Ray Blakney is the CEO and co-founder of Live Lingua, a popular online language learning platform that offers a novel, innovative, and immersive approach to mastering a new language. Live Lingua pairs users who want to learn Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, and more with their own hand-selected, certified, native-speaking tutor for online teaching sessions via Skype. An award-winning Filipino-American entrepreneur, speaker, and podcaster, Ray builds and helps others build 6- and 7-figure businesses on a bootstrap budget using SEO.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is Live Lingua all about?
My company, Live Lingua, offers an engaging and novel approach to learning a new language. Live Lingua’s online language learning platform connects users who want to become fluent in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and more with their own hand-selected, native-speaking, certified tutor for teaching sessions via online video chat. On top of this, a full-time academic team (with more than fifty years of language teaching expertise) assists every student with any questions they have related to learning the language. Our administrative team also helps students with any technical problems or issues related to scheduling.
Live Lingua immerses every student in the language they are mastering, as well as the history and culture behind that language.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
In 2008, my wife and I launched our first company in Mexico, which was a brick-and-mortar Spanish language immersion school. My spouse is Mexican (but studied at a university in the United States) and was selected to be my Spanish teacher when I came to Mexico as a Peace Corps volunteer. At the end of 2007, we got married and started our school with only $2000 to our name. Thankfully, our school was successful from day one and was fully booked after just a few weeks.
Then we faced a major challenge in March 2009: the Mexican swine flu crisis. This pandemic caused the borders of Mexico to close, and most of our school’s students were from outside of the country and had to cancel their teaching sessions. My wife and I did not have enough funds to keep our school operating much longer, so it was absolutely essential to pivot our business model.
At this point, my wife suggested reaching out to our previous pupils to see if they would be interested in doing teaching sessions via Skype. This ended up working very well, so I decided to create a website offering classes, just to test out the idea and see if anyone would want to sign up.
After the swine flu ended eight weeks later, our brick-and-mortar language immersion school was once again full. However, we were surprised to see that our online classes were continually growing–within six months, they were bringing in even more revenue than our initial brick-and-mortar language immersion school. In addition, we only needed to work on the website for a few hours each week.
After analyzing all of the numbers, we knew it was best to sell the brick-and-mortar school and focus all of our efforts on the online school. We rebranded the online school as Live Lingua in 2012, and have been growing about 20% bigger year after year since then. We even had our best year yet in 2020!
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
In order to thrive and be successful, an entrepreneur must have discipline. They must be able to wake up every single day and tackle all of the tasks that they said they would complete that day.
A second skill that every entrepreneur must have to be successful is the ability to stay focused on tasks without getting side-tracked. It is vital that business owners work on projects until they are complete before moving on to other activities. For example, do not stop working on your client report to check your personal social media pages. Also, don’t launch a new company while your current enterprise is starting to thrive. Maintain your focus on completing one project before starting another one.
Finally, a successful business owner must get comfortable with being uncomfortable. When I was starting up my business, my mentor taught me a major lesson: entrepreneurship is about always learning and growing, which for the most part is uncomfortable. Taking this advice to heart has helped my business and I survive and thrive during the past swine flu crisis and this current pandemic we are facing.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
In Year 2021, we will invest more funds into new marketing approaches that will help our business grow. Live Lingua had its best year yet in 2020, and we will maximize the extra revenue’s potential by starting a YouTube channel and podcast that will help us reach new markets. Our goal is to make online language teaching sessions mainstream, with Live Lingua being one of the first platforms that people use for their language learning journey.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
In contrast to the many language teacher directories that make users search through countless tutors (many of whom don’t have credentials) to find the best one, Live Lingua does all of the work. As a full-service online language school, Live Lingua provides the same level of support to students that a physical school would, at just a fraction of the price. Every single teacher at Live Lingua must have a college degree and pass an extensive screening process that contains interviews, trial sessions, and application exams. This helps us ensure that Live Lingua’s teachers are the best of the best for our students.
In addition, out of the top five language schools worldwide, Live Lingua is the only one that didn’t use any big investments from wealthy venture capitalists. This helped us make sure that we focused on providing top-notch education for our students, rather than prioritize growth at the expense of all else.
We are proud that Live Lingua began as a family business and is still a lucrative boutique language school, even while the market is continually flooded with large companies that are just a number funded by wealthy investors who don’t have a real interest in the quality of language education.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- Losing focus. It is easy to stay focused when you need to work to pay the bills. What is hard is when you have some success and start getting distracted by more exciting, but unrelated, projects. After doing that and losing my main business overnight due to a Google algorithm change, I learned to focus on growing one business at a time and not taking my eye off the ball.
- Focusing on work and not taking any breaks. Now that I have been doing this for over a decade, I realize how important resting is for success. I thought successful people just worked 100-hour weeks with no break. I tried this, and it led to burnout. Business, just like in sports, requires as much planning of one’s rest as it does of one’s work hours. Right now, I plan a 1-week rest vacation every six months. As soon as I finish one, I book the next one to make sure I don’t make excuses and not take it. It is not only great for business but also great for health and family.
