ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND: A Charlotte translating company provides its employees freedom and flexibility.

Michelle Menard grew up in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural family. Her mother was born and raised in France; her father is from Panama. As a young child in Charlotte, the language at home was French and Menard often spent summers in France with her grandparents.

"It got me started with understanding that there are cultural differences," she says. "Out grandparents did not speak English, and my sister and I were speaking French all summer while getting spoiled by our grandparents." While in college, Menard worked at a restaurant and also helped her mother, who had a freelance job doing translations. Her boss had an idea.

While I was a student at UNCC, my manager at Olive Garden suggested I start my own business," she says. "When he said that, I had goosebumps and flashes of what this business would look like."

Why not use her language skills to help others?

Menard is founder and owner of Choice Translating, Inc., a company that assists businesses with translations and interpreting services. She has a core of 15 on staff and is projected to bring in about $3.2 million this year.

One key to Choice Translating's success, which launched in 1995, is Menards method of hiring co-workers, and choosing what projects match each employee and what resources they need to complete their work.

"It was humble beginnings, just me and my mom working together to translate French projects," she says. "In those days, there were visitors from France coming to the Charlotte area--which has more than 700 foreign-owned firms--and they would come to do plant tours, or meet with their U.S. subsidiary. Then we realized additional clients needed additional languages."

Menard, who has been a SBTDC client for about 20 years, worked with UNCC's office at the former Ben Craig Center on campus (now Ventureprise, the university's entrepreneurial resource center), and its PORTAL [Partnership, Outreach and Research to Accelerate Learning] center.

One way the center has helped is with evolving technology.

"In the early days, if you were transferring files, you'd have to confirm the settings on the recipients' side and save them to these bigger discs or FedEx them. We had a server cabinet," she says. "Now everything is in the cloud. We expanded our resources to provide a more complete offering to clients."

Menard's employees are project managers who can provide interpreting services in person, over the phone or on video by working with vendor partners and translators around the...