"We live in a time of great opportunity. Staying creative and ensuring you understand how to instill versatility into the teams you lead will also be vital to achieving these ends.'
Salvador Ordorica Tweet
Meet Salvador Ordorica, who has worked his entire life to better understand people and the ways in which they connect with one another. He has seen the direct impact that language and understanding, or the lack thereof, can have on communities. The world runs on connections, and when we give everyone the equal ability to speak and trade on a global scale, we have begun to build something better.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Salvador Ordorica: I am passionate about globalization, foreign languages, and anything international. I have lived in numerous countries and I am fluent in three languages.
I am the Founder and CEO of The Spanish Group LLC, a first-class certified translation service based out of Irvine, California that serves a wide range of international clients.
My mission is to improve intercultural understanding through bold strategy with The Spanish Group and the drive to help others.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Salvador Ordorica: When I grew up I dreamed about being an international attorney. I loved the idea of constantly traveling from country to country and having international clients. After preparing for law school after university, I realized that this wasn’t the right path for me and instead focused full speed on my growing business instead. This has turned out to be a much more gratifying experience.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Salvador Ordorica: The Spanish Group offers certified translation services from translation for personal use, to its use in academic, official, and professional documents. Our fully online working model offers the accessibility to request translations 24/7 into over 90 languages. We have professional translators located in different countries, which is practical for anyone who requires our services, regardless of their geographical location or time zone.
Today, not only are individuals and families benefiting from the quality and speed of our services, but multiple international corporations rely heavily on The Spanish Group to serve their international clientele. We have won multiple competitive government contracts, and various federal agencies directly recommend The Spanish Group for their translation services.
In 2021, we were ranked as one of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States, which speaks of our continuous development, always seeking to provide quality service. The Spanish Group has become indispensable to multiple Fortune 500 corporations, as well as thousands of families and individuals across the globe.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Salvador Ordorica: I think there must be a balance between the two of them. Although the theoretical part is given to you by studies through degrees, you must put that knowledge into practice and, until you “get your hands dirty” working, you develop certain qualities that can lead you to become CEO.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Salvador Ordorica: We live in a time of great opportunity. Staying creative and ensuring you understand how to instill versatility into the teams you lead will also be vital to achieving these ends.
It’s always important to look at the big picture of your company and ensure that the major decision you are making is bringing your organization closer to this envisioned “end goal” or the model of what your company aspires to be.
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Salvador Ordorica: Focus on supervising the summarized tasks with the leaders of each area without getting too involved in the day-to-day operation. If you have the right people and processes in place, you won’t need your CEO’s intervention on all sides.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Salvador Ordorica: Since everyone started to work completely remotely, it was difficult to know how to control the daily activities of the staff without falling into micromanagement. When the pandemic began, it was important to make the coworkers feel trusted so as to not create a spirit of distrust within the organization, but we also needed to be cognizant of the numerous distractions a home may have. At The Spanish Group we use some screen trackers, time logging apps, and daily summaries of work completed in order to ensure that our staff is staying efficient. We currently have a lot of people working remotely from different parts of the world, so these tools help us a lot with supervision and organization not only in case of another lockdown, but even if things get better with the pandemic, keeping these tools helps for all our remote employees.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Salvador Ordorica: Some of the biggest mistakes I have noticed business leaders make is not reacting quickly enough to the change in consumer demand as well as their employee’s needs. It’s important to be reactive and to be open-minded to new ways of doing things in order to be able to improve your business.
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Salvador Ordorica: I was able to find my target customer base by observing translation businesses that fail to effectively meet their target client needs. I saw an opportunity and developed it. This was my main lesson, when you see an opportunity, take it and develop a solution.
For those who have a product but aren’t sure exactly who will respond best to it, you can recreate much of what I accomplished through a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). With an MVP you can begin to gauge the reaction to your product or service and then begin to build the structure of your business around meeting the demand it garners. While all products need to solve a problem you see in the market, creating a successful MVP will help you to understand who exactly wants YOU to solve that problem.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Salvador Ordorica: The most pressing challenge that we’re working on is departmentalization of the different parts of our company and setting up KPIs for each department in order to measure success. Without having KPIs and an understanding of how your business defines success, you are effectively operating in the dark and it is not possible to effectively scale a business this way.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Salvador Ordorica: Memorize instead of understanding information. During the school years, it is common for theory tests to ask you questions about definitions of concepts, which causes you to develop memorization but not understanding. I could get a good grade for having answered concepts according to how I had them in my notes, but after finishing the exam, I had not really learned.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts
Salvador Ordorica: Focus on developing a core operations team that can wear many hats. We have seen during the pandemic how key having a small, versatile, and highly skilled team at the center of your operations can be. Reducing the size of your business without completely negating areas where you derive revenue can be essential in making it through hard times, and can allow you to expand with minimal risk.
The difficult part of this is the selection process, knowing exactly which areas and who of the team can fulfill this versatility of skills to keep them within the company.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Salvador Ordorica for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Salvador Ordorica or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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