Liz Elting: From Frustrated Employee to Billion-Dollar Founder

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Unlikely Entrepreneurs is available now wherever you buy books, and we couldn't be more grateful for the response so far.

As we settle into this next chapter (pun intended), we want to continue shining a spotlight on the incredible founders who trusted us with their stories.

Today we are sharing the story of one of America’s most successful self-made women, Liz Elting of TransPerfect.

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The story of TransPerfect starts with a simple sentence… perhaps the most valuable sentence in human history:

“There HAS to be a better way to do this!”

In the late 1980s, Liz was working at a large translation company in New York City. She'd studied French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin at Trinity College (Go Bantams), and translation was a natural fit. She loved the work.

What she didn't love was how the company operated.

Projects moved too slowly. Quality wasn't where it should be. Client service felt like an afterthought.

And because Liz worked directly with clients every day, she didn't just see these gaps in the abstract… she felt the frustration on both sides of the table. She knew what clients needed because she was the one fielding their concerns, managing their expectations, and cleaning up the messes when things fell short.

There HAS to be a better way to do this…

That gnawing feeling wouldn't go away. Liz didn't just think she could do better. She was convinced of it.

That conviction sent her to NYU Stern for her MBA, where she and her co-founder mapped out their plan for a service-minded, end-to-end translation company. No shortcuts, no half-measures. They were going to build the kind of company Liz wished she'd been working for all along.

They launched TransPerfect right after graduation in 1992.

But just because the pain was obvious didn't mean the business was easy to start. There was no outside funding or warm introductions to Fortune 500 clients. No one was waiting for two recent MBA grads to disrupt the translation industry.

So Liz did the only thing she could: she picked up the phone.

That was Liz's routine from day one. Three hundred cold calls and three hundred pitch letters PER DAY. Not per week. Per day. She describes the phone being "hot to the touch from constant use."

(Most founders talk about hustle. But are you on Liz’s level? Probably not.)

Then one day, the phone rang in the other direction. A small law firm called needing a three-page contract translated into Slovak. They'd received one of her mailings. The project brought in just a couple hundred dollars.

But Liz treated it like a million-dollar engagement. She handled the process from start to finish, made sure every detail was seamless, and never let on that this was TransPerfect's very first job. In her words, "I acted like I'd been there before." And in a way, she had. She spent years doing this work for someone else. Now she was doing it for herself.

That mindset never changed, even as the company grew.

TransPerfect became the world's largest provider of language services, with more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue and operations in over 140 cities worldwide. Liz built a relentlessly cash-efficient company, setting revenue milestones that had to be hit before each new hire could be made. This discipline that TransPerfect lean and profitable from the start.

Following her sale of the company 25 years after founding it, Liz launched the Elizabeth Elting Foundation, dedicated to advancing the economic, social, and political equality of women and marginalized people. She's appeared on Forbes' Richest Self-Made Women list every year since 2016.

All because she sat at her desk one day and thought, "There HAS to be a better way."

If you're feeling that same frustration right now — at your job, in your industry, or with a product you use every day — don't ignore it! That feeling might be the seed of something extraordinary.

Liz's story is one of many we tell in Unlikely Entrepreneurs. We included it because it shows how you don’t need to be a Silicon Valley software engineer to found a billion-dollar company. There are BIG businesses waiting to be built in every industry, even language translation.

The TransPerfect story also shows us that the best problem to solve is one you’re intimately familiar with. As you search for your next business idea, look around you. What frustrations show up on a daily basis? When have you ever thought, “There HAS to be a better way?”

We hope Unlikely Entrepreneurs inspires you to follow that feeling and to build on it.

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Talk to you next week!

All the best,

Lou and Trish