We interviewed Luann Parker, Managing Director of Wordy Affairs. She has over 20 years of experience in commercial real estate and construction, with expertise in the retail, food, and entertainment industries.
Her company, Wordy Affairs, is a boutique business that teaches Business English Communications. It’s the perfect solution for non-native English adult learners who want to enhance their English communication skills. Wordy Affairs also has a social media presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.
Explain your and your company’s background in detail.
I began my corporate real estate career in the USA, working for Fortune 500 companies, and quickly ascended the corporate ladder. Within those remits, I oversaw teams who executed the real estate procurement of Grade A sites for global F&B brands, entertainment, and retail chains. Our scope encompassed the full development cycle of contract negotiations to acquire real estate through the construction delivery of those assets to our operators. In addition, I led teams who managed existing real estate portfolios to increase cost efficiency, improve location demographics and add value by improving the company’s cash position.
Seeking to broaden my sphere of influence, I moved to the UAE to contribute my strengths to several esteemed companies doing business throughout the MENA region.
That said, the culmination of my professional experience in the USA and, more particularly, the past 10 years in MENA led to Wordy Affairs’ formation.
Wordy Affairs is a boutique business that specializes in teaching Business English Communications to non-native English adult learners from various cultural backgrounds who want to increase their professional confidence and productivity at work.
Our lessons are personalized for students paired with our top English educators who facilitate a much more comprehensive and thorough learning of the language. Thus, this environment significantly enhances students’ desire to learn, speak the language well, and benefit from a better learning experience.
What are your goals?
Simply stated, our goals are embodied in our bold mission and values.
Our Mission: We are committed to providing Business English language lessons particularly designed to empower professionals everywhere with real-world language knowledge needed to help them achieve significant career growth and reach their full potential. This commitment is built on 3 solid pillars: KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, and PROFESSIONALISM, which are stepping stones for everything we do on a daily basis.
Our Values: We aim to become the leading language education platform with an eminent reference for Business English language learners globally.
Our ultimate goal is to generate a meaningful, long-lasting impact on the global workforce by providing individuals with the best language skills and knowledge to become more confident, resourceful, and successful at what they do. This paves the way for enhanced work inclusion, increased participation in professional development, and a more level playing field for those who come from different circumstances and backgrounds. Moreover, international talent management and progression at advanced levels are better facilitated.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of yourself/your company right now?
Our unique selling point is our educators, who are equipped with both business and teaching experience. Moreover, they are certified in their craft, having formally studied educational pedagogy in its most researched and successful form for guaranteed results. They are best in class and are ready to curate bespoke lesson plans to elevate English learning communication skills in the workplace.
Our team of 15 Wordsmiths resides in the GCC region (mostly UAE) and the West (USA, Europe, and South Africa). Thus, they are diverse in nationality and have worked across a plethora of industries, including law enforcement, oil and gas, hospitality, banking, medicine, and academia. Last but not least, they are well-rounded professionals with personal passions and interests, including music, artistry, sports content writing, and language translation (French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Polish, Russian, and Hindi), to name a few.
What was the path you/your company took to get to where you are today?
It was quite linear in that I had recognized this need in the business community across MENA. As a native English speaker and a professional who is passionate about efficiency and dynamism in the workplace, I knew I could forge a venture to connect the two.
Thus, I decided to pursue the requisite certifications to become a credible and qualified instructor, following which I realized that I could not facilitate this connection alone. I needed a team of professionals with both prior business experience and teaching expertise.
With urgency, I searched for this unique combination of skills and interviewed every teacher on our roster today. In parallel with this concentrated effort, I managed other areas of the business that were needed to complete this valuable service.
Despite some challenges with the IT development of the platform, all other areas were in lockstep with our vision. In fact, every third party with whom I engaged in facilitating these areas passionately echoed support and belief in what we were endeavouring to create. That reinforcement incessantly fueled me, particularly during several challenging moments.
Why did you start (or want to be the head of) this company?
I witnessed a vital opportunity amongst a significant portion of the talented professional community here to elevate their communication skills in a way that could significantly impact the quality and pace at which business was conducted.
More specifically, at least 70% of my colleagues over the past 10 years were non-native English speakers. Often, major communication gaps resulted from their inability to clearly articulate project challenges. Many meetings were a pure exercise in minute-taking rather than a productive update on a project’s status and clear action items to occur prior to the next meeting. The ultimate result was incremental delays to project timelines.
In addition, I assisted numerous colleagues with re-drafts of emails, reports, presentations, and meeting minutes, as they would ultimately reflect on communications from our team. It was important to me that our team communicated in a meaningful way across the organization to obtain results.
