Babel Business Development (What Peter has been up to lately - Part 2)

As my faithful 2 readers know, over a year ago I founded "Babel Translations and Text Creation", by now the largest and oldest translation agency in Second Life. Part of the service of Babel Translations was always to offer conceptual and planning work to clients as well. I did not advertise this - it more came naturally during the discussions with the clients. My close friend and SL sister Trinity Dechou suggested a while ago to branch these services out. We discussed the idea a while, made concepts and plans, a portfolio of services and towards the end of July we founded Babel Business Development, a company offering full service marketing and business services to Second Life companies.

Our slogan is "We make a difference", and our goal is to provide exactly what a business owner in SL needs. Unlike RL, where specialists care for their respective areas, in SL businesses are often run by individuals with limited capacity who need to take care of a lot of things: creating their products and services, handling sales, generating public interest,supporting their clients, etc. Trinity and myself have both RL backgrounds in Sales and Marketing/PR, as well as a track record for being successful in SL. With this experience we offer the tools often forgotten or misunderstood to business. With the ability to view business as an outside source we can offer advice on areas to be developed. One core concept is to give our clients only what they need. We do not want to "take over" their business, not change their ways, not take away the power to make the decisions from them. Our clients remain independent, and get from us as much or as little as they want.

Fairly fast we found our first prospective client, an averagely known fashion designer with her partner, who reported to struggle with sales lately. A visit on site revealed many things with potential for optimization, starting from the layout of their shop, product presentation, and continuing with their blog and brand representation. We prepared a report and a number of next steps, alas we seemed to have overwhelmed them and they literally fled the scene.

We changed a few things in our presentation, and set a "Meet and Greet" on the client's property as the first step, and soon enough we found our second client, a rather well known accessory designer, and conduct a brand research for them as of the writing of this blogpost.

Coming from a country where creating your own business is ridiculously difficult, and been employed my whole adult life, for the third time I am thrilled how easy it is to create a business in SL. People with good ideas, designs and creations can simply start to market them, and the abundance of creativity in SL is proof of that. I did not come to SL to become an entrepreneur - but here I am, running the market leader in translation services, a successful furniture company, being the business soul of another company, and now the co-founder of a business development company. Not only is this fun, not only is this useful, it only taught me a lot about myself.