"Don’t be afraid of risk."
Elizabeth Elting Tweet
Elizabeth Elting, Founder, and CEO of the Elizabeth Elting Foundation is a New York-based philanthropist and businesswoman, recognized for her outstanding entrepreneurship and focus on developing women’s business leaders. These recognitions and awards include the Working Woman “Entrepreneurial Excellence” Award for Customer Service, the Ernst and Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” Award, the American Express-Entrepreneur Magazine “Woman of the Year” Award, the “Distinguished Alumnae” Award from NYU Stern’s Women in Business, the “Women Worth Watching” Award from Diversity Journal, the Trinity College “Alumni Medal for Excellence” and “Gary McQuaid” Award, the Enterprising Women Magazine “Enterprising Women of the Year” Award, the National Organization for Women “Women of Power & Influence” Award, and the American Heart Association’s “Health Equity Leadership” Award. In addition, Elting has been named one of Forbes’ “Richest Self-Made Women” for the past seven years in a row (2015-2021) and is a recipient of the 2019 “Charles Waldo Haskins” Award for business and public service from NYU’s Stern School of Business.
An accomplished business leader, Elting co-founded TransPerfect, the world’s largest provider of language and business solutions. Headquartered in New York City, the company has over $800 million in revenues and more than 6,000 employees in over 100 cities around the globe. Elting has been profiled in books including American Dream: Interviews with Industry-Leading Professionals by Jason Navallo, The New York Times bestseller Succeed by Your Terms (McGraw-Hill), Leadership Secrets of the World’s Most Successful CEOs (Dearborn Trade Publishing), and Straight Talk About Starting and Growing Your Business (McGraw-Hill). She is featured regularly in the media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, O (The Oprah Magazine), The Financial Times, Reader’s Digest, Huffington Post, and Crain’s New York Business.
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Table of Contents
Let’s start with a brief introduction first. Introduce yourself to our readers.
Elizabeth Elting: I am a global CEO, business leader, linguaphile, philanthropist, feminist, and mother. After living, studying, and working in five countries across the globe, and quitting a particularly nightmarish job, I decided it was time to chart my future. Driven by a passion for language and cultural diversity, and a vision to break down boundaries, forge new paths forward, and connect people and businesses across the globe, I founded my dream company out of an NYU dorm room. During my time as Co-CEO, I grew that dorm-room startup into the world’s largest language solutions company, with over $800 million in revenue, 6,000+ employees, 11,000+ clients, and offices in more than 100 cities around the globe. Today, I’m now the Founder and CEO of the Elizabeth Elting Foundation and still fueled by a passion for breaking down boundaries – not only geographically, culturally, and technologically – but also in the workplace for other entrepreneurial women working toward their dreams and building a better tomorrow.
Our audience is interested to know about how you got started in the first place. Did you always want to become a CEO or was it something you were led to? Our readers would love to know your story!
Elizabeth Elting: I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. And through my family’s extensive travel and having lived in several different countries, I discovered early on that I had a passion for languages and connecting with people all across the globe. I won a language award in high school, and while in college, I majored in modern language, spent a year living and studying in Spain, and then took a job in Venezuela. After that, I moved to New York and took a job at what was, at the time, the largest translation company in the world (this was in 1987, just as the globalization of business was beginning). I loved working there and stayed at that job for three years, both in production and in sales, and was able to get a good understanding of the work and also of what clients were looking for – I especially loved solving clients’ problems.
While I enjoyed what I was doing there, I thought it could be done better with a more holistic approach – back then, it was enough to be a translation company because there simply weren’t very many of them. As a result, we sometimes wouldn’t be able to give our clients everything they needed. I saw that there was a real gap between what many of our clients needed and deserved and what was available in the industry. Effective communication isn’t just about translation – you have to understand your client, their business, the world they’re in, and the lens through which they view it. With that mentality, I began conceiving of a company that could offer the very best in terms of quality and services, much like a top-tier law firm or investment bank. Out of that idea, TransPerfect grew.
