Today we’d like to introduce you to Claudia Mirza.
Claudia’s father immigrated to the United States when she was four. He left her mother and her in absolute poverty, living in the projects of Medellin, Colombia. The two of them were able to survive thanks to the kindness of people who fed them, gave them furniture, educated them and provided a way to make a living for her minimum wage-earning mother. Their saviors were an entrepreneur from Medellin, his employees, the school nuns and family members.
To make matters worse, Claudia and her mother lived through the most violent times when the Medellin and Cali Cartels were at constant war. Medellín is now one of the most innovative cities in the world and has left behind the war.
At the age of 21, after Claudia graduated from college and 18 years of being apart, she reunited with her father in the United States.
Claudia and Azam met in the United States while both were working for corporate America. Claudia worked for a big telecommunications company while attending school to obtain her second business administration degree.
Azam Mirza, a bright engineer from India, with a Master’s degree from the University of New Orleans in electrical engineering and specialization in artificial intelligence, not only had worked in defense but also had been recruited by Cap Gemini Ernst and Young as a database consultant supporting Fortune 500 accounts.
Akorbi began when Claudia lost her job during the dotcom crash in 2002. Claudia and Azam Mirza, a newly married couple and driven young professionals, had to deal with the uncertainty of a life change for Claudia in the middle of a challenging job market.
Claudia applied for many jobs, but those jobs did not appear to be aligned with Claudia’s vision for herself and her family. From 2002 to 2003, Claudia spent most of her time applying for jobs while helping her father train horses at horse race tracks in Texas and Oklahoma. Azam remained employed at the big five global consulting firm.
During her job search, Claudia decided to visit the Greater Dallas Hispanic Chamber since they had an amazing job bank. She requested an appointment with the Director of Economic Development, Gabriela Carballo, who instead told Claudia that she should consider opening a business, instead of applying for a job.
As Claudia was going back and forth between Dallas and San Antonio’s race track, she enrolled herself at a racing seminar. As luck would have it, the interpreter that was providing the Spanish language support, could not show up to perform the interpretation, but instead he told the organizers that “Hector’s daughter (Claudia) was very smart and that she could take care of the interpretation”. The organizers immediately reached out to Claudia and the rest is history. Claudia immediately rolled up her sleeves and got to work. She not only facilitated the interpretation from English into Spanish, but also helped editing and translating all the training materials.
Then, the non-profit and the Greater Dallas Hispanic Chamber of Commerce started referring customers to Claudia. Claudia knew from the very beginning that she was not a professional translator and decided to hire the best professional linguists in the industry. She knew from the very beginning that she wanted to produce materials with editorial house quality.
Azam Mirza joined Akorbi full time in 2004 and other important team members were added to the organization. Over time, new technology, services and influential division leaders were also added to the company’s portfolio, making Akorbi what it is today. A group of companies specializing in building compassionate human connections through language, technology and workforce solutions.
Has it been a smooth road?
Businesses are always full of challenges and obstacles. In fact, entrepreneurship is the daily fight with status quo. Our biggest challenge was growing the business. Although we hit the $1 million mark after only two years in business, we spent the next several years trying to figure out how to grow beyond that.
The two biggest challenges hindering our growth were:
1) Attracting highly-skilled people, willing to risk leaving a larger, more established company, to work for a smaller, growing company.
2) Having only one line of business, which gave us limited revenue and growth opportunities. This also made us made us very vulnerable to economic and industry fluctuations.
How we overcame these challenges:
1) To find strategic talent, we worked with and developed people within Akorbi that showed a lot of potential and an entrepreneurial spirit. By raising the team up to a higher level of success, it became much easier to attract qualified talent. Top talent attracts top talent.
2) We began to strategize ways to diversify our business. After a lot of research and planning, we decided to launch staffing, telephonic interpretation, in-person interpretation and business process outsourcing (BPO or contact center) services. In order to successfully create these new divisions, we recruited and hired senior executives with the experience and vision to launch these new services and take the business to the next level.
Since then, we’ve landed some of the world’s largest companies as clients and we’ve become a dominant industry player, even being recognized in June 2018 as one of the largest providers of translation, localization, multilingual contact centers and interpreting services in the U.S. and globally by independent market research firm, Common Sense Advisory.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Akorbi is a U.S.-based company that provides enterprise solutions that empower companies to achieve success in the global economy. We help companies connect with employees, vendors and customers in over 170 languages 24×7, in any modality, from any location. Our customizable, enterprise solutions include staffing, learning services, multilingual contact centers, video remote solutions and language solutions where we specialize in sign language, braille, large print and document remediation.
What are you most proud of as a company?
We are proud of our technology innovation and patents, our people and our community involvement. We are proud of our strategic thinking, vision and business integrity.
What sets you apart from others?
We are honest with our team and clients, committed to consistently upholding our company values.
We are forward-thinkers which has led Akorbi to become one of the most diversified mid-sized language companies in the world.
We are innovators. We realized technology can change and improve how we deliver our services. Technology can’t replace humans, but it can improve and help with service delivery. Our technology has helped improve the connection speed and quality of phone, video and mobile calls for contact center support, interpreters, sign language support, plus so much more to help our clients improve customer and patient satisfaction. This technology also improves the process and translating documents, all while operating in a secure, compliant environment which is mandatory for most of our clients. We are constantly innovating, to find ways to add value and support to our clients.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I feel that Texas is a great place to do business. It is amazing to see how our culture and country revolve around the celebration of entrepreneur success. No other country in the world does that. Specifically, North Texas has become a great ecosystem to foster and grow businesses.
A large challenge that our business and others face in Dallas is a lack of access to a skilled STEM labor force. We need more engineers, scientists, accountants, and more people working in research and development in advanced technologies. We need more talent to keep the innovation of small businesses and entrepreneurs going.
Contact Info:
- Address: 6504 International Parkway
Suite 1500 - Website: https://akorbi.com/
- Phone: 214-256-9222
- Email: cmirza@akorbi.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AkorbiUS
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Akorbi
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudia-mirza-6004831/
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