Success Story: Language Solutions Inc.
St. Louis, Mo.

Melissa Wurst's professional passions collide constructively at the crossroads of culture and language.

Above: Melissa Wurst founded Language Solutions Inc. in 1998, after several years of experience related to language and cultural development, including service in Thailand as a member of the Peace Corps. Below: The company president runs her international firm from its Clayton-based headquarters at the World Trade Center Saint Louis.

Melissa's cross-cultural immersion started 20 years ago after she earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Missouri. As a Peace Corps volunteer in 1988, she implemented language and training programs in Thailand. Today Melissa heads a Clayton-based company — Language Solutions Inc. — with a global reach and an international talent-pool of more than 1,200 multi-lingual professionals.

"My Peace Corps experience is what inspired my love of languages and cultures," recalls the Language Solutions president. "It led me to bringing home the third goal of the Peace Corps, which is educating people in this country about other cultures and thereby widening perspectives. I feel that a different language is indeed a different vision of life."

Following the Peace Corps, Melissa pursued other foreign culture and linguistics assignments that eventually helped propel her toward her entrepreneurial venture. While studying for her master's degree in education at Wichita State University, Melissa nurtured her international interests by serving as assistant director of the Kansas-based Midwest Refugee Center. Next she headed back to Asia to serve as director of a bilingual school in Taiwan.

By 1996, she had returned to her native St. Louis to direct the foreign language learning program for an international company. In that post she set standards and established language immersion programs for the overseas-bound employees of several corporate clients, including retail giant Wal-Mart.

Above: Melissa refers to a display of information related to her company's localization-industry work for its globally focused clients. Below: State Sen. Joan Bray (right, D-24th District) presented a legislative resolution to the Language Solutions president during the annual MO SBDC Client Showcase, earlier this year at the state capitol. Wurst has received business counseling from Kevin Wilson (left), director of the St. Louis regional SBDC.

"The program was instrumental in helping to facilitate Wal-Mart's expansion into Germany, Brazil, Korea and Argentina," Melissa says.

However, after two years in the job Melissa needed to scratch the entrepreneurial itch she had developed during 10 years for working for others.

"I decided to leave my position and open my own destiny, one that I could control and conduct differently than what I was seeing in the market in our industry," she explains.

The industry to which Melissa refers is the localization industry, which is defined by the Swiss-based Localization Industry Standards Association as: "... the process of modifying products or services to account for differences in distinct markets (including language and cultural differences)."

So in 1998, Melissa started her own localization-industry business. She brought substantial experience in teaching and management, and an unfettered love for helping people overcome cultural and language barriers.

"It is truly my objective and passion to educate people on different languages and cultures," she beams. "I want to open their perspectives and perhaps change them a bit so the next time they encounter another culture or language, they may think differently about it. If I can affect that kind of change person-by-person, I feel that it can in a way have a global effect."

While such passion went a long way to help this entrepreneur get her business rolling, Melissa also learned it takes some solid business sense to keep it rolling. After a while she found herself frequently wakening at 3 a.m. worrying about the direction of her firm. She found help when she contacted the St. Louis office of the Missouri Small Business & Technology Development Center.

"We found the SBTDC online," she recalls. "And smart business owners know they should surround themselves with people who are smarter than they are. Kevin Wilson was that smart person."

Wilson, business counselor and director of MO SBTDC in St. Louis, helped Melissa and her firm attain a business compass and a sense of financial direction. She needed tools and reports to provide an accurate view of the firm's financial past in order to make sound decisions for the future.

"We had no financial dashboard from which we were running our business," says Melissa. "We believed this was the first place to start taking control of owning a business and not just owning a job."

Wilson helped the company develop an organized financial analysis of its most recent three years and compare it against other firms in the localization industry. He also encouraged Melissa to better control receivables, which improved cash flow and eventually led to an increased line of credit. Now she regularly runs budgets, forecasts, client analyses and income-to-budget analyses.

"Having a person of Kevin's expertise has allowed me to make smarter decisions based on proper business insight, and it has had a huge payout," insists Melissa. "In addition to his expertise, I must also add it is Kevin's upbeat attitude and encouragement that has meant the most to me and kept me going."

Language Solutions has experienced is largest growth during the past three years: a 50 percent increase. It has established project management teams in Singapore and Argentina. The firm's contracting network of more than 1,200 linguists focus on the needs of each of its clients. Those needs include technology and engineering, marketing and public relations, life sciences, and chemical manufacturing.

"Our main areas of expertise are HR communications and healthcare, and these two verticals tie well into each other," Melissa says. "In HR, we typically deal with a corporation that is implementing a performance management campaign to its multi-national offices, or needs to communicate benefits, compensation and related information in other languages to their field offices on an ongoing basis."

With a sound financial direction charted for Language Solutions, President Melissa Wurst focuses attention on her passion — multilingual communications and cultural connectivity — during her long business days. She also focuses better at night, contending with fewer of those unscheduled 3 a.m. sleepless fretting sessions.

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This story was featured in the July 2008 newsletter.

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