language. So Kerri gets them all lined up with the content they need to do. And then we take it and take it across multiple languages. So we do everything from highly technical written translations like patents, or you know, market entry research and contracts up to, you know, website translation brochures, user manuals, anything that has to be in the written form, but we don’t stop there. We also help people when they’re speaking. So it can be anything from the telephone, a webinar meeting. The live interpreter that’s going to come with you to a meeting like a doctor’s appointment, or deposition, or Voc Rehab, up to conference interpreting. So Kerri, I thought we should talk because we’ll work with speakers and, and help them present when they’re going to be presenting through an interpreter. I don’t know if you do that training. But that’s certainly something that’s becoming more and more important, because there’s certain words that you shouldn’t use and humor is a particular consideration how fast you speak, you know, having your slides translated or advanced materials given over to the interpreters. So we we do everything to another language?
Jeremy Weisz 6:17
I’m gonna talk about that. Because in your book, you talk about some funny translations like that would if you just try and go to Google Translate, it would technically be correct, but it’s offensive. So we’ll talk about maybe some offensive translations people use where they name their company, the wrong thing, and it it basically, you know, in that language, it’s actually offensive. But um, you know, I want to start off, and we’ll, we’ll dig deep on a few topics here, but with a couple fun facts about each of you. And, Wendy, we’ll start with you. You know, the
Wendy Pease 6:50
these are the ones I don’t know that you
Jeremy Weisz 6:52
do not know what I’m gonna say here. But, you know, I do a lot of research ahead of time. But, you know, as a young child, you lived in a lot of different places, Mexico, Taiwan, Philippines, you lived, where there was no electricity or running water in a town. So I’d love for you to just talk about one of the experiences and how it shaped you living internationally.
Wendy Pease 7:15
Sure, yeah, I can talk about Taiwan as you listen to the book, which I recorded in my basement wine cooler wine storage room that I use for gift storage. That was a load of fun with a expert recording person. But in there, I talk about living in Taiwan, my dad was an international agriculture research. And so we were assigned to go live in a new center that was just being developed outside of Shan Hua, Taiwan. And that was the small town that didn’t have running water or electricity, but the center would that they were building it did. But we’d go into the town and they had never seen blond haired children. So my brothers and I would show up and people there would want to touch touch our skin, touch our hair. And, you know, we could buy all the fresh produce and meat was still a scarcity. But cereal you couldn’t get except for driving about an hour, an hour and a half to tie in on and you go into this little black market store. And so to this day, I still love cereal. I had it for dinner last night. My, my son happened to be out and I was like, Oh, I’m just gonna have cereal. So you know, there’s a lot of funky little things that can form when you’re a child. I think it also gave me a love of cross cultural communications, you know, how do you communicate when you don’t share a language? What can you do with body language, the appreciation that you can get and in talking to people that when you don’t share a language and how you can come together and share experiences?
Jeremy Weisz 8:54
Yeah, one of my favorite desserts is Lucky Charms. So sometimes after getting all you cereal is a dessert. So it says there’s vitamins in there. I don’t know how
Wendy Pease 9:03
it’s healthier than cake and cookies and ice cream. Right?
Jeremy Weisz 9:06
Exactly. Um, you know for you, Kerri, I have two fun facts. One is that that Annie was an inspiration for your career trajectory. So talk about that. And if you are inclined, one of my favorite songs is Hard Knock Life. So but start with Annie, how’s that influential for you?
Kerri Garbis 9:29
Well, I was six years old, and I grew up in Baltimore and my parents took me to the first national tour of Annie. And I was already taking dance and playing piano and like to sing, but after the show, we go out to dinner, and happened to sit next to all the little girls that were in the show. And this was like to me I mean this was every star the Mega amazement to my little six year old self. And I ended up in a conversation with the six, the other six year old, who was in the cast. It was the youngest girl and she was playing Molly in the show. And I was like, What’s it like to be a professional actress? And what do you do? And she’s like, Oh, it’s great. You have a tutor, and you go shopping during the day, show at night. And I was like, This is great. And that I turned to my parents at that dinner and I said, this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. My mother may have cried a little and right and for years and years, I held on to that program until it disintegrated, just withered with time. And the The Girl Who Played Molly in that production was Alyssa Milano.
