The Gazellen Awards of Het Financiële Dagblad

We are starting to become a bit addicted to awards. Here’s why: after the SME top 100 of the Chamber of Commerce and the Deloitte Fast 50, the Gazellen Award of Het Financiële Dagblad is the third award we have been nominated for and awarded with in 2016. Third time’s a hat-trick!

Revenue

To qualify for the Gazellen Awards, there must be a rise in revenue and size of at least 20% over the last 3 financial years. According to the calculation method of Het Financiële Dagblad, our growth was roughly 300%. The first obstacle was overcome, but it didn’t end there.

Innovations

The committee had an extensive list of questions for us. For instance, they wanted to know how we see ourselves in the future. In short, we focus on two main themes; people and technology. Translation is human work; it is a craft that revolves around the knowledge and expertise of the translator. While it is true that today, the translator has more and more technological tools at their disposal, these remain no more than tools. We also address the entire infrastructure of the translator’s work environment.

Fun

The word ‘technology’ often generates a fair amount of criticism, but we like to use technology where it benefits people. For instance, we have had our own cloud environment developed where our translators can easily download their work and then upload it together with their invoice after they are done. The translators can also see an overview of their finances, indicate their availability, and much more. The result is that the translator can live and work wherever they want. Isn’t technology fun?!

Even more fun

And we haven’t even discussed the benefits for clients and the management yet. Clients can enter work, view the status of the work, communicate about their order, etc. And the management has an overview of all incoming and outgoing movements. We think it is great to combine the useful with the pleasant. Better yet: the useful needs to be united with the pleasant. Only then will the results be optimal.

Striking

In their conclusions, Het Financiële Dagblad notes that just like previous years, the list of the Gazellen Awards is full of companies who somehow take advantage of the quickly changing labour market and are active in staffing services, such as temporary employment, secondment, payrolling, and recruitment. Growth percentages of 500% up to 1000% were achieved here.

And now for the results

Amidst all the payrolling violence, we still ended up in 58th place. We are more than pleased, especially considering the fact that we were the only translation agency among the 292 nominees.