MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming recently spoke at length with Sramana Mitra, creator of the “Entrepreneur Journeys” interview series, about his earliest days as a businessman—and how savvy trend-spotting and a commitment to listening to clients transformed MotionPoint into an industry leader.
The exclusive, in-depth interview showcased the company’s willingness to execute significant pivots in processes and business models to help clients achieve business success in new international markets.
An excerpt of the interview:
Sramana Mitra: When you were describing this localization thing, I was thinking, “Okay, it’s not just doing a site in another language. Selling in another geography is a whole different ball game.”
Will Fleming:Exactly. … (Our clients were) saying, “Here’s what I want you to figure out. Let’s take the Hispanic market for example. Many of your customers have a Spanish website for US customers. We share some common problems there.”
We said, "Like what?" We were thinking of them as being in very different businesses.
They said, "We know that we are in very different businesses but what we all want on our Spanish website is Spanish language traffic. We also want to make sure that the Spanish language website is especially engaging to our Spanish language visitors."
It was with those comments that we had real insight into a broadening of our business and the business opportunity. Whereas, up until that point, we thought of ourselves as a website translation company, we realized that there's a much broader opportunity to drive business results and help companies penetrate new markets. That was a major move for us.
It led to a process that began back then and has continued to this day of, "What does that mean? What does that imply for us both from a strategy standpoint and product development standpoint?"