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"Entrepreneur created gazelle with €360 in his pocket".

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Entrepreneur created gazelle with €360 in his pocket

Photo: Robert Hendel
Article: By Signe Hvas. December 23, 2017

At one point, Martin Boberg juggled three different jobs in addition to Diction while studying at CBS.

Lacking a good student job, 20-year-old Martin Boberg chose to start his own translation company. Now he has offices in three countries and a turnover of millions.

Good, relevant student jobs are hard to come by. Martin Boberg experienced this when he was 20 years old and a student at CBS. But then you can always become self-employed. With €360 in his pocket, he created Diction, which had a turnover of €800,000 in 2017 and will become a Gazelle company next year. Diction specializes in translating texts, primarily for the business community, but also for private individuals. And there was a market for that right away. "The companies I contacted were really keen on this," he says.

Diction quickly became a subcontractor to the larger translation companies in Denmark. Here they learned the standards. "The first three years we didn't earn much. All the money went to the translators. It was really, really tough," says Martin Boberg. At that time, in addition to Diction and his studies at CBS, he had found three, not so relevant, side jobs to make ends meet.

The last seven years he has spent getting the company up and running, and after three years he could start drawing a salary. "It was a tough period. But if you want it, you can get through it," he says. To make it work, he had to draw on all the energy he could and turn every penny.

"After three years when Diction consisted of language students, we transitioned to becoming a digitized translation agency that only had fully qualified translators," says Martin Boberg. He believes that many startups can tend to be a bit slow to get off the ground. "What a lot of startups forget is that it's about having customers. Many spend time developing their service or product. We made a website, and then we started grabbing customers," he explains, adding that many startups may be in a waiting position instead of "just getting started."

Could have used knowledge

For Martin Boberg, it has been important to be able to finance the company himself, and therefore Diction has never received additional capital beyond the €360 he started with as a 20-year-old.

He believes one should think twice before accepting investments. "It's very prominent in the media to take in capital. But so far we've been satisfied with the pace at which we've grown," he says, explaining that the strategy has precisely been to reinvest the profits each year.

Prominent customers

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