Wendy Pease 10:48
Wow. That’s crazy. Yes. So Thanks, Alyssa. I feel I hear you sing. I want to hear you sing hard knock life. Kerri Garbis 10:59
I do sing. I do love Annie. So with apologies to all the Annie fans, it’s a hard knock life for us. It’s a hard knock life for us stead of treated we get kicked stead of kisses we get tricked it’s a hard knock life, and I just messed up the words, but that’s fine.
Jeremy Weisz 11:21
Amazing. I love it. One of my favorites. I’ll have to replay that one Kerri. Thank you.
Kerri Garbis 11:28
So wasn’t really, I wasn’t really warmed up.
Jeremy Weisz 11:31
I mean, I put you on the spot. You know, um, so Wendy the I’ll come to you in a second, but but Kerri, you know, your teachings and, and your company comes out of your experience from, you know, acting and singing and everything that you do. Talk about the right now I’m in person, in person return, and events training, what’s going on?
Kerri Garbis 11:58
Well, it is like, all of a sudden, the world woke up and said, Oh, great, we want to get back together. And the wonderful staff of facilitators and coaches I have, which are, by the way, all professional actors, that is the whole inspiration for the company, because I think actors have important things to say to business professionals. It is a wonderful and exciting. And what has come to light, it just in the past couple months is that now we’re getting people back together, which is great, which is really what we love, we also you know, virtual all good, back together human interaction, that’s where it’s at. And here’s the thing, if you have a group of people coming back together for the first time, who haven’t seen each other in two years, or maybe they haven’t met yet, and they’ve only worked virtually all they want to do is talk to each other. They don’t actually want to do a communication skills exercises, they really want to just talk to each other. So we have been working with curriculum development and kind of reframing opportunities for people to connect and, and talk to each other, and putting a little education in there too. So giving, giving time people to breathe, hug connect all that good stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 13:18
Um, you know, both of you mentioned before we hit record about building a sales engine in so that’s top of mind. And so, Wendy, I want to start with you, and what are your thoughts? You know, there’s a lot of business owners listening to this on building a sales engine?
Wendy Pease 13:34
Well, that’s what I’m struggling with. I don’t know if I have anything to say to business owners about how to do it. But yeah, where I’ve gotten to in my business is we’ve we’ve built over networking and referrals. And if I think about bringing in a sales team to do that, it’s harder to network these days. And that’s not how a lot of sales is doing. There’s so much more automation at the top of the funnel, and it’s so much more electronic networking. So how do you build out that top of funnel to be efficient using technology and maybe BD RS and maybe VAs from international, so that you’re driving more leads into, you know, actual buying opportunities. And we do a ton of inbound marketing and that’s been successful to a certain point. But I think you have to have inbound and outbound. And so that’s what we’re, you know, we focused in on inbound. I’ve got Lisa Ray, who’s running that she’s absolutely fantastic. Now, how do we supplement that with the outbound function?
Jeremy Weisz 14:52
Yeah, I mean, for me, Wendy I always have more questions than answers. So sometimes the questions are more valuable than anything else. So I want to hear your thought process and how you’re thinking this through because I think for any business, this is always top of mind, you know whether I don’t know of any business has it figured it has figured it out? I mean, you’ve been doing this for four years, you know? Yeah, exactly. So I’m curious. And Kerri I want to hear your thoughts on it. But what software is you like to use just in general with your company? Because you mentioned automation? Are there certain software’s that you use as a company that you like, you know, like, we use, like, LastPass and Active Campaign, there’s like a lot of different ones we like what do you what do you like to use?
