Nothing lax about Lex as it thrives among academic elite

Louise Chapman, Managing Editor of Cambridge startup Lex Academic, offers the inside track on how the company has grown since foundation in November 2021. It  is now around three times the size in terms of staff and revenue and enters what can often be a tricky second year for a fledgling business. Lex is a listed supplier of academic translation services in dozens of elite universities. 

In my first full trading year, and while still a full-time PhD student at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, Lex Academic turned over half a million pounds, writes Louise.

Having now submitted my PhD and nearing the company’s second anniversary, I can say I am getting used to juggling many complex variables while running a business. Not only did I start Lex Academic as a PhD student, my team and I have worked hard to grow the business during multiple, concurrent national and global crises. 

We launched during a pandemic so we were used to some level of crisis as the status quo. In terms of global stress factors it has been interesting to see what has been salient to our sector (academic proofreading, translation, indexing, and consulting). 

We speculated, for example, that our pandemic success was partly down to the fact that researchers couldn’t spend their personal budgets and university research allowances on conference organisation or travel, so had unrepresentatively large funds available for things like editorial services for that period. 

With things slowly going back to some kind of normality, we were concerned that this large group of clients (some 1,000 researchers worldwide) would no longer be in a position to lean on our support. But the opposite seems to have happened. 

It’s impossible to know for sure how things would have panned out if we’d launched long before the pandemic, but during the past few years we have built a name for ourselves as one of the very few editorial companies that is led by researchers who understand the very specific needs and pain points of academic authors. So the brand exposure is bringing us many new clients, both through word-of-mouth and extremely targeted marketing.

The other thing that seems to have happened concurrently is that almost all of the clients who first used us two years ago are still coming back for more. It seems that an entire demographic of researchers got to sample our services during the pandemic, and very many of them have become devoted customers. 

I think that what they may have initially seen as a ‘nice-to-have’ service is now playing a ‘must-have’ role in their career progression activities. For some people, this is partly a time and energy saving strategy. For others, it’s simply a question of raising the quality of the text for its own sake. 

But for the overwhelming majority of our clients the chief benefit of our service is in real-terms success when it comes to having papers accepted in journals, book manuscripts and proposals accepted by top publishers, and grant applications by funding bodies. 

Some clients who had not used an editorial service before the pandemic came out of it with two or more publications thanks, in part, to us. While we began as a proofreading company we now also assist academics with things like transcription, book and funding proposals, CVs and cover letters, etc. 

Growth and a commitment to quality

With new clients approaching us every day, and a very high returning client rate, our sales are already double this time last year (our turnover for August was £75,000, which speaks to some aspect of the business’s seasonality), although our net margins have shrunk owing to inflation and personnel requirements. 

This is not something we’re unhappy about; we want to grow a truly robust company that gives people opportunities – both in terms of our personnel, but also our clients.

We had an amazing first year in which it seems we burst onto the scene out of nowhere and have since been growing our personnel. To be honest, we would be growing even faster if our standards weren’t so ruthlessly high. We have a difficult ‘entrance exam’ and typically only accept editors who have, or are studying for, a PhD. When I more or less stopped copy-editing client work myself, I sought to replicate my fastidious eye for detail in my first, second, and third hires, as well as in my now 200-strong international team of freelance editors. 

Customer demand is very nearly outstripping supply, but I work day and night looking for editorial talent to keep up with our growing reputation and the numbers of referrals we receive. 

Quality is absolutely central to what we do and there would be no point at this stage in going to, say, venture capitalists looking to inject enormous amounts of money into the business to fast-track our growth. 

The reality is that testing the mettle of new editors is a long and painful process, with an increasingly protracted training and feedback period. There is no real way to expedite that without harming our product. 

We were delighted to bring in our first and only investor, Peter Redhead (former MD of JPMorgan), last year. Peter’s been exactly what we needed to fine-tune our business processes, especially recruitment, which is an especially vexed area for startups. 

Peter also gave me a huge (metaphorical) whack on the head to help me fill the shoes of a million-pound company CEO. Going from being a PhD student to a CEO – managing cashflow, multiple employees, analysing accounts, and trying to understand the changing nature of academia across the globe – is quite dizzying when I sit to think about it. 

I am glad that the very nature of what we sell means that keeping things lean is the most natural and sensible approach to our success and longevity: we wouldn’t be able to cope with growth faster than this. 

That said, we are about to hire a Chief Copy Editor (otherwise known as a Professional Perfectionist) to consolidate the core of our business and to enable us to continue delivering truly world-class editing services.

In the music business, people talk of a band’s ‘difficult’ second and third albums. The same is true for businesses, though for slightly different reasons. In the service industry, at least, it’s not a case of having packed everything you have to offer into your first season and being left with nothing thereafter.

But, as you grow, you have to relinquish control. This needs to be done at the right speed if it is not going to affect quality. And to be done well, it will also (at least temporarily) hit your profit margins. So there are some very difficult decisions for a CEO and COO to make. 

You hear war stories of founders who either can’t get past being ‘the technician’ and so reach a ceiling after year one, and those who manage the transition to ‘entrepreneur’, but only at the cost of allowing some middle manager to come in and destroy half of their business. Suddenly, not only have the profit margins shrunk but customers are complaining about the speed and the quality of the service.

So me and my co-founder and COO, Professor Constantine Sandis, have taken measures to avoid this at all costs. Our price increases have not been an increase on the very same service. 

For one, increased prices have enabled us to add an additional layer of quality control by a certified professional copy editor. Unlike other companies who provide such services, we match each manuscript to an editor (translator, indexer, etc.) with the appropriate expertise. 

So the editing done is by a researcher in the same field as the author. But we now also add the quality control of accredited editors with decades of experience, in addition to my own eye. 

So you now get the best of both worlds, which I think is truly unique in the sector. This means that clients can trust that, when they send their work to Lex Academic, the proofreading, translation, or indexing will be taken care of exactly as they need it to be. 

And when everybody is paid better, everyone does a better job, and the clients get better value for money than if they’d paid a little bit less. It’s a win-win all round. While we always price fairly, there’s no point trying to compete on price with another service, because that competition can only end with the provision of inferior services, dissatisfied clients, and underpaid editors.

Inflation is another issue. It is in our contracts that our staff get an automatic inflation-tied salary increase, in addition to any possible promotion. This is really important to us, first and foremost because it’s the obviously the right thing to do. 

Why would you want the people you most rely on to suddenly be earning less against the cost of living than they were the year before when the company was smaller? It simply doesn’t make sense to us.

As a result of the above, our profit margins have shrunk a bit, but not too much. And given the high increase in volume, this is how it should be. But the demand also enables us to be a little more discriminating about choosing clients. If someone talks down to any of us, or is trying to haggle all the time, we are in the lucky position of not needing their custom. 

When you start a business, it’s all about getting the customers to choose you and of course we still need this to be the case. We want our authors to have absolute trust in us, knowing that they do not need to worry about anything once we’re in charge and this has led to a fabulous track record of Google Reviews, despite the fact that there are sometimes good reasons for academics not to publicise their use of language-editing services. 

Finally, perhaps the best bit about our growth is that we are now able to better support some of the causes that are most closely tied to our mission. We firmly believe in levelling the linguistic playing field within academia so are funding some prizes to raise awareness of the biases that non-native English speakers often have to overcome.

In tandem we have introduced Lex Academic Scholarships for dyslexic postgraduate students working in Classics and Philosophy, to raise dyslexia awareness within academia. 

The first winner of the Lex Academic Scholarship went to a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. It was always my intention to give back to Cambridge in some way and long may it continue.

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