In the online education world, Ray Blakney is a major powerhouse in the language learning sector. He is the CEO and co-founder of Live Lingua, a renowned online language learning platform that he launched with his wife in 2009 during the Mexican swine flu crisis. They started Live Lingua out of complete necessity, as the swine flu dealt a major blow to their previous brick-and-mortar language immersion school. Now, over a decade later, Live Lingua has been continuously growing and dominating the online language learning scene!
Home Business Magazine recently had the opportunity to catch up with Blakney and get the inside scoop about his business and entrepreneurial journey. He was happy to share what sets Live Lingua apart from other online language education solutions, how his company will help entrepreneurs in Year 2021, and his top business achievement. He also shared helpful tips for other aspiring entrepreneurs who want to launch their own enterprises!
HBM: Tell us all about Live Lingua. What sets it apart from other online language learning solutions?
RB: “Live Lingua is not just another language tutor directory where you have to sort through thousands of tutors (many who have no teaching credentials) to find one that works for you. We are a full-service online language school. This means that students at Live Lingua have all the support they would have at a brick-and-mortar language school in their city but at a fraction of the costs. All the Live Lingua teachers are required to have a college degree and go through an extensive screening process involving multiple interviews, trial lessons, and application tests to make sure that only the best teachers work with the students of Live Lingua.
In addition to the great teachers, each student is supported by a full-time academic team (with over 50 years of language teaching experience) to help with any learning-related questions, as well as our administrative team which helps students with any scheduling or technical issues they may face.
We are also the only one of the top five language schools in the world that does not have large investments from rich venture capitalists. For our students, this means that we can focus on the quality of the education without always having to focus on growth at the expense of everything else.
At Live Lingua, we offer the full language immersion experience so you can not only learn the language but also the culture and history behind the language you are learning.
Live Lingua started as a family-owned business and continues to be a successful boutique language school, even with large companies where you are just a number funded by millionaires with no interest in language education continuing to flood the market.”
HBM: What inspired you to launch Live Lingua?
RB: “Mexican swine flu. My wife and I started our first business back in 2008. It was a brick-and-mortar Spanish language immersion school in Mexico. My wife is Mexican (but went to university in the US) and was my Spanish teacher when I arrived in Mexico as a volunteer with the Peace Corps. We launched our school – and got married – at the end of 2007 with only $2000 US in our bank account. Luckily, the school was a success from day one and was fully booked within weeks.
Then in March of 2009, the Mexican swine flu appeared. Within weeks they had closed off the borders of Mexico (and most of our students came from outside of the country) and our students canceled. We had just started a few months ago and did not have enough savings to keep operating for more than a few weeks.
It was then that my wife had the idea of contacting our previous students to see if they wanted to have classes over Skype. It worked better than I expected. So I decided to launch a website and offer the classes to the public, just to see if anybody would sign up.
The swine flu ended in eight weeks. It did not end up being a global pandemic. So within a few weeks, our brick-and-mortar school was full again. But to our surprise, our online classes kept growing. Within six months it was generating more revenue than our brick-and-mortar school for just a few hours a week of work.
At that point we decided to sell our physical school (it took three years to sell) and focus on the online school. In 2012, we rebranded it as Live Lingua, and we have been growing at about 20% a year every year since then.”
HBM: How will Live Lingua help entrepreneurs in Year 2021?
RB: “It may be counter-intuitive during COVID-19, but learning a language can give you financial freedom in 2021 once people start traveling again. The reason for this is not immediately obvious, but it is backed up with over 12 years of me living it.
Many of us have been working remotely since the start of coronavirus, and many companies are surprised to see that productivity and work satisfaction (assuming your kids are not home) have gone up during this period. This means the work-from-home policy may continue for many of us.
Most people may think this means they will just stay in the same place and work from home. However, if you are willing to be more adventurous, you can peddle this into a 400%+ increase in your spending power. How? The answer is easy: just move to a country where the cost of living is a fraction of where you live now.
If you live in a major city in the US and are willing to move to Mexico or Latin America, your money would be worth 400% more overnight. Instead of working in an expensive city, you could be working between surf sessions in Brazil. Instead of spending $50.00 US for your lunch, you could be enjoying a full meal of delicious tacos in Mexico for about $5.00 US. Instead of having a cubicle as your work view, you could be looking out at a waterfall in Costa Rica.
To make these moves, feel safer, and really make the most of your experience living in another country, learning the language and culture is key. And Live Lingua is here to help with every step.”
HBM: What is your top business achievement with Live Lingua?
RB: “In 2015, Entrepreneur Magazine chose Live Lingua as one of the best small businesses in the US (E360 award).”
HBM: Were there any big challenges you had to overcome in launching your business?
RB: “We had to build the business twice. After launching the business in 2009 during the Mexican swine flu, we grew to mid-six figures in 2012. Our business was built using SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is how you get your website to rank highly on Google’s organic rankings.
In 2012, Google did an algorithm update which killed our business. Overnight we went from being on the first page of Google to not in the first 100 results. So on that day we had to start from scratch and build up the business again. It took us two years to get back to where we were before, and we have continued to grow since.”
HBM: What tips do you have for other aspiring entrepreneurs who want to launch their own businesses?
RB: “One of my favorite quotes is by Jack Dorsey from Twitter:
‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you waited too long to launch.’
The biggest tip I can give any aspiring entrepreneur is to just launch. I can’t even count the number of people who I have met when speaking at conferences or retreats that have great business ideas. I can easily count the number of people I catch up with years later who have actually acted on their business idea.
If you have a business idea, just throw up a website and promote it. Don’t worry about the page or the offer being perfect. Just launch something. Then wait for the feedback to come in. Most of it will probably be bad. Don’t take it personally; just learn from it and improve. Do this day in and day out and within a year or two, you will have a growing business.”
HBM: Where do you hope to see Live Lingua in three years?
RB: “Our focus in the next three years is to add a full suite of language learning material to the site (handouts, interactive material, videos, audios, etc.), so that students can continue to immerse themselves in the languages. All this without significantly raising our prices so we can make language learning as affordable as possible for everybody.”