Wendy Pease 15:34
I just started using LastPass. And now I’m, I’m converted, I think, stick? Yeah, yeah, to change your passwords and easily login and share passwords with other people that have to get in. Yeah, so we’re, we’re extreme HubSpot fans. So we’ve been using that for years. At this point, couldn’t live without it. I shouldn’t say that they made up our price. I really do like HubSpot. LinkedIn, LinkedIn navigator, we do a lot with that we fold around with duck soup on how to do some automated outreach. But you know, then it’s trying to figure out how to make the connections because you can’t just make connections and drop it, you’ve got to build the relationship. But duck soup has been able to help with that. We as phantom Buster to take names that we names and companies that we don’t have information on to try to get their name in a direct email contact. We’ve been trying some automated email outreach, but that hasn’t worked real well. But we’re we’re still in the testing phase. And we’re using persist IQ for that. And we see LinkedIn Navigator has been very interesting to help us develop lists. So I think those are the key ones that we’re using.
Jeremy Weisz 16:54
So Kerri, we’ll go to your favorite software. So yeah, we use LastPass Active Campaign. Another one that I like to tell people about is, is Text Expander. It’s the best $3, you could spend a month. So check it out. It’s like a desktop app where if you type in a word, if you find yourself typing the same thing over and over, like, here’s my bio, or here’s an answer to this, you can actually save all those in text expander. And when you type in that, that word, it will pop up in your email or in social media. So we love that.
Wendy Pease 17:25
Yeah, we use text plays, which is the same thing. I think that’s that’s great for so many things that you put in. So,
Jeremy Weisz 17:35
So Kerri, what about you? What are some of your favorite software’s that you use? I love to hear. You know how you think about the sales? Pipeline sales in general?
Kerri Garbis 17:46
Sure. Absolutely. LastPass Yes, huge proponent HubSpot, love it. slack for internal communication. We tried to move all team communication to HubSpot slack rather. So that email doesn’t get that can get so I can get buried under that pretty quickly. Proposify for our proposals, which link all of this links in nicely to HubSpot, which I really, really like Basecamp for project management, and then personally for my writing, because I’m a terrible speller is I use an app called Grammarly. Yeah, right, say I don’t know for me saves my life. So I’m gonna check out TextExpander though that sounds really interesting.
Jeremy Weisz 18:27
Check it out. Um, yeah.
Kerri Garbis 18:30
In terms of the cash flow sales for us, the the challenge is, it’s really, as a friend of mine, a finance guy said it’s really chunky, right? Because it’ll come in and then and, and goes down. And the challenges because we’re working with so many very large players, that the the payment cycle can be net 65. Net 90. And so we’ve done a ton of work, I’ve paid the the staff, we’ve put out the expenses, and I’m waiting two plus months to get the cash back in. So sometimes that can get very little, you know, nerve racking, and what I have, so what I just tried to do is jam in as many sales as possible. Like I’m just a fiend for it. Yes, yes, yes, yes, we can do it, we can do it and bring in as many sales as possible. And luckily, a lot of the work that I’ve done over the past 10 years of having a business is building up the processes to support that so that as much work as we’re taking on, it’s rolling out and delivery of it is successful versus having complaints or it’s not up to snuff for our clients.
Jeremy Weisz 19:48
Yeah. I’d love to hear if you have any Wendy chime in to have tips on for collection purposes. I remember I forgot what guest it was but they said they would send a gift To whoever the person that the payment thing is like, they send him a bottle of wine, like every month, just as a nice thing and they make sure they’re paid on time. I don’t know, any tips you have maybe keeping track in one of the CRM is to make sure that everything’s paid on time. Or maybe it’s just all set up and you have no problems with that.
Kerri Garbis 20:21
Well, anybody can send me a bottle of wine anytime and absolutely paying them. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think that I love that idea that would not work for if I’m sending a bottle of wine for somebody in AP and like some gigantic company, I think it might be perceived as a bribe. So not for me. I would say, you know, we have I have an an outsourced comptroller bookkeeper, they’re sending the invoices right now whoever has the relationship, the salesperson, me, will then do the the follow up. And it you know, it’s a pain.
Jeremy Weisz 20:59
Yeah. Sometimes I ask because I feel like stuff can get lost, right? You send it, it’s a big corporate deal. So it just needs to be at least kept track of and then followed up on at a minimum, you know. So you’ll, you’ll have someone who owns it, who will follow up with it, and they keep it on their, their list, and they’re just there to follow up with until it comes through.
