UNLOCK THE LANGUAGE WITHIN

Paula Flanagan, Founder ie Spanglish.ie

This website is for people who want to learn Spanish in a fun and enticing way Thousands of Spanish speaking people visit the shores of our Emerald Isle every year with some of them deciding to stay and live here for a while. The same can be said for Irish people travelling to sunny Spain to leave the rainclouds behind and lap up some sun, sand and sea. For English and Spanish people the language barrier can be a hindrance but now a new website www.spanglish.ie is sure to make interaction easier and for those of us who want a fun way of learning the language, this website, founded by Paula Flanagan, is the perfect opportunity to do so.

LANGUAGE OF ROMANCE

Spanish is a romance language originally from the northern area of Spain. It is the official language of Spain, most Latin American countries and Equatorial Guinea. In total, twenty nations and several territories use Spanish as their primary language. Flanagan and her Spanish partner Juan Daniel Nogues Roig saw that Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world with around 46 million people studying Spanish worldwide. She observed a niche in the market for a social networking website to appeal to both Irish people looking to learn Spanish and visa versa. She was learning Spanish at the time and looking to spend more time with her family, so she seized the opportunity and set up her website. With a degree in Business Studies and a Masters in Project Management, Flanagan had the experience to do so effectively.

Flanagan comments that the Enterprise Board was a help in providing funding and she is currently doing their sales and marketing course. Brightspark Consulting was also a great help to Flanagan when she was starting the website and worked with Flanagan on the project from start to finish. They designed the logo and planned the site’s content and information architecture.

“I set up the website for my own personal reasons because I’m learning Spanish and I want to bring my children up bilingual. There is around 46 million people studying the language worldwide. I saw this was a phenomenal number and thought to myself that there was a big market open here. I thought if I could supply something for that market, in turn it would give me the flexibility of working to my own routine and give me more quality time with my family. That was the driving force behind the website,” explains Flanagan.

“I haven’t seen another website like Spanglish and I’ve gone through a lot of the language learning websites. Some websites might just focus on learning but not on bringing people together like our website does,” continued the entrepreneur.

USER ACTIVITIES

The website offers many facilities and activities for users. A monthly membership is required but the experiences and material on offer makes it worth it. For example, Flanagan explains that if you are planning on going to Barcelona for a few weeks or days you might want to chat to another Irish person that’s already living there so you can do a search and meet another person your age from Ireland in Barcelona, send him or her a message and ask her questions or arrange to meet. “The website is set up to enable members to set up their own profile and start sending messages to each other. Its a very easy way for people to meet up with native speakers or others learning the particular language. They can communicate via email or they can arrange to meet. We have a number of podcasts and we want to build up a lot of learning material in our learning section aimed at helping people develop their learning skills in Spanish and English,” says the entrepreneur.

Family Life

It may seem like plain sailing for Flanagan right now as her business continues to grow and she has more quality time with her family, but it was not always so easy for her, remarks the business woman. Flanagan was pregnant when she was setting up her new endeavour but amazingly she says, ”it was actually quite easy. You can hold a baby with one hand and type with the other.” Being a woman in business is not easy according to Flanagan and, “when the children are sick, regardless of how good your partner is, the care is always on the woman. I think it is something all women in business find.”

To deal with this problem of juggling work and home life, Flanagan has registered as a childminder, set up a small playgroup at her home, and employed a Spanish teacher to educate the children. At the moment there are a few children in the group but she says that, “if the childminding business went well I’d hope to expand that too. I’ve been looking around for Spanish schools and crèches and there’s not a huge amount of them in the market. So at the moment I’m doing it from home but if there turns out to be a demand then the obvious next step is to set up a formal crèche.”

To conclude Flanagan says that in five years time she would like to be, “heading up a successful company that I have established”, which is a definite possibility for this determined entrepreneur.

Published in the July/August 2007 Issue of Irish Entrepreneur