Spruce Grove startup finds fiscal success in translation
How do you turn a tiny home-based startup in Spruce Grove into a successful global business without leaving Spruce Grove?
Not easily, you can be sure. But it can be done.
Consider the unlikely saga of Michele Hecken, the founder and CEO of Alpha Translations Canada, a firm that translates complex legal, financial and technical documents into dozens of languages for some of the world’s top law firms and biggest multinationals.
With 15 employees in Canada, four staffers in Germany, roughly 2,000 contract translators worldwide, and annual revenues of several million dollars, Alpha Translations has grown into a thriving, profitable business.
Since it was founded in 1994, it has provided translation services to corporate giants like Deutsche Telekom, Nissan, Bayer, Bosch, Yahoo!, Coca-Cola, and the former DaimlerChrysler, as well as dozens of the world’s largest law firms.
But the story of Alpha Translations is really the story of Michele Hecken, an entrepreneur who knows how to capitalize on a golden business opportunity when she sees it.
Hecken was born in Toronto to a Canadian mother and German father.
She shuttled between the two countries while growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, making friends on both sides of the pond and becoming fluent in German along the way. When she was studying at the University of Bonn in the late 1980s, Hecken met a fellow student who was translating books on the side to earn some extra cash.
“He was getting paid, like, 15 bucks per page, and I thought to myself, I can do that,” she recalls.
So she applied to the same publishing house for work and soon found herself translating a book spun off from an American television series of that era called Quantum Leap.
“It was the first thing I translated. Unfortunately, I never got to watch the show, since this was in the pre-Internet age and I couldn’t see it online,” she says.
Hecken went on to translate other short stories and books, while completing her studies.
“Then I got a translation request from Nissan, the car manufacturer. My exhusband used to work there so they knew me.”
Nissan liked her work, so they started sending her regular assignments.
In 1993, Hecken decided to leave Germany for Spruce Grove, so she and her two young children could live close to her mother.
Around the same time, Hecken stumbled on a magazine article about a translator who lived in Australia.
“Every day she’d hang out at the beach, and then when her U.S. clients woke up, she’d start working. So I’m like ‘Wow, wait a minute. There’s an eight-hour time difference between Germany and Edmonton. So I can tell my clients to fax me assignments before they go home, and I can work all day and fax them back before they come to work the next morning.”
Soon Hecken was working long hours from Spruce Grove, pumping out translated documents for firms like Clifford Chance, a global law firm based in London. Other law firms soon followed.
Hecken hired freelance translators on a project basis to share the workload. But she realized by the late 1990s she needed to be less hands-on. So she turned the translation work over to others and began focusing on marketing.
By 2006 she began hiring sales staff, and in 2011 she formed a sister consulting firm called Alpha Global Experts, with partner Usukuma Ekuere, who holds a PhD in genetics from the University of Birmingham in the U.K., and an MBA from the University of Alberta, to offer expert advice on foreign markets.