Kerri Garbis 21:21
Yeah, so we keep I mean, I keep track of that through the aging reports, our QuickBooks aging report. That’s, that’s how I see it. And I’m like, oh, no, we got to reach out to that person.
Jeremy Weisz 21:33
Got it. Um, so I want to go through Wendy, if you have anything to chime in, on the collections part, or just following up if there’s any specific process people should think about on that. And
Wendy Pease 21:46
I think like Kerri said, is just got to put a process in around it. So we outsource our bookkeeping to Analytics, which is based in Massachusetts, but everything’s done over in India. So when an invoice goes out, we’ve got a follow up, that goes out on certain period time periods. For for when it’s due, if it gets past a certain time, then we have somebody internal call and figure out what’s going on. The other thing that we do for larger jobs, we take 50% payment upfront, because then that enables us to cover our expenses, you know, if we have a collection issue, so not, you know, not it doesn’t cover all of our expenses, but it covers a good amount. So we’re not struggling with that, you know, the up and down cash flow so much on the bigger projects. And so that’s, that’s been pretty good. I think over the history of the company, we’ve had collections issues with two big companies that, you know, have have drugged out and, and caused us a problem. Of course, we’ve had, you know, small ones here and there where, you know, it’s just a thorn in your side because it’s taking more time. But for the most part, once we got the process set up, we stayed on top of it. And it works.
Jeremy Weisz 22:57
Yeah, I asked because I mean, even if you look at you know, rehearse books going up, and one of the major sections is cashflow. Right. So if this is a real deal problem, or can be for businesses. So Kerri Another fun fact, because I forgot to mention we were talking about fun facts is I don’t know if Wendy knows this one. This is a really cool and you actually went to school with Tupac and Jada. Jada Pinkett Smith.
Kerri Garbis 23:24
I did
Wendy Pease 23:26
No I didn’t know she continues to amaze me
Jeremy Weisz 23:29
I just again, there was whenever someone will say this. There was a thing that happened at the Oscars so that Jada Pinkett Smith has been in the news, but more Are they like in high school
Kerri Garbis 23:39
Okay, first of all, can I talk about the Oscars just for a second? There was another okay. So Jada is one of my so I went to the Baltimore score for the arts day as one of the most famous alumni we have. And however, there was also another Baltimore School graduate was the conductor at the Oscars. And I feel that Dante Winslow’s, a debut as the conductor Balton proud Baltimore School for the Arts graduate, it was so overshadowed by what happened with Jada. And the cool thing was that before the Oscars that Dante and Jada, were posting all these pictures of Lego School for the Arts and the house pictures, and they were really cool. And everybody’s so proud and, and I just wanted to give a shout out to Dante. And so So
Jeremy Weisz 24:34
was he in the same class also, or was just he was
Kerri Garbis 24:36
just a couple years younger than me in the music department. I was in both music and theater. So it’s, it’s really, really exciting. And
Jeremy Weisz 24:46
just to say something, you know, here is a small school. It’s not like there were 1000s of people that right so
Kerri Garbis 24:54
Oh no, my graduating class included me and Jada. And there were 55 people in our graduating class. This what I do like to throw down is this, you know, the senior superlatives like people vote like most likely to whatever, Jada and I tied for most popular girl. So there’s
Jeremy Weisz 25:14
up front in your book, like the tagline of your book is like, the quote.
Kerri Garbis 25:19
That’s right. That’s right. Jada was very much, Jada sassy, fabulous, adorable, Uber talented, energetic. Tupok was, um, he, he was kind of nerdy. He was, like, really it like really thoughtful and into Shakespeare. And, uh, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t know him super well, he was a year ahead of me, maybe two think maybe just a year? And. But, yeah, yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 25:56
that’s great. But I just figured, you know, what were they like back then? Um, so, Wendy, I don’t have another fun fact for you. But I do have a question I want you to talk about, there was a manufacturing company that you worked with. And I want you to talk, tell that story.