I set out to fully learn the business and the various industries it reached and began pinpointing areas that needed improvement and gaps that needed filling. Realizing that a translation company had to be more than just a translation company, I went back to school and got my MBA from NYU, and while I was there, I began making my idea of a comprehensive and holistic translation company (i.e., of a one-stop-shop for communications and translation solutions that offered top-level service and would give our clients the complete package) into a reality.
“Selfmade” is a myth. We all received help, no doubt you love to show appreciation to those who supported you when the going got tough, who has been your most important professional inspiration?
Elizabeth Elting: My parents are both extraordinary people who raised me to be self-reliant, resilient, prudent, and goal-oriented. And importantly, they raised me, their daughter, with the understanding both that I could do and be anything a man could, and that my being a woman meant I’d have to push harder and longer to succeed. My dad always liked to tell me that I shouldn’t depend on a man for financial support because independence is too valuable to give up.
He lived that ideal. When he was president of Grey Canada, a successful advertising agency, he made sure six out of eight senior vice presidents were women. He knew that women were key to success, especially where marketing is concerned – women make the vast majority of household purchasing decisions – and to this day, says that commitment to women in leadership was the reason Grey Canada succeeded. I have to point out that this was in the eighties and early nineties when nobody was doing that sort of conscious elevation of women. So I grew up surrounded by examples of women in charge.
My mom was such a huge part of my success as well. She’s brilliant, for one. She was going to be a doctor, but, because the past is, well, the past, it was made clear to her that you can either be a good mom or a doctor and that there was only one acceptable choice. So, instead, she went into education. She had a long and diverse career in education, and after my parents’ divorce, she showed me day in and day out that a woman can make it on her own. To this day – she’s 83 now – she lives alone and is completely self-sufficient. Pre-pandemic, she still regularly made the twelve-hour drive from Toronto to New York City solo and continues to be active in politics, like she’s always been, working as an organizer for Democrats Abroad. She has been a hero and teacher to me, and the clearest example in my life of the kind of woman I have always strived, and still strive, to become.
How did your journey lead you to become a CEO? What difficulties did you face along the way and what did you learn from them?
Elizabeth Elting: Well, I’ve always loved language. My family traveled a lot, so I’ve lived all over the world: the US, Canada, Portugal, Spain, and Venezuela. It’s been a lifelong fascination, which is why I worked to gain fluency in Portuguese, Spanish, and French and studied Latin. The decision to start a translation company was the confluence of a lot of factors. My background, my family, my interests, my education – they all played a role. But, along with my passion for language and entrepreneurial mindedness, I believe the reason I embarked upon my specific path ultimately comes down to two significant experiences early in my career: my experience working at a big translation company in the late 80s and my dissatisfaction with my first job out of business school.
After college, I took a job at an NYC translation company. This was in 1987. The world at that time was in the middle of massive change, and on the cusp of more. The Soviet Union was collapsing in upon itself and opening to the West. But the translation industry at that time, the industry I saw, wasn’t ready. I don’t know if you know this old Michael Keaton movie, Gung Ho? It’s about an American auto manufacturer that gets slurped up by a Japanese conglomerate, and from there it’s a whole story of culture shock and personal encounters. I haven’t seen it in years so I can’t say if it holds up. But that’s the way everything was back then. Intercultural communication was ad-hoc, largely restricted to simple, flat translation without a ton of thought going into how it was going to be read by the other side, which was already causing problems as more and more companies started expanding into international markets or outsourcing their manufacturing and so on. And the whole field was already basically functioning at capacity, and that was thirty years ago, just before the World Wide Web – the communication protocols, syntax, language, and software that together make up what most people today think of as “the internet” – even existed. So how was it going to cope with the massive increases in global communication that would ride in on what we used to call the “information superhighway?”
