As a fluent Spanish and English speaker, the late William R. Martin began interpreting at a young age. The son of Cuban parents, he frequently found it necessary to relay messages for his mother that were spoken in English, into their native tongue.
“He helped my grandmother navigate the world,” Martin’s daughter, J. Nicole Martin Lawton recalled.
As an adult, he saw the importance of language access for those individuals who prefer to communicate in a language other than English and thus began his journey as a professional interpreter. He found a way to help people other than his mom, which brought him much joy.
Bill Martin founded Phoenix Language Services in 1993. Following his death in May 2020, Lawton took the helm as president and CEO.
Since taking operational control of Phoenix, Lawton has made one of her top priorities the commercialization of the company’s Interpreter Management System (IMS). IMS; first developed by Martin in 2012, is a management and scheduling solution to facilitate the provision of interpreter services.
“My dad believed in the value and benefit of our Interpreter Management System,” she said. “I owe it to him and to his legacy” to move forward with commercialization.
A suggestion from a business connection encouraged her to seek help from SCORE Bucks County mentors. Two years ago, Nicole began meeting with her SCORE mentors, Bill Grant and Charlie Morris.
“Charlie was a tremendous source of support for me on our development calls. He gave me sound, valuable advice and served as my interpreter in the software space,” she said. “Charlie is a software development expert.”
For Nicole, 2024 and 2025 will be pivotal in establishing a subscription service for IMS. “I believe in it,” she said.
Grant provided important financial and strategic guidance with significant insights into vendor negotiations, and both he and Morris supported Nicole through the process of further development for the third iteration of IMS. Their advice and recommendations, both corporate and software focused, have been invaluable as Nicole embarks on the company’s continued growth.
As an owner of four companies, “you must remain current. You must think ahead,” she said. “Bill and Charlie help me think of different ways to approach growth.”
Since the days when her father launched the business from their family home, it has grown significantly with hundreds of in-person interpreters, and more than 15,000 remote interpreters offering language access in over 140 languages. Phoenix, based in Blue Bell, has many clients in the greater Philadelphia area and its suburbs, including four large health systems.
Language interpretation services are used in health care settings and in business within human resources, in schools, and legal settings such as arbitrations, depositions and client meetings. “Any setting really,” she noted.
Prior to assuming a leadership role at Phoenix Language Services, Nicole worked for a decade as a health care attorney and was a partner at a large law firm.
“I have a legal brain. That’s how I think,” she said. “That really has helped me a great deal with being able to manage things.”
Nicole grew up working for Phoenix Language Services in different capacities and was most heavily involved in the early 2000s, while finishing her undergraduate and master’s degrees simultaneously at the University of Pennsylvania. She served for a few years as the Phoenix Language Services program director, located within a local pediatric institution.
“That’s really what sparked my love and interest in this,” she said. “I was planning all along to be where I am today. It really is what I was meant to do. I feel so honored to carry on my father’s legacy.”
Nicole’s leadership and the company’s achievements have recently been recognized with the prestigious 2024 Eastern Pennsylvania Entrepreneurial Success of the Year Award, presented by the U.S. Small Business Administration, and she was also an SBA Success Story featured by WBEC-East.
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