Wendy Pease 26:12
So manufacturing, doesn’t seem as sexy and as exciting as to what Kerri’s talking about. And they’re actually having a hard time pulling the millennials or younger generations into work for them. But manufacturing is a hotspot for technology and finding jobs. And I do a lot of talking about how they can hire non English speakers to work. And they’re good jobs for the people who are very educated, but might not have good language skills. So do a lot of talking about that. But I think the manufacturing company that you’re talking about, in particular, is a global manufacturer of like boxes and shipping materials. And they were made up of a bunch of acquisitions and had offices in manufacturing plants in different countries. And they offered different products in each of the countries and they each had their own website. And it was a huge loss for global marketing, because they weren’t under one brand. They weren’t sharing all the, you know, the Google juice of having more people come to your website. So very astute marketing person said, Okay, we got to get control of this. And she had this massive spreadsheet of countries products, and what was offered where and then was able to figure out what had to be translated into different languages. And so we work real intently with her on making sure this worked. And then they were able to launch a Global website that could bring in people from all over the world, but direct them to what products they could buy in the region that they’re coming from. So if you’re out there looking for a job, or you know, people that don’t speak English, don’t don’t knock off manufacturing for a career choice, because there’s huge potential there and huge potential for manufacturers to sell internationally.
Jeremy Weisz 28:12
No. And what’s interesting about what both of you do is because you work with different industries, you see trends in these industries, you know, you’ll see trends in manufacturing and so yeah, next thing Kerri for you I want to ask is trends in speaker training before you answer that, um, you know, I want Wendy just for you to touch on mistakes of naming. Okay, you’ve probably seen some mistakes of people naming products or things that are offensive in a country because people don’t realize it’s offensive. So I love for to hear a few that are top of mind that you’re like, oh my if they would have just hired us they would not have had this issue.
Wendy Pease 28:55
The one I love that you guys are gonna get clearly because it was an Iranian company coming into the US with detergent, and the detergents name was barf. You know, here’s another English one, you know is Electrolux, you know the vacuums that are supposed to be good. Over in England, their tagline was Electrolux, it sucks came into the US and they had a different meaning. So it didn’t do well.
Kerri Garbis 29:25
I think that’s a brilliant tagline. I would totally buy that.
Wendy Pease 29:34
You know if you’re targeting the right market,
Kerri Garbis 29:35 right? That’s right. ABS good. It’s good. Yeah.
Wendy Pease 29:40
The Ford Pinto tried to launch in South America. I can’t remember which country but Pinto is a slang term for male genitalia. So that didn’t work. Luckily, they were able to pluck off the names and put a new one on called core cell which was you know, a horse where they were so
Jeremy Weisz 30:00
Something that slipped through the cracks at a company
Wendy Pease 30:02
They don’t they don’t test it. You know, so you can’t you’ve got to look at who you’re testing stuff. And if you’re, you go. So if you talk about consumer products, people want to have emotional connection when they buy it. And so it’s not as simple as saying, Okay, we’re going to do this in Spanish and launch it and every every Spanish speaking country, because every place has different slang, even if you look at New England versus, you know, the west coast or the slang is very, very different. You know, I always like to give the example of y’all You wicked, smart. You know, those, they just don’t go together, y’all Southern and wicked is New England. And so you have to think about who your audience is. And you want to test it in that audience. So when we’ve done brand name testing, we don’t just ask what language were we asked, Where are you going to be using this? So we can make sure that we have the right people testing? You know, looking at it and telling us, does it have a negative connotation? Do you associate it with anything else?
Jeremy Weisz 31:06
So if you are launching a product in the country, call, Wendy, don’t still mistake of barf. I mean, I don’t know how that slips through the cracks. I didn’t bow somewhere.
Wendy Pease 31:17
You know, you know? Yeah, so that’s kind of level one. Level two that I’m seeing now is all the e-commerce companies that are missing out on huge amounts, because you put something on a website and launch it out there. People are finding it. But if they can’t find it in your language, number one, that’s a problem. Number two, they’re using machine translation to to run their ads. So in social media, they’re wasting their money completely. Because if that ad doesn’t resonate with the people, the culture who you’ve translated it for, they’re going to skip right by it. So if you’ve got ads that aren’t working, you’ve got to really look at what language you’re using, and then the other places on Amazon, Amazon’s going to show your products all over the world. And they’re going to put machine translation in so I can go in there and I can find products that have partial translation and partial English and the translations gobbly gook because it was done with machine translation. So you’re losing all that ability, and particularly if you’re selling on Amazon, they’ve got such good programs to support exporters, so you can actually fulfill it internationally.
