Kenneth Tomkins and Julie Lucas are both executives at the Internet Language Company. Lucas is the vice president of sales and Tomkins heads up the business development and marketing.
After putting in a 12 hour day today…they will both head to the same home and then head out into the city for a Valentine’s Day date. If you think this is a story about on-the-job dating, let’s make one thing clear right here at the beginning: Kenneth and Julie are husband and wife.
The two met several years ago at a chance encounter at a cafe. At the time the Internet didn’t really exist in its present form. However, Julie was running an ESL (English as a Second Language) school and the students needed a lot of learning materials.
Then came the Internet!
Kenneth saw the potential for providing language learning materials via the Internet. But first the two launched a brick and mortar bookstore. The click and mortar operation came soon after.
Today, the English Language Company powers three Websites: www.esl.net, www.translation.net and www.multilingualbooks.com.
“It is fun to be a dot-com survivor,” says Tomkins. “We have always had a real business with actual revenue and will be profitable this year, but we did learn our own lessons in the craziness of 2000.”
Julie’s target market continues to be schools. “They are warming up to the idea of online learning. Some schools are stocked with computers, but have no software.”
Kenneth has been focusing on Translation.net. “Translation.net has been going crazy, everyone wants to translate everything, and we are the only company that offers professional and machine translation, foreign language keyboards, free online translations and multilingual dictionaries.”
Both Kenneth and Julie seem to be happy sharing each others dot-company. “We both like excitement and thrive on change..so we found ourselves, as we often do, in the same place at the same time,” says Lucas.
