Ditto Transcripts

Transcription Outsourcing Update: How We've Grown 30% Since Last Year

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Ben Walker

Founder, Ditto Transcripts

$100K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Ditto Transcripts

dittotranscripts.com

from Denver, CO, USA

started June 2010

$100,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Ben recommends to grow your business!

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Want more updates on Ditto Transcripts? Check out these stories:

1. How We Started A $100K/Month Company That Provides Transcription Services (2020) ➜

This is a follow up story for Ditto Transcripts. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 4 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

My name is Ben Walker and I am the CEO and Founder of Transcription Outsourcing, LLC in Denver Colorado. We provide premium transcription services to the legal, law enforcement, medical, financial, academic, and general business industries.

When accuracy and timeliness are important people come to us for their transcription needs. Our clients include law enforcement agencies, universities, Fortune 500 corporations, court systems, law firms, surgery centers and hospitals, all the way to solo self publishing authors.

When doing it right matters we are the ones people call on. We are still in the 1.3 million per year and will be for probably the next 3-6 months before our new marketing and branding efforts start to pay off. If it were easy we would be a $100 million company already, it’s not though, so these things take time and consistent effort to build up.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

I have been doing a lot of the same things as before in order to stay consistent and keep growing. Since our last talk we’ve grown another 10% and will continue to grow between 20-30% for the year.

Yes we have started to create more linkable blog content and have also started outreach to journalists and bloggers to include our articles in their pieces. These are almost all data driven pieces that are easy for people to consume and share as well. This has been working well for us and we will continue to do these as long as they are successful getting us new backlinks and traffic to our site.

Get as much PR as you possibly can, and get a coach as soon as you can. Both are highly important and will help you become a success much faster.

In addition to maintaining the work I was doing we have hired our first Director of Sales. This role has been dedicated to outbound goverment sales and their efforts are starting to bear fruit now a little over 90 days in. It also takes consistency and stamina to stay with it when sales roles are new and you are cold calling prospects.

We have also brought on 2 more workflow people who work directly for our Operations Director to manage all of our new clientele and work coming in. We actually rely on our clients coming back every day, week, or month depending on how often they need our services, so yes we have been keeping our clients happy. If they aren’t happy we give them their money back and I haven’t had to give anyone their money back in over a year now, knock on wood :)

We will have some new information on PR in the next few months for sure as we are in the middle of a total rebrand and new messaging project with a marketing and branding firm here in Denver. It will take 4-5 months total and then we will launch the new logo and company name in late January or early February of 2022.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

This year was our first time hiring a Director of Sales and my first offer letter that went out was to the wrong person unfortunately. That however forced us to restart our search and we were able to find someone even better during our second round.

Choosing to offer the first person was 100% my decision and I was told by my recruiter not to offer him. There was something not right about some of his answers and story the last few years and one of his former bosses wouldn’t take our calls about him. I should not have offered him, and should have listened to the recruiter. It was my mistake and I have learned to listen to the recruiting experts more closely in the future when hiring people.

I play a lot of high level competitive team tennis and one of my teams made nationals again this year. Although we didn’t do well at nationals we did make it again and had an incredibly good time travelling together and playing some really good tennis.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

As soon as we are breaking even on our Director of Sales we will be hiring a junior sales person. The Director will train and educate the new sales person to take over their role as the government sales specialist and they will move into higher level sales that require months and sometimes years to build up to. Along with sales roles we will continue to build out our workflow management teams as we continue to grow our monthly revenue.

Have you read any good books in the last year?

I’ve developed the habit of listening to 2-3 books per month while I walk my dog around the neighborhood and park I live near. There are so many good books out there it’s hard to say which one was the best I’ve read in the past year.

A few that stick out in my mind are “Making Money is Killing Your Business”by Chuck Blakeman, “Screw It, Let’s Do It” by Sir Richard Branson, “Hacking the Unconscious” by Rory Sutherland.

“Hacking the Unconscious” is what helped me move toward our rebranding this year after listening to it. It made me realize that we needed to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and to do that we needed to hire an accomplished branding and marketing team.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

This is something I say every time someone asks me what I would tell other new business owners or myself if I could go back to the week I started my company.

Get as much PR as you possibly can, and get a coach as soon as you can. Both are highly important and will help you become a success much faster. You won’t have to learn everything the hard way like I did if you get a coach as soon as you can.

You’re gonna need PR because no one knows who you are or what you sell, and I don't care how many social media followers you have. Get mentioned in legit publications, guest write for legit publications, and get your company name and information out as much as possible. People can’t buy from you if they don’t know about you.