Ray Blakney and LiveLingua began out of a “brick & mortar language school” that provided classic and “true language immersion” for students who want to learn a new language.
After years of work, Ray Blakney and the LiveLingua team managed to build a “thriving network of schools.” However, the students wanted to experience the same language immersion from their own homes.
So, Ray Blakney founded LiveLingua. The company offers “first-class, private language lessons at an affordable price,” and true language immersion even from the comfort of their own homes.
Ray Blakney and LiveLingua offer the benefits of a “traditional language immersion school” and technology when you sign up for their lessons done over VOIP.
Thanks to the experience of Ray Blakney, LiveLingua employs teachers are also native speakers of the “11 most spoken languages in the world.”
Prior to LiveLingua, Ray Blakney began his professional career by writing software for several “Silicon Valley startups, Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. Government and NGO’s.”
In 2006, on the way to LiveLingua, Ray Blakney joined the US Peace Corps, which deployed him to Mexico.
In 2018, Ray Blakney started LiveLingua with his wife, Laura. The company was meant to complement the “in-person classes offered at the expanding chain of brick and mortar school.”
In 2010, he sold the “brick and mortar part of the business” so Ray Blakney could focus on LiveLingua’s online component.
Check out more interviews with online education entrepreneurs here.
In a world where every business, including online language schools, is growing for the sake of growth, we have had great success by focusing on staying personal and family-owned. Ray Blakney, LiveLingua
Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Ray Blakney: In a world where every business, including online language schools, is growing for the sake of growth, we have had great success by focusing on staying personal and family-owned. When a student signs up with us, they work with one of our specialists to get paired with their ideal language tutor. We don’t make the students search through thousands of tutors for themselves. We do all the work for them.
When each student signs up, they get a personal welcome email from me with my direct email address so they can contact me directly with anything they need. A few weeks later, my wife and co-founder emails them as well to see how the classes are going. She runs the academic end of things and is on hand to help them make progress.
This approach has not only helped us in our business but has also helped us grow our group of friends. We have met with many of our students in person, either when they visit our area or when we visit theirs. I have also had the opportunity to connect with and get to know some celebrities and very well-known CEOs with this approach. It is not why we do it, but it has been a fun and unexpected benefit of being a more personal, family-owned business.
Jerome Knyszewski: Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Ray Blakney: This one took me years to discover but has changed my life. Make sure you plan at least a 1-week ‘rest vacation’ every six months. Never skip it. A ‘rest vacation’ is one where you go to a place where you can entirely disconnect from work (nobody is allowed to call, and you should ideally have very limited internet/email access) and you focus on resting. This is not a vacation where you are exploring a new country or seeing tourist sites every day.
That can be different for everybody, but for us, it includes going for morning walks on the beach and reading fiction books 10–12 hours a day by a pool. If you do it right, you will notice that about 4–5 days in, you will feel re-energized. By day 6–7, you can’t wait to get back to work. Normally during the first 1–2 weeks after these vacations I not only make up for the lost time but also get more work done than the other five months between the rest vacations.
Jerome Knyszewski: None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Ray Blakney: That one is easy: my wife. She has been not only my life-partner but also my business partner at LiveLingua.com for the last 12 years and counting. Without her, there would have been multiple times I would have wanted to give up and just get a job that paid me every month.
One incident that really stands out to me was when we were starting out. This is what led to the revelation of taking a rest vacation every six months as I mentioned in the last question. My idea of how to run a business was, sadly, from movies and what I heard on TV. I thought that to start a successful business, it was all about hustling for years until you finally get your big break, make lots of money, and can enjoy the rest of your life.
So, for the first three years, I never took a day off and I even worked most weekends. By the end of that time, I was burned out and did not want to work. My wife saw this, and without even telling me, she booked one week in an all-inclusive resort. I told her I did not want to go, but she had already paid.
The first night we got there, I slept for 14 hours. I did not even realize how stressed and tired I was. By the end of the week, I felt like a new person. Without this intervention, I don’t think I would have reached where I am today.
A great company is one that over-delivers on the goods or services that they promised at a quality that far exceeds the expectations of the customers.
Jerome Knyszewski: Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. The title of this series is “How to take your company from good to great”. Let’s start with defining our terms. How would you define a “good” company, what does that look like? How would you define a “great” company, what does that look like?
Ray Blakney: A good company is one that provides the goods or services that they promised at the quality that is expected by the customer.
A great company is one that over-delivers on the goods or services that they promised at a quality that far exceeds the expectations of the customers.
Jerome Knyszewski: What would you advise to a business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth and “restart their engines”?
Ray Blakney: Ask. If your business has been stagnant for any period of time, the easiest way to decide what to do next is simply to ask. You can start by asking your team if they have seen any opportunities for growth that you have not taken advantage of yet.
If that does not provide you with a direction, the next step is to ask your customers. Sending emails is a great start, but the ideal is finding your best customers and simply getting on a call with them. Ask them what they love, what they think could be better, and what they wish you could help them with (within your vision). That should give you a clear direction on where your best opportunity for growth lies.
If your business has been stagnant for any period of time, the easiest way to decide what to do next is simply to ask.
Jerome Knyszewski: Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies you use to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?
Ray Blakney: The one thing we have done to survive the crisis in the past, and that we continue to do today, is run a very tight ship. Our costs have never gone above 70% of our income in a calendar year. We save a lot, even after re-investment and innovation.
If you have gotten your team onboard with the vision of the company and give them the room to grow, we have found that across the board everybody always steps up and does more than they are required to in their roles. This means, we never have a need to hire frivolously. This in turn allows us to save more. With these savings, we are actually able to outgrow our competitors during a crisis.
The best example of this is that during the COVID-19 crisis, we were able to take advantage of the low online advertising costs — because so many people cut their advertising budget — and we were able to pick up ad buys for pennies on the dollar and we grew close to 40% in 2020.