Ten years of witnessing and aiding these communication gaps, along with my passion for executional excellence, made me want to find a way to make an institutional difference. Thus, my business standing, paired with my educational credentials, paved the way for me to make this happen.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome?
IT Development! I am not techy by any stretch of the imagination, so trusting a 3rd party with all elements of design and coding of the platform entailed a significant learning curve. After what I thought was a completed website, I later learned the initial developer hard-coded much of the platform, which my subsequent developer could not decipher or alter. The pinnacle of my struggle was redesigning the website at the point where I thought it was complete. I had to chalk it up to a right-of-passage, stay the course, and continue to drive the execution of this platform for our targeted demographic and our teachers who are passionate about making a difference.
Give us one word that describes you the best.
Sunshine!
What makes you excited about Mondays?
Tackling and making significant progress on the week’s biggest task(s) excites me on Mondays. This gives me mental comfort and energy to accomplish even more than planned for the balance of the week.
What do you value most about your culture and vision?
The right culture is key to how a company performs. We are a boutique niche platform, so our environment is intimate and comfortable for our students. It’s a pleasant atmosphere with teachers who really care, and it shows in their messaging on the platform.
Tell us about a project that forced you to be innovative and creative.
As a start-up, we have yet to face such a project. However, I suspect that we will be presented with such an opportunity with the B2B business we’ve begun to attract. Companies will have very diverse needs based on their specific industries and desired level of improved competency for their team members. There’s no one-size-fits-all, so we will invariably have to be creative in our approach, selection of instructors, and teaching methods to achieve the greatest outcomes of success.
What are your company’s strategies, and how do they stand unique from your competitors?
Our overarching strategy centers on providing one offering (Business English) and providing it well. We view ourselves as the business class experience of online learning where students can expect unparalleled instruction from any of our Wordsmiths at the same rate. Therefore, a student will not have to make a teacher selection based on pricing and will not spend hours sifting through thousands of instructors from whom to select. The superior quality of the student journey commences with this review/selection process and is maintained through the completion of a student’s lessons.
What are the key values which helped you to overcome the roadblocks/challenges in your career? Tell us something about your memorable incident in your leadership.
A positive and focused mindset has served me well. Positivity is a choice, and it overrules negativity the majority of the time if you practice it enough. Through practice, I’ve built this muscle that powers me with the fortitude to tackle challenges. Focus is what drives my behaviour to do something daily in the advancement of a goal. Both attributes have guided my ascent professionally and transition across the globe to execute at the same level.
I’ve had the pleasure of leading successful teams throughout my career. As such, I’m a staunch believer in high-performing teams who deliver quality results. One of my most memorable leadership moments was at Yum Brands as Head of Portfolio Management for their 5000+ company restaurant chain in the US. I was brought in to manage a team of 8 mid-level professionals with a sore history of neglect in terms of their professional trajectories. After spending one year in this role, my team members gained a renewed perspective on their roles in our team and the company and became passionate about the next phases of their careers. They did not enjoy my decision to move back to NYC for a promotion but were grateful and proud of what we’d accomplished together in a very short period of time.
How do you see the company changing in two years, and how do you see yourself creating that change?
I am excited to see how our journey will evolve. It is important that we maintain our core values of a boutique environment supported by best-in-class instructors offering a specific service. There will undoubtedly be forces pushing us to increase our offering, perhaps in other languages. However, we will strive to purely solidify our footing in this niche offering, so we are the go-to for the business community globally.
Numerous fields, including but not limited to science, technology, computing, and aerospace, are typically taught and studied in English as the lingua franca. As a result, the number of e-learning platforms has grown exponentially, sparked by a high-interest level in learning English. In fact, the global English language learning market is expected to register a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5% from 2022 to 2029 to reach $69.6 billion by 2029. At Wordy Affairs, we are well-positioned to be a disruptor in these fields with our specific service offering. Not only do we communicate well in English, but we do it well within specific industries using the jargon needed to learn and excel professionally.
My leadership will be pivotal in garnering B2B with companies that want to solve their lack of investment in learning and development. I believe my proven business background lends significant credibility that businesses will seek as they explore partnering with Wordy Affairs. Our clients’ benefits will be enhanced communication in their workplace and with their customers, resulting in greater productivity, confidence, and professionalism across team members, more efficient deliverables/outcomes, and greater profitability. In sum, clients will gain a competitive advantage through these benefits.
Connect with Luann Parker on LinkedIn.