- Believing the idea that “nobody can do it as well as me”. The “it” was multiple things in the business: answering emails, modifying the webpage, writing marketing copy, etc. No matter what, I believed only I knew the business well enough to do them all, so I did not hire anybody. It was not until another entrepreneur I respect said “Ray, of the eight billion people on this planet, you really think you are the best at answering emails?” did something click. When you put it that way, it is ridiculous. Thus, I took a risk and hired my first virtual assistant to answer the repetitive emails, and it changed my life. Unlike what I feared, the business did not suddenly go downhill. In fact, we grew, because I was no longer spending time on those daily upkeep tasks and was able to focus on growing the business. Today, I have over 150 staff members helping me run my businesses, and they are all better at what they do than I ever was.
How do you go about marketing your business, and what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
SEO. Search Engine Optimization. For those who are not familiar with the term, it involves getting your website to rank on the first pages of Google for relevant keywords so you can get in front of your ideal audience when they are already at the buying phase of the sales funnel. The best part about SEO is that it is free. The downside, if you take the free route, is that it takes a lot of work and time.
The additional benefit of SEO, and ranking on the first page of Google, is that every customer you get from that method becomes almost pure profit. This is because you had zero ad spend in acquiring them. It took us about seven years to make LiveLingua.com a 7-figure business using this method, but that is what allows us to bootstrap businesses and compete with bigger players with tons of venture capital backing.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
“We actually had to build Live Lingua two times. After we started the company in 2009 amidst the Mexican swine flu crisis, we blossomed to mid-six figures in Year 2012. We built our company by using SEO tactics to get the website to rank highly on Google. Then, Google did an algorithm update in 2012 that killed our company. Overnight Live Lingua went from showing up on the first page of Google to beyond the first 100 search results. Once this happened, we had no choice but to rebuild our entire business. We took two years to get to the same point we were before the algorithm update, and I am happy to say that we have been continuously growing ever since.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
One thing I wish I knew before starting my business was the importance of not getting bogged down by perfection. I would tell my younger self: if you have an idea for a company, go ahead and create a website that promotes it. Don’t fret over everything being perfect–just forge ahead and launch your idea, then see what feedback comes in. There will most likely be negative feedback, but don’t take it personally; use it to learn and improve your business. If you do this every day, you will have a growing company within a year or two.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
Ahrefs.com. This helps us not only monitor our ranking and find other opportunities to rank for; it also helps us track what our competitors are doing in the same space.
ActiveCampaign.com. We use this for our weekly newsletters and all our automated email sequences (onboarding, retention, etc.).
PodcastHawk.com. We use this tool to help my team and I find and get booked on podcasts, which helps us reach new audiences and get brand name recognition.
One book that I highly recommend is The Lean Startup, written by Eric Ries. I regularly re-read this book, as it contains fantastic lessons. This book teaches readers to launch a minimum viable product as soon as possible, and then improve based on user feedback. Many business owners, including myself, always get caught up in striving to create the “perfect” product offering before releasing it and then discover that nobody uses most aspects of what we built.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would first spend $100 US on building a simple one-page website offering the product or service I want to sell (even if I did not have the product, course, or service ready). The page would simply ask for people to sign up for a small fee to get early access to whatever I was offering in 90 days, with a full refund if they did not like the product.
I would then spend the other $900 US on paid ads to see if anybody signs up. If nobody signs up, then I would go back to the drawing board and either work on my messaging or scrap the business idea and try something else.
What is your favorite quote?
My favorite quote is:
“If they were to write a book about your life, would anybody want to read it?”
– Unknown
This quote inspired me to leave my almost-6-figure salary job as a software engineer and embark on the new journey of becoming a location-independent entrepreneur. Once I pictured myself writing code in a cubicle for the next 30 years, I knew I didn’t want that to be the summary of my life’s book.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
My biggest piece of advice stems from one of my favorite quotes (by Jack Dorsey from Twitter):
‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you waited too long to launch.’
My top tip for any aspiring entrepreneur is to just launch your business idea. Throughout my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve met so many people at retreats or conferences that have wonderful ideas for new companies. However, I can easily list the people I caught up with later who went ahead and moved forward with their business idea.
Random Bonus: With the game on the line and 5 seconds on the clock, who takes the last shot? Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or Lebron James?
Lebron James.
Mainly because I worked in his armpit for five years. Bizarre, but true. During Lebron’s first few seasons, I was living and working in Cleveland. My condo was across the street from Gund Arena (now Q Arena) and the office I worked at was just around the corner. My cubicle in that office had a view of a window which was covered – the year Lebron started – by the famous Nike “We are all witness” poster that was hundreds of square feet big on the side of Tower City downtown.
You can’t tell from the photo, but the poster is actually porous so we could see through it from inside. The window I could see out of was right under his right armpit.
Oh, and he was also an amazing player who took one of the worst teams in the NBA and, eventually, made them champions.
How can we get in touch with you?
To get in touch, you can visit our website at LiveLingua.com and connect with us on Facebook. You can also find me at my new venture, PodcastHawk.com.
Entrepreneur Interview: GrowTraffic Founder Simon Dalley Talks Diversification