Working in the translation industry in the 80s was frustrating, but also exciting. What I saw was a clear gap between what the industry offered and what clients needed and a huge opening to be a part of transforming a budding industry into the massive force in international business I knew – with the right model – it was poised to become. Once upon a time, translation was more or less a one-and-done affair; you needed a document translated, and someone would translate it. But clients needed so much more than that, and I knew the volume would grow exponentially. There was a lack of comprehensive services (beyond just translation) for companies looking to do business internationally. I left that job and went to business school, but that experience planted a seed in me that was ready for just the right moment to sprout up.
After graduating from business school, my first job was as an arbitrage broker in the trading division of a large French bank. I was so excited to get out there and put my education to work, but reality did not live up to my expectations. It was the early nineties, and while Wall Street wasn’t still riding as high a cultural force as it had just five or six years earlier, it was understood as (and still is) a great way to carve out your future. But finance wasn’t where my heart lay, and even as a stepping stone, the job felt like a dead-end for me as a woman in that time and place. As the only woman in the office, I immediately noticed a stark difference in how I was treated. I was routinely expected to perform administrative and secretarial tasks – answering the phone, keeping the supply closet stocked, even making and serving coffee to my colleagues. This experience gave me the push to do what I wanted to do – go into business for myself and transform the translation industry. I knew the business world needed something more comprehensive than what the translation industry was providing, and everything in my life up to that point led me to believe I was the person to fill that need. So I went for it.
Tell us about your company. What does your business do and what are your responsibilities as a CEO?
Elizabeth Elting: I founded the Elizabeth Elting Foundation in 2018 to promote initiatives that lift women and other marginalized people and underserved communities – from business to public health to education, venture funds, and scholarships. But this pandemic brought about an economic and public health catastrophe unlike anything seen in living memory, and the first true pandemic in the global era, where travel almost anywhere on earth is commonplace. It spread like wildfire, faster than we could understand it, forcing us to shutter our economy almost entirely. It has painfully underscored the structural inequalities that run deep in our country. The fact is that around 80% of the American workforce lives paycheck to paycheck. That’s a ridiculously large proportion of the populace that has little to no economic security, little to no savings, for whom a lost job or a medical emergency is an almost surefire path toward ruin. So we’re trying to start there: with on-the-ground relief efforts, specifically targeting overlooked areas and underserved communities to make sure we’re bridging the widest gaps and making the biggest possible impact.
What I do is set the direction, the priorities, the tone, and the mission on a day-by-day basis. The Elizabeth Elting Foundation was originally focused on working to bridge opportunity gaps for marginalized communities, especially women. But when COVID-19 hit, we adjusted our focus and launched the Halo Fund, a multimillion-dollar initiative to help provide concrete and comprehensive relief to people suffering from the pandemic’s very real human consequences: food and housing instability, widening economic inequality, low access to healthcare, lack of childcare for working parents. That last one is only getting worse, and we’re in the middle of a crisis that is setting women’s progress in the workplace back decades (something I’ve been writing about for months now).
Through Halo, the EEF partnered with the American Heart Association to launch the Bernard J. Tyson Impact Fund for equitable healthcare and social justice, which means we’re supporting initiatives covering our initial area of focus and then some. The AHA has stepped up to the plate, marshaling its charitable network and fundraising experience to build a comprehensive COVID-19 response alongside the Bernard J. Tyson Fund’s work toward supporting locally-led solutions to dismantle social and economic barriers to health equity. We’re putting our resources where they can do the most help.
What does CEO stand for? Beyond the dictionary definition, how would you define it?
Elizabeth Elting: The CEO is the unifying piece, the keystone who’s there to define the company’s values and priorities and make sure it’s moving in those directions. The CEO is the “I” of the company, if that makes sense, the single perspective that’s supposed to unite all the different pieces of a company together in service of its mission.
When you first became a CEO, how was it different from what you expected? What surprised you?
