[E. Tomasik] What we really try to target for our business is what we call “business
to business,” so most of our clients are major businesses, but we do just take the
average man on the street, who walks in or calls in and wants language classes. Our program
is very, we tailor everything, so everything we do, we tailor to the needs of the student,
so if it’s one person who wants to learn Spanish, for example, we have lots of doctors,
who hear about us through interpreters and hospitals; they come in and say, hey, I want
to learn Spanish, or I want to learn one the Burmese languages, and so we just start working
with them one-on-one, but I would say ninety percent of our language training clients are
bigger companies, fortune 500 companies, professional organizations, athletes, who kind of have
a bigger, corporate need. The way we got involved with the LPGA was
about two years ago, as many people know if they follow ESPN or any type of sports, is
that the LPGA kind of ran into some trouble with an only English policy that they weren’t
putting out, but some reporters had kind of caught wind of, and so they hadn’t even
really put it there; they were just throwing out the idea, and ever since them, they’ve
kind of been struggling figuring out what to do.
So, we had been in contact with them and said, hey, we’d love to start working with you
and seeing what we can offer. We sat down through a series of meetings, a lot of different
contract negotiations, trying to figure out what would be best, and what they decided
is all four of our services, our main services we offer, is really beneficial, and so we
do written translation for them, oral interpreting, we do language training, not just English,
but we do language training in several different languages for a lot of the European and American
players, and then also cross-cultural training as well, and most of those are preparing the
girls to go to new countries and just preparing them just for diversity in general.
All the new rookies, there’s about twenty new rookies every year, and those rookies,
they all go through one hour, one-on-one training with us just on diversity, how to understand
new cultures, especially if they’re Americans. They may not really have been exposed to many
different cultures, and so we work on that with them.
What we do is we bring our computers on site, and then the players come. We usually teach
in their clubhouse or their dining area, and so we just have the laptops set up, have the
headphones ready, and they just get on, and their teacher is on the internet here at our
location working with them. I work with all the players, but I don’t
teach them all, so I see them on a daily basis at the tournaments. We walk around, talk with
them, see how their doing, what are their needs, especially for those with English.
What are they really struggling with that day? What interviews can we help them prepare
for? So, we’re really not just teaching English, but everything we do is for a specific
purpose. If the girls tell us, I really need to work
on pro-ams, talking with people. I need to understand the forty, fifty year-old American
male culture. How do I talk with them? What do we talk about? We really try to gear that,
or some girls will say, I got three interviews this week; one is Golf Channel, one is ESPN.
Here’s the questions they gave me. Can we just role play dialogue and help me prepare
for that? A lot of them, especially if they’re coming
from Korea, they’re education level is not always as high, so if they started playing
professional golf at eleven, that’s really the age when they stopped going to school,
so their confidence level in anything academic is very low we have found, so even their reading
level, their speaking level in their native language is not very high, and so just working
with the teacher one-on-one, we’ve really had to work hard to establish a relationship,
and then, not only that, but then we’re speaking English; they really have very little
confidence, so if you feel comfortable and you like a language, if you feel comfortable
with that person with the language, you’ll like that language more.