LinQuake

Translation specialist LinQuake has been in business since 2013. The company from Udenhout (NL) has grown from a sole proprietorship delivering high-quality translations to a team of ten people. In 2018, Dave van den Akker, director of LinQuake, first encountered Topical: “At a networking breakfast, where someone from your team gave a good pitch. I was curious but also found the concept very interesting because, at that time, we were still working with Word templates.”

The challenge

Before Topical, LinQuake created loose documents for every single meeting. That resulted in a large amount of plain text files that are unstructured and hardly ever used again. The actions and decisions were intertwined in the text, which made it hard to retrieve exactly the information needed later, especially with a meeting history spread across 26 separate documents.

The approach

A major advantage of Topical, according to Dave, is the ability to “park” information during the week. By allowing everyone to add their contributions to the agenda before the meeting, it prevents topics from being discussed randomly throughout the week. Dave says, “This way, I know I can let go of certain topics for the time being because we’ll discuss them in the meeting a week later.” All forms of meetings are supported by Topical, for example 1-on-1 sessions with colleagues and operational meetings. It’s important to note that for LinQuake, everything revolves around actions: “We don’t document everything that’s discussed but focus on the actions. The actions are consistently followed up with the software.”

The result

Another significant advantage is that everything discussed can be easily found. Dave reflects on the difficulties of searching for information before using Topical: “With Topical, everything is centralized and easily searchable, much better indeed.” Since LinQuake started with Topical a few years ago during the pilot phase, they have also been closely involved in the entire development of the tool: “I’m glad that we, at LinQuake, can make a contribution. There is truly something happening with the feedback. That’s gratifying because it’s certainly not taken for granted.”