By Carrie McKinnon, ILCA Co-founder
For years I dreamed of running an online business. I had my ‘real-life’ business that sent language teachers into companies. Together with my co-founder, we built a national presence and opened an office in the business capital of Morocco, Casablanca, as well as the Spanish border, boom city, Tangier. The Tangier office was in a technology space for start-ups and we are so proud of these achievements.
I’ve always had a strong interest in technology and how it can be leveraged by entrepreneurs, I started dreaming of opening a purely online business. I was also teaching and consulting remotely so it certainly put the concept on my radar. I wasn’t sure what kind of online business I wanted, what I would sell, or even what I cared about enough (besides my real-life business) to actually start an entire other business for.
It was on the internet that I first ran into the idea of Language Coaching. I had already been identifying as a language coach for quite some time and even branded some of our products as language coaching.
So, the origin story of ILCA starts here: me in Morocco with my brick and mortar business, identifying as a language coach, and running into someone online calling themselves a ‘language coach’ (that’s the fabulous Gabriella Kovács, my ILCA co-founder, in case you are wondering).
Fast forward 3 years, it’s 2021. Gabriella and I have founded ILCA and connected with an entire TRIBE of language professionals that we work with daily. I now live on a different continent and just checked out google analytics for this website to find visitors from 95 countries in the past month alone. Let me say that again, NINETY FIVE COUNTRIES!
We have had visitors from a whopping 128 countries since we began. That’s 128 out of 195 countries in the world! As someone that is fueled by people connection and cultural discovery, this is exciting.
Of course many of these countries have ONE person from it that visited us. But oh how I wish I could reach out to that ONE person in Rwanda, Palestine, or Timor-Leste and thank them for visiting our website, ask them if they’d like a cup of tea and if I can do anything to help them on their language coaching journey.
I lived outside of my home country for 11 years. I left the United States and moved abroad because, “I wanted to join the rest of the world”. For me, living anywhere else in the world feels like living in the rest of the world, compared to living in the United States which feels very much like, living in the United States. So this global business, this 128 countries…well it keeps me connected to the rest of the world and for that, I am grateful.
