Newbury Business Today

The importance of speaking your customers’ language

12th August 2010

Email: richard.maynard@newburynews.co.uk

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Richard Maynard talks to Nathalie Danon-Kerr, the director of the Vici Language Academy

Launching a business in a recession is never easy, but that is what Nathalie Danon-Kerr did two years ago, when she founded the Vici Language Academy, in Bartholomew Street, Newbury.
Originally from Besancon, France, she had previously run a business called called Bleu, Blanc Rouge, which only offered French tuition. It ran  French clubs, and had contracts, to teach mainly primary schools and nurseries, private clients, companies, and similar organisations.
She explained: “This business lasted about six years. Then in the last two or three years, I had in mind to create something different – something bigger and better.”
Discussions with a friend who was also a business coach and advisor convinced her that she could expand the scope of her business.
She continued: “I was teaching children who, from the age of three, loved learning languages and were so enthusiastic about it, and were really good at it. But when they then went to secondary school, French or Spanish just became ‘a school subject’, and the enthusiasm just went. Most of them did not take it at GCSE, and it broke my heart, because in this country, we really only teach a language to get people to get their GCSE, a tick-boxing business. Why don’t we teach languages to make people bilingual? Should that not be the aim?
“And I thought, I wanted to do something about it, and that’s how I decided that I would create a structure where we could support students from a very early age, until they go to GCSE, until they go to A-level, and then I wanted to establish programmes for adults as well, so that all our students could eventually reach fluency.
“I have rarely met people who have not said to me ‘I would love to speak a foreign language’. But I don’t think that people here [in Britain] have the right support. We love the idea of being bi-lingual, but don’t do anything about it.
“It’s a mixture of me teaching French for so many years but wanting to stop doing it in schools, at lunchtimes, for half an hour.
“I wanted to keep the fun in it because that’s what attracts people, even adults, but I wanted to make it so that they could get results, not just fun.”
Newbury was chosen because Bleu Blanc Rouge already had a clientbase in the town, along with clients in Reading, Andover and Basingstoke.
What, I asked, were the main challenges of launching a business during an economic downturn?
“When we launched, the recession had been announced, two weeks before, so I was not going to stop, I just had to carry on, and make sure that the business was strong enough, based on a solid business system that could go through the recession.
“I then realised that we had to revise our forecasts, because it was not going to be as good as we expected. It was going to take a lot longer to be where we wanted to be.
“What was probably most difficult was the lack of support. You found that banks were not interested anymore, where six months before they thought it was a wonderful idea. “You find that your friends and family say to you ‘Look, you had a really good small business there – what are you doing? You’ll go bankrupt in four months’ – I’ve actually heard that!
“If nothing else, it is having to have that strong mentality, and the belief  that it could work.
“I’ve worked really hard on it. I knew that deep down, it was great, that I had the right staff in place, everything was in place for us to do a brilliant job.
“I was also very lucky in that because I had been in this year for six years, I had quite a solid clientbase. People I had been working with for a long time. I will always be very loyal and grateful to these people, because they enrolled into the academy before it actually opened its doors. They trusted me, they trusted the product I had to sell, and paid their fees before they could actually see what was happening. That was a huge bonus for me, but I think all of it was based on a lot of hard work and a lot of self-belief.
“It was very difficult and I don’t think that after two years we are right out of it. We are still not where I want us to be. But I don’t want to blame the recession. I think that too many businesses blame the recession.
“Let’s put it this way – the recession is rather like hopping on two solid legs – you’re hopping a little bit, but a lot of businesses used the recession as an excuse for their own failure.
“Coming from France, when I first started a business in the UK, I found that people were completely carefree about  their money. [In France, the banking system does not allow people to go overdrawn without serious consequences].
“We didn’t have this idea of spending money on your credit cards, and going on holiday on your credit cards. We don’t have that mentality. The consequences of writing a cheque that bounces back are huge in France.
“But with the recession, people started to really think about how they spend their money.”
Nathalie Danon-Kerr felt that perhaps the one thing that has been positive for Vici has been that  people have put the brakes on non-essential expenditure such as expensive clothes, instead preferring to spend the money on services such as education. “There has never been a better time to invest in your children’s education. I think people have realised that in a time like recession, it’s the people who are best educated and can add things to their CV who are going to pull through.”
As a nation, we have acquired a poor reputation for learning foreign languages, preferring the rest of the world to learn English. Did she think that this shift signalled a change in this attitude? “I hope so,” she said. “We find that a lot of people come here and they are very eager to learn a language. We have also found that people who are retired have come to us – people are still young at 65 or 70 now. I have been doing this job for about eight years, and we never used to see that – people would say ‘Oh I’m too old now, it’s too late for me, what do I need that for?’
“That, for us, is a huge boost, as it show’s people’s mentality has changed.
“They’re still young at 65, people want a hobby, to educate themselves, and there has been a lot written about how learning a language can be the best thing against Alzheimer’s disease, because your brain is constantly working.”
British people, she said, were becoming much more open-minded about learning languages, especially as they travelled more.

Nathalie Danon-Kerr is a strong believer in the benefits of language skills for businesses. She has seen an increase in businessmen and women coming to the language academy not to learn ‘business French’ or ‘business German’, because large companies conduct meetings in English. Instead, people are wanting the tools to build a more social rapport with their foreign business contacts outside the meeting room. One client commuted weekly to Belgium, and simply wanted to be able to ask his colleagues if they had enjoyed their weekend, or if their children were well. He is now learning conversational French.
Other clients have begun learning languages having lost out to rival job applicants through not having a language on their CVs.
“I believe that most companies that are multi-national should have a language department, not only for the language skill, but also for the cultural aspect of it. When we deliver language lessons within a company, we always offer some cultural training. ‘Is it OK to shake hands? How do you address people?’
“We found that quite a lot of demand comes from Asian countries, the emerging markets. Here in Europe, we found Asia and the merging markets fascinating but a little scary, and that’s were we can help people.
“But I firmly believe that the reward that you can get from having staff who can speak the language, and are aware of cultural differences, then the return on investment is wonderful. It is doesn’t cost that much to invest in language learning.”
French is still the most popular language it is the ‘diplomatic’ language and the official language of the EU, but other are becoming more important for business. “Before, we found that Spanish came close, but there has been a quiet shift, and we have found that Italian has become quite strong, Portuguese has become quite strong, along with Mandarin (Chinese) and Japanese.
“When it comes to business people, Madarin and Japanese are really pushing through.”
Vici Language Academy will expand in terms of the languages it can offer – it currently teaches 10 – but not at the expense of class size. “We are keen to keep our classes quite small – we want to keep the teacher-student ratio very low, to give our students the best chance. We are not looking at filling up all of our classes – that’s not what we are about.” 

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