Kerri Garbis 32:27
I think the cultural, I’m not in this space at all, but I’m gonna throw my opinion and the cultural piece is, is key. And Wendy’s company is a vendor of ours Rapport International does the translating when we deliver our training in a different language. And so when we started working together, I remember you saying well, it’s not just the translation, it’s also the cultural piece, how you talk about stuff here in the States, maybe very different. Our we’re going to talk about it elsewhere. And, and it’s really important to keep in mind,
Jeremy Weisz 33:01
and Kerri, again, talk about that for a second, because those are mistakes, you know, big mistakes people make with, you know, their product, what are some mistakes people make when presenting? We’ll get to the trends and speaker training. But what are what have you seen some crazy stories with presenting and mistakes, and you don’t have to name names here, but like, you know, what have you seen?
Kerri Garbis 33:24
Oh, I’ve seen some really great mistakes, including some very odd wardrobe choices, too. But you do have to be if we’re talking about caught cross cultural audiences, which is something we need to be extremely wary of, in the virtual environment, because anybody can log on from anywhere, is to understand, is this story going to resonate with all audiences? Is this going to be offensive? Or for me, particularly where I had to start to look at my own content when I’m hired as a speaker is how American centric are my references? There were so many things that I found myself saying like, Okay, maybe not everybody in this audience is gonna know the Brady Bunch, or
Wendy Pease 34:09
just like, a home run, or we’re in the fourth quarter, right?
Jeremy Weisz 34:15
Awesome. Well, some people with the great soccer it’s okay, well, American football.
Kerri Garbis 34:20
Yeah, but there’s no worries with sports because I never make sports reference. Yes, exactly. In in that same vein, I I recall, I just, it was a nice reminder to me how closely I need to look at my own stuff. And then we pass that on to our, our, the speakers that we’re working with as well. I have seen everything. One, this one guy was it was at a large tech conference. We had trained him I was standing in the back watching the session and he he came out and he told this great opening, engaging story because storytelling is a huge thing and engaging the audience. And he was like, Okay, let me know my story. And now I’m going to basically essentially say get to my content. And he was like, Okay. And he said, I don’t I don’t have my clicker. I don’t. Where’s my clicker? He had forgotten to bring on his remote clicker, as he kept saying it. He said, I don’t my clicker. I don’t like clicker. And instead of saying, like, hey, I’ll get started. Can somebody bring me it? He was like, Wait, I’ll be right back. And he runs off stage. And the tech people left his mic on. So all you hear backstage is like, crap. Anybody know where the clicker are? Why can’t I get the clicker? And so you heard that for it was probably like a minute, but it was so funny. And I’m crying in the back. And then he runs out on stage. And he’s like, I got it. And the whole audience erupted in, in applause, which was really cool. I, you know, he really won them over.
Jeremy Weisz 35:59
I love that. So one is don’t leave your mic out if you’re going to the bathroom or something, you know, or going back. So I mean, in that case, it helps it humanizes the person, right?
Kerri Garbis 36:09
Yes, yes.
Wendy Pease 36:11
Well, so well, to come back on and celebrate. I mean, that makes a huge difference. Yeah, he did
Kerri Garbis 36:18
it, he turned it around. It was it was it was really funny.