Elizabeth Elting: I first became a CEO in my twenties out of a dorm room, which was far from the usual experience at the time. So I guess I didn’t have expectations since I didn’t have any models for what it would mean to start a company from such humble beginnings and rapidly grow it into a global industry leader. I’ll say I was surprised by how overt sexism could be, how often I was taken for my co-founder’s assistant, but that’s pretty minor compared to the wealth of new experiences I was having and how much I was able to throw myself into the work. I love work. Maybe the most surprising thing was how hard it would be to step back from on-the-ground decisions like hiring as we grew in size and organizational complexity. I missed knowing every employee.
There are many schools of thought as to what a CEO’s core roles and responsibilities are. Based on your experience, what are the main things a CEO should focus on? Explain and please share examples or stories to illustrate your vision.
Elizabeth Elting: Well, it’s not money, for one thing. I was raised to be very conscious of having resources that others don’t and to believe there is a moral charge, if not an obligation, to put those resources to good use. It seems like a no-brainer to me; we live in a society, a civilization, and everything I have I was able to build because of the vast cooperative network of private, public, and non-profit organizations and individuals who have together constructed this massive infrastructure of movement and communication and finance. Nobody pulls themselves up by their bootstraps. Even if you did, someone had to make those boots.
When I left my company, I knew what I wanted to do was dedicate myself fully to my philanthropy and advocacy. The first thing I did was launch a charitable foundation to bring those values to life and create opportunities for women and other marginalized communities to find their paths to success, where they could contribute to this amazing human project in a lasting way with the dignity of full recognition. COVID-19 cracked open our structural gaps and forced us to refocus our efforts, but the mission remains the same: to make sure underserved communities have the resources needed to thrive, whether in systemic terms or, in the case of COVID-19, in immediate terms.
At the end of the day, a CEO either has integrity or nothing. Either you stand by your word, or you don’t. Either you tell the truth, or you don’t. Either you do your job, or you don’t. It’s that simple, and I think a lot of the problems we’re facing in the world today come down to not enough value being placed on integrity and forthrightness. It led to the financial collapse of 2008, and since then, we’ve seen more and more a brazen disregard for decency and fair play. We’ve got to treat each other better than that. We have to be better than that. We have to be honest in our dealings with our employees and communities and work to keep the enterprise or organization from being more harmful than helpful, even if that’s where the money is.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Elizabeth Elting: The hardest decision I ever had to make at TransPerfect was the decision to leave it. Aside from that, though, what was especially difficult was deciding to scale up the business in such a way that reduced the leadership team’s involvement in the day-to-day management of work. I’m a perfectionist, very type-A, and I always want to know what’s going on. Learning to trust others enough to delegate responsibility is never easy. There are CEOs like former AIG Financial Products head Joseph Cassano, who was the only person at the company who seemed to know how everything fit together, but we saw how well that went when the financial system fell apart in 2008 because nobody else had the whole picture. That’s incredibly dangerous.
How would you define success? Does it mean generating a certain amount of wealth, gaining a certain level of popularity, or helping a certain number of people?
Elizabeth Elting: Success, in my estimation, is leaving the world a better place than you found it. Everything we do should ultimately be in the service of that. I started TransPerfect to help ease the trials of nascent globalization and foster international cooperation on a commercial level. I started the Elizabeth Elting Foundation to put some of the wealth I made doing that to good work, lifting women and supporting direct pandemic relief. If I’m not helping, then what’s the point?
Some leadership skills are innate while others can be learned. What leadership skills do you possess innately and what skills have you cultivated over the years as a CEO?
Elizabeth Elting: That’s impossible to say. I’ve been learning how to take care of myself and my finances my entire life. I don’t know if any skills as such are “innate” rather than the results of our experiences in this world. I can say that I struggled to recognize that not every team member is necessarily as emotionally invested as a co-founder, and that I struggled to build up a healthy work-life balance as well as make sure my team had one, too. That stuff only comes from experience in management.
