In 1991, brother sister entrepreneurs Shawn and Shohreh Khorassani made a decision that changed their careers and in fact their lives forever.
This month marks the 30 year anniversary of Prestige Network, so we wanted to take this opportunity to delve into the origin of Prestige.
The first thing to know about Prestige Network’s history is that it did not start as the Prestige that you all know and love now. Let me take you back.
Frustrated and Alienated
The 80s were a time of great technological advancement, but for Shawn and Shohreh Khorassani it marked a decade of frustration.
Frustration with the lack of control in their lives. Frustration with the shortsightedness of their bosses. Frustration with not being able to follow their passions.
So with the 90s coming round the corner, they decided to make a change. They decided to make Prestige Network.
In fact, Prestige Network was almost called something else.
“We were reaching a place where things were not moving so well for us. I got a contract for software development. And in order to invoice the company, you needed a name. So when I started, after a day or so, I remember exactly where I was when I made the phone call to buy a company, so that we can start invoicing. They went through the names on the phone and there were two names that I liked. One was Series19 and the other one was Prestige Network. So we talked about it and went with Prestige Network.”
In the beginning, Prestige Network was set up as an entity for invoicing contract work that Shawn and Shohreh undertook. They used the extra free time to come up with a business of their own.
In 1990, Shawn had met with a representative for a multilingual word processor and it was love at first sight.
“You could say that it started at Hilton in Park Lane, where I saw this guy who showed me the box of Universal Word multilingual word processing. I fell in love with the box . And that’s where the idea of starting a company, with this product as something we can market and sell, came from.”
They decided that Shohreh would give up her contract work and on 1st April 1991 the Prestige Network that we know now officially started.
Shohreh started full time marketing and promoting The Universal Word multilingual word processing software with Shawn supporting her in the evenings and weekends! 6 months later, Shawn left his job too and the 2 of them were fully behind the growth of the company!
A New Beginning
From then on, Prestige Network worked to help businesses find suitable language software for their needs. Universal Word was just the start of it.
Over the years, Shawn and Shohreh signed deals with Rosetta Stone as well as numerous other language specific software solutions and found success in the UK, wider European markets and beyond, selling to 45 different countries.
Along the way, they moved their offices out of the house they shared with their mother and into a service office.
“Having started from the utility room, we went to a service office in Swallofield near Reading, a beautiful building. We had a room half the size of this boardroom and were paying around a thousand pounds or so.”
Onto New Horizons
By the turn of the millenium, Prestige Network had already established themselves as a leader in the multilingual publishing space, but this was not enough for the Khorassani siblings.
They sought out different opportunities to expand and never turned away new ventures. They worked heavily with both Microsoft and Apple, and even sold Arabic versions of Microsoft back to Microsoft themselves. Prestige Network were also making a name for themselves outside the language space, with companies looking to them for their marketing and PR.
In May 2001, the labour party approached Prestige Network to translate their pledge cards into five different Indian languages. It was at this time that the siblings sensed where the future might take them.
A year later, the translation services had seriously started when one of their Public Sector clients mentioned how he saw the growth in face to face Interpreting and asked Shawn if Prestige was able to provide interpreters to cover a variety of different languages. As always the answer was a definite “Yes” and in August 2002 Prestige Interpreting dept started. 2 years later Prestige had a six figure contract from MOD and it sent 40 Dari Interpreters to Brunei.