Jeremy Weisz 36:22
So Kerri some trends and speaker training. So
Kerri Garbis 36:26
when I, when I started Ovation, 10 years ago, it would, it would be out of the ordinary. If anybody called and asked for anything other than we would like a two day training, please come to our company and do two full days of training. Now, we haven’t done a two day training in maybe eight years. And prior to 2020, march 2020, it was like things were getting shorter. Yes, we had a couple full days. And then it was like lots of half days. And then in the virtual environment just because of the way people can take in information, the zoo, taking an account zoom fatigue, and how much everybody was spending time in front of their devices. Pete we were recommending no more than two hour chunks at a time. I thought that that is what was going to tide over. When we started back doing in person in the fall. Again, we were getting hired for like one to two hour things in person. I thought this is the way it’s gonna be. We’re gonna do lots of series of stuff, no problem. Now, I am, I think just in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had 10 requests for we’re getting back together, and we want to be back together for a full day. And so that to me is exciting.
Jeremy Weisz 37:51
Love it, we’re gonna
Wendy Pease 37:53
surprise that I thought you were gonna say that you kept it’s shorter. Because I do know that one I’ve been presenting it used to go from an hour, then it went to a half an hour. Now, you know, social media is 10 minutes or less than one minute. So it’s, it’s always taking that material and cutting it down and down. So that’s that’s great to hear that you’re going back to full full day.
Kerri Garbis 38:18
Yeah, that’s definitely on the the learning and development side programs for Speaker development. It is still lots of short little individual sessions. But on the the l&d HR side, it’s I’m, I am shocked. Yeah, delighted and shocked.
Wendy Pease 38:36
I guess that’s because people want to get together and talk. So you got to build in that time. And how do you get learning out of that talking? Yeah, but you can’t you can’t teach people by just having them, you know, by doing too short and not repeat on that. So that’s good. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 38:53
No, you’re good. Wendy, I have a question for you. And then I’m going to come back to Kerri. Before we hit record, you said postmasters on crack. So we’re going to talk about that. Yes, in a second. But, Wendy, I want you to talk about there’s a story about Staples.
Wendy Pease 39:11
Just this goes back to the brand name testing. Yeah, this was really interesting. We did staples tagline, when they were still more international it was make more happen and they wanted to take the more out and put in other words like make work happen, make art happen. And so they asked us to translate it and what was really interesting is you couldn’t book and the words like you could in English, and you had to get the message across. So first, we had to explain that like how the message wouldn’t make sense if we still tried to bookend it. And then we had one that was make refrigerator art happened in the French translator came back and she said, refrigerator art. What’s that? We don’t have that in France and she knew what it was because she lives in the United States. For those of you who don’t know, refrigerator art is that that art work you’re so proud of that your child does that you hang it on the refrigerator becomes like your personal art gallery. So we we went back to Staples and told them well, there’s no refrigerator art in France because the refrigerators for keeping food cold. It’s not a dual purpose. It’s not your art gallery and your refrigerator. So they we gave them an option to come up with something else that was substitute for it, or they just decided to do away with it. You know, coming off that story. You mentioned something earlier about the easy button for podcasts that you do at Rise25 It reminded me of a story about a podcast host that was he was in India I said he was in India and he said okay, I speak English. I’m going to do the podcast in English because there’s a larger market for it couldn’t get listenership he went back to his native language that they smoke bespoke in that region of India started doing that and his his followers skyrocketed. So there’s this whole movement to do multilingual podcast. And if you’ve got any clients that want to reach an international market, you can take the recorded podcast translated have a voiceover in, and then they’ve just expanded that content of what to do beyond so there’s all sorts of fun creative stuff going on. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 41:26
Thanks for that idea. That’s great. Sure. postmasters on crack.
Kerri Garbis 41:33
That’s right. So I the pandemic hits, I cried in the corner for like, 2020 minutes. It wasn’t much. And I’m like, alright, what am I going to do? How am I going to keep my trainers which are all professional actors, when everything shut down? Busy? Oh, I’m not traveling. We’re not sporting 100 in person events, because there are no in person events. What can I do and I thought I want to build like, you know, I want to I want to build a modern day Toastmasters on crack. And I did. So I created a b2c platform with so anybody can come in get speaker training, it’s a monthly membership. It’s called Studio G, you can find it at getStudiog.com. And which Studio G by the way, was the original original original company company name I had for this company when I was first, like toying around with the idea 110 years ago, and it is monthly membership, we’ve got different levels. There’s live weekly, everything’s virtual, it’s live weekly workshops. You can add on additional one on one coaching, we have rotating training videos. And you also have access to our exclusive AI driven rehearsal platform. So you’re able to go on rehearse your presentations, it pumps out metrics, like faster talking, or how many filler words you’re using. And it’s an asynchronous coaching tool. So you upload it when his mouth is open. And that’s cool. It means I’ve impressed her so much.
