The Outsider Advantage That Changes Everything
Brogan Taylor spent years on Bay Street doing distressed turnaround work, buying broken companies, fixing their balance sheets, and helping management teams rediscover their core value. He worked through airlines, oil and gas giants, newspaper companies, and cross-border restructurings at FTI Consulting before helping take a wealth management firm private. Then, somewhere in that journey, he decided he wanted to own something himself. He looked at over a hundred companies across industries, and the one that checked every single box was a small language services provider out of London, Ontario called Stillman Translations. What drew him in was the sheer size of the sandbox. The industry was naturally global, deeply fragmented with room for both niche players and broad operators, and full of problems that a sharp operator could solve creatively. What he didn’t see coming was that he’d close the acquisition in mid-2022 and watch the entire industry get flipped upside down almost immediately by AI and large language models.
Applying Distressed Thinking to a Healthy Business
The interesting wrinkle in Brogan’s story is that Stillman wasn’t distressed when he bought it. It was profitable, well-run, and had a founder who was simply ready to move on to his next chapter. But the market disruption that followed the acquisition forced Brogan to do exactly what he used to do for troubled companies: strip things back to the core value proposition and build deliberately from there. He kept asking his team one simple question, why do we do it that way, and that relentless outsider curiosity became a genuine competitive tool. What emerged from those conversations was a clear answer. The thing Stillman did better than almost anyone was workflow and process management. They had spent years integrating into the wildly different systems of dozens of LSP clients, building custom processes for each one without losing quality control. That operational muscle became the foundation Brogan decided to build on, what he calls the bedrock of the skyscraper. From there, the strategy expanded into two clear pillars: language accessibility in regulated markets like healthcare, life sciences, education, and legal, and a governance layer covering data security, privacy, and analytics that lets hospital networks actually measure the impact of their language programs on patient outcomes.
Building Integrated Language Ops Without Cannibalizing the Core
One of the more candid moments in the conversation came when Brogan described how Stillman’s digital marketing arm, the Stillman Factory, came to exist. He built it as an internal agency expecting to sell marketing services to their existing LSP and MLV clients. They had zero interest. Rather than shutting it down, the team kept building, and a few years later that content creation capability became a strategic asset in their push toward direct enterprise clients who need multilingual content generated from scratch, not just translated after the fact. It’s the kind of accidental right turn that only makes sense in hindsight, and Brogan is honest enough to credit his team’s perseverance rather than claiming it was all planned. The bigger strategic challenge he navigated was making sure the new integrated language ops business didn’t cannibalize the traditional translation work that still drives significant revenue. His answer was sector focus. By targeting highly regulated verticals where large LSPs and marketing-focused players aren’t typically competing, Stillman found blue sky territory that sits comfortably alongside the core business rather than threatening it. On the MA side, he’s openly interested in acquiring books of business from LSP owners who are ready to retire or who can’t keep pace with the technology shifts, a creative structure that lets him grow revenue without necessarily taking on the full overhead of an operating company.
This is one of those conversations that rewards a full listen because Brogan moves fluently between capital markets thinking and operational detail in a way you don’t often hear from LSP leaders. Episode 246 of the Localization Fireside Chat is available in both formats so you can engage however works best for you. Watch on YouTube if you want the full back-and-forth energy of the conversation, or Listen on Simplecast if you prefer audio on the go.
Robin Ayoub 
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