How did your role as a CEO help your business overcome challenges caused by the pandemic? Explain with practical examples.
Elizabeth Elting: Well, we’re a charitable organization with a small staff and low overhead, so our focus was on helping others overcome their challenges. There were (and still are) millions of people who were suddenly unsure where their next meal would come from, how they would stay in their homes, how they’d pay for insurance, and what they’d do if a family member gets sick with COVID-19. They don’t just need help. They need support. They need immediate relief. So we spent that first year heavily focused on pandemic relief efforts. The pandemic has painfully underscored the structural inequalities that run deep in our country, and those gaps couldn’t be more critical or urgent (access to food, housing, and healthcare are all tenuous for millions of people thrown out of work who were already living paycheck to paycheck). And that’s why we launched the Halo Fund as a comprehensive COVID-19 response and relief initiative, aiming to identify the areas where we can have the biggest impact, helping vulnerable and underserved communities, those hit hardest by the pandemic and economic downturn, and the healthcare and essential workers still putting their lives on the line for us every day.
Do you have any advice for aspiring CEOs and future leaders? What advice would you give a CEO that is just starting on their journey?
Elizabeth Elting: Don’t be afraid of risk. The scariest part of running a business is not knowing what you don’t know, and I think that tends to be paralyzing. The absolute worst mistake a startup can make is to be driven by fear; entrepreneurship requires boldness and a willingness to take risks, which is hard to do when your money is on the line. Be brave, be ambitious, get outside of your comfort zone, and make sure you have the substance, a plan of action, and the work ethic to back it all up. Give your team room to make mistakes. For your people to perform to the best of their ability, they need to know that they aren’t risking their jobs to do so. The fear of termination is not a powerful motivator for performance; it encourages people to think small, instead of outside of the box, and to work to avoid failure, rather than achieve excellence. That often means it’s up to you to shield them as much as is reasonable, owning mistakes while letting them keep their victories. Good morale is a key part of good performance, and knowing that there’s a net to stop them from hitting the ground should they falter gives your team the freedom to soar.
Manage your workload, acknowledge your limitations, and learn to delegate. The fact is that nobody’s brain can manage anything as complicated as a growing company by itself–you will eventually hit your limit, and your company will either stagnate or be plagued by institutional problems. “Grasping the whole web” is not a good way to run an organization; it’s just a good way to drive yourself mad. Lead from the trenches. I’m a firm believer that a leader has to be, on some level, in the trenches, and your team needs to be aware of that. Whatever sacrifices you’re asking them to make, you need to be willing to take on yourself. If you act like you’re above them, if you lord your power over them or ask them to make sacrifices you won’t make yourself, they’ll only resent you, which will make it infinitely harder to get everyone going when the going gets tough. You’re the leader of a team, and that makes you part of it.
Go easy on yourself. The biggest challenges you’ll face are the voices in your head amplifying all of your worst anxieties. You don’t have to be perfect. Imposter syndrome is real, and I know we all look at other leaders and think that they must have it all figured out, but at the end of the day, successful leaders are people who know what they want and do the work to make it happen. Nobody knows everything, and I sometimes suspect all of us are just faking our way through to the best of our ability. But I want you to remember that the reason you embarked on this quest is that you had an idea you believed in and the wherewithal to follow through with it. Most people never even get that far. Celebrate that and keep moving forward.
Thank you for sharing some of your knowledge with our readers! They would also like to know, what is one skill that you’ve always wanted to acquire but never really could?
Elizabeth Elting: I think it’d be pretty fun to be a professional chef.
Before we finish things off, we have one final question for you. If you wrote a book about your life today, what would the title be?
Elizabeth Elting: ‘Found in Translation’, easily.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Elizabeth Elting for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Elizabeth Elting or her company, you can do it through her – Instagram
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