Wendy Pease 43:15
I can’t believe I didn’t know about the. So I am so excited.
Kerri Garbis 43:21
So i i You know, my unofficial tagline because I don’t think I could really use it because I might get sued is, you know, we’re Toastmasters on crack. So but you know, so any marketers out there who want I would love to find a way to like, you know, roast toast without
Jeremy Weisz 43:40
things ideal who’s ideal for that? Do they?
Kerri Garbis 43:43
Is it so it is it is an absolutely could be entrepreneurs. It was I thought of it more as somebody who’s on the precipice of a promotion, or people looking to make a move in their career and they just wanted to refine their professional presence a little bit before going on an interview or maybe stepping up within an organization or they’ve got a presentation. They’re speaking on a conference. They’re nervous, come on, in practice, get out but also stay.
Jeremy Weisz 44:17
So getStudiog.com.
Kerri Garbis 44:20
That’s right, thank you.
Wendy Pease 44:21
You know, another huge target market is English bilinguals speakers or people internationally, the US has a lot of people that aren’t afraid of standing up and speaking. But there’s a lot of people that move from technology, you know, positions or operational into management and they have no skills. So have you thought about doing this in other languages too?
Kerri Garbis 44:46
I would love to, and we have a couple bilingual folks on my team right now. I’m always looking to grow that Wendy Pease 44:57
fantastic. Alright, I’m going to check it out. Because if I hear surely I care. Yeah, thank
Kerri Garbis 45:03
you for giving me the space to do so. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 45:06
Um, so I also just want to end I don’t want to forget to have you talk for a second about VMware.
Kerri Garbis 45:15
Oh, yes, VMware is one of our, one of our clients that we support their big show. And their big conference last year was called VM world. I encourage the universe to see what may be coming down the pike of which I’m not allowed to say. But it was, it was a shining moment for us because VMware had shared with me that for the past five years, they’ve always used a new speaker training company. And we supported their speakers last year, and for the first time, in five years, they said, Wait a minute, these guys are a little different, we’re gonna stick with them. So where were their first repeat vendor in terms of speaker training in five years, something I’m really proud of really goes to the the quality and the work ethic of, of the Ovation trainers. And they it was, it’s a proud moment for me. So thank you for letting me share that.
Jeremy Weisz 46:12
And then to Kerri reminds me, I do have to introduce you and a shout out to event teak that they do. events all over the country, I think in different countries, even you know, in New York and you guys, there’s I see a lot of collaboration there between the two of your companies, because they basically help put on these shows all over the place. So of the shout out to have antique and we often meet Kerri and her company too. So thank you both for sharing your amazing stories. And I just want to point people to both your websites, you can go to getOvation.com or as Kerri mentioned, getStudiog.com. And then as far as Wendy goes, you can go to Rapport. That’s rapporttranslations.com. Are there any other places online for ease of view that we share people check out.
Wendy Pease 47:03
LinkedIn? I’m all over LinkedIn. So Wendy Pease Pease like peas and carrots with any at the end. And I’m posting funny if you like the funny stories about translation. We’re posting stuff like that all the time when we come across it. If you have any send them over to me too.
Kerri Garbis 47:24
Yes, I’m on LinkedIn as well. Are we allowed to mention our podcasts? Of course. Go ahead. Oh, yes. So my podcast is called Speaking of Events. So that’d be great intro to the event company that you talk to, I’d love to speak with them. And Wendy do you have a podcast to right?
Wendy Pease 47:44
I do the Global Marketing Show. And so on all the places you find podcasts.
Jeremy Weisz 47:51
Well, thank you both. This has been fantastic. And thanks, everyone for listening.
Outro 47:56
Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast. This episode is powered by Rise25 Please subscribe and check out future episodes.