Jerome Knyszewski: In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
Ray Blakney: Discipline. Especially when companies are just starting or even a few years in, there is an air of excitement and that is enough for growth. However, that phase will end eventually, and the only way to keep growing is to have developed the discipline to come in and get the tasks done that will take you to your long-term vision for your company. Then repeat that every day for years.
Jerome Knyszewski: Great customer service and great customer experience are essential to build a beloved brand and essential to be successful in general. In your experience what are a few of the most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience?
Ray Blakney: We have found that the best way to wow our customers in the customer experience area comes down to two things. The first is to set the customer expectations at each step of the journey, so they know what to expect and when in the entire process. With this clearly conveyed to your customers, you avoid 80% of the friction in the process. Even if a certain step in your process takes a few days, you will find that most customers will not mind as long as you let them know beforehand and explain to them why.
The second step is to over-deliver on what is promised. This goes hand in hand with setting up expectations. If you are shipping a good and you set up the expectation that it will arrive in 3–5 days, you will probably not get any blow back. But then, if you do overnight shipping and they get it in 24 hours, you will get rave reviews. This entire thing can be planned. You knew, even before they were going to buy, that you were going to overnight the product but you tell them 3–5 days. This even gives you the protection that even if something delays the overnight delivery, and it arrives in 2–3 days, you are still over-delivering.
That is just one example and it can be applied to multiple areas in your business. This is not about tricking your customers. What you do is set the expectation to that of the worst-case scenario. In this example, it is a delay in shipping due to a blizzard snowstorm, for example. But you do better than the expectation you set 99% of the time.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are your thoughts about how a company should be engaged on Social Media? For example, the advisory firm EisnerAmper conducted 6 yearly surveys of United States corporate boards, and directors reported that one of their most pressing concerns was reputational risk as a result of social media. Do you share this concern? We’d love to hear your thoughts about this.
Ray Blakney: I agree with the EisnerAmper survey in that there is definitely a risk when engaging in social media. But I don’t agree with the concern. By its nature, being in business is all about risk and if you are trying to avoid all tools that have some risks to them (like social media), you will never grow your business.
For social media in general, my recommendation is to use it to provide educational material and promotional material for your business. This educational material tends to get the best engagement and gets your reach up, so you can promote the sales material. This material also has a very low risk of causing any reputational damage.
Does this mean that people will never disagree with your posts or comments? Absolutely not. But as long as the posts by your business and the staff in your business clearly promote the company’s purpose and vision, you will find that the people who post negatively were probably not your ideal customers anyway. In addition, by posting the content you did, with the clear focus on vision, you will attract more people who are your ideal customers.
The idea behind the social enterprise would be to create a system by which small-scale entrepreneurs in the developing world would be trained to take their business online in their own micro-niches. Ray Blakney
Jerome Knyszewski: What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
Ray Blakney: There are two big mistakes I see a large number of people make when they start their business:
1) They wait until their product or service is ‘perfect’ before letting any customer try it. This leads to a ton of waste, as the business generally spends tons of time and money on features that nobody is actually going to use in the future. I am a strong proponent of the Lean Startup Methodology. Create an MVP (minimum viable product) and launch it right away, even if it is awful. Get feedback from the users who tried the ‘awful’ product, and then iterate. Do this as quickly as possible. If you do this consistently within 1–2 years, you will have a product that your customers really want, without having wasted time and money developing things they did not want.
2) Shiny object syndrome. The great thing about starting a business these days is that you can find information about everything you need online. The worst thing about starting a business these days is that you can find information about everything you need online. It is very easy for a business in the startup phase to read a blog post or listen to a podcast in which the founder of a successful company talks about all the sales channels that they use and how they all generate sales. That leads to the temptation to try them all at the same time just like they do. What is being skipped is that to get to that point, the successful company started by trying only 1–2 things. When one worked they kept it, when it did not, they dropped it. Only after repeating that process for years do they now have multiple marketing streams.
This applies to every part of the business. When you are starting, you should be A/B testing everything. However, just stick to A/B testing — don’t make it A/B/C/… testing.
Jerome Knyszewski: Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Ray Blakney: Creating a social enterprise to train people to create micro-businesses online. This is something my wife and I hope to try later in life (of course, we would be thrilled if anybody else actually beats us to it).
The idea is simple. There are millions of opportunities to make an income online. Many of those ideas, however, are small and may only make a few hundreds or just a few thousand dollars a month at most. Most people in developed countries would not work for 1–2 years to build a business that makes $200-$2000 US a month. But, in many developing countries, this can be the difference between poverty and financial freedom for you and your family.
The idea behind the social enterprise would be to create a system by which small-scale entrepreneurs in the developing world would be trained to take their business online in their own micro-niches. For example, an artisan in Kenya who sells only to tourists who visit the national park would learn to start selling online. Instead of getting in front of 100 people a month, he could reach millions. Even if his work only has a very small audience online, a small audience on a global scale could change his life.
Another example would be a secretary in the Philippines who is good at Excel. They may only make $300 US a month. However, by teaching them to go online and look for clients internationally, it would not be hard for them to make $600 a month, if not more. This would double their income. The enterprise would do the training and even help cover the costs of creating a website for those who complete the course as well as provide ongoing mentorship. In exchange, they would get a small share of the online business.
The long-term idea is that the organization would be self-sustaining. After helping thousands of people start successful online businesses and owning a small share in each, it would make enough to continue to support its work, without having to look for charitable donations and grants. It would be self-sustaining, and the more success the people who go through the program have, the more income it would have to help more people succeed and get out of poverty.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Ray Blakney: You can check out LiveLingua on our website and at the below social media channels:
Thank you!
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
