In 2002, my son Francis suggested I employ a friend of his who was finding it difficult to get a job in Germany as he didn’t speak the language of the country. We met the young man and the idea made sense as it would then have been very convenient to have someone represent us in Germany as the numbers of students coming to Malta from Germany was quite considerable. Being my son’s friend, we treated this young man as a trusted friend.
All seemed to go well, and we held on to our other German agent for the next couple of years. Regrettably, this ended as we were told that it made no sense for the German company to act as our agents since we had our own Elanguest representative in Germany. I was very saddened by this as it was an excellent and honest agency which we lost, and we had worked with them for many years.
In 2005, our representative decided he would start his own language agency in Germany but still work exclusively for the adult Malta market, keeping the name Elanguest and acting more or less in the same way as he had done as our representative. As an agent he was receiving up to 30% in commission which was pretty generous.
In November 2011 he came to see us at the school and we happily handed over the latest up-date database as, in our opinion, he was still one of our trusted team. He thanked us and went out to dinner with our son.
Come February, our son phoned us to point out that the German version of our webpage now re-directed instantly to another name altogether. Our school details were still there, students, school, everything but under this new name. We phoned him immediately and were told that he had opened his own school in Malta and would be gradually moving his clients to that school. We insisted that, whatever his plans were for the future, we wanted our German website returned to what it had been called. His response was to refuse point blank and our partnership dissolved instantly. We instantly lost 60% of our market which we had allowed him to expand to and the ability to market in the countries he had worked in since we were barred from the domains we had allowed him to set up in our name.
After many months of wrangling and many legal costs and letters from students in Germany, we managed to regain our domain Elanguest DE and start again to market the school.
At first, I was heartbroken at such treachery but both my wife and I realized that God was in control as He had always been in our lives and everything would be for the better if we put our trust in Him.
My sons were so upset on our behalf that they rallied to our rescue. Thomas took over the school and developed a completely new approach in marketing and ensured that the academic side was specialized and improved upon. Francis, our other son, who was living and married in Belgrade, helped as he had programmed English Forums which had 50 million visits per annum. Michael developed his own language website to attract enquiries and students to our school and Peter, our youngest put forward some clever thoughts and worked with his older brothers to implement a new type of agent database.
Money was scarce, huge losses had been made in those first few months in 2012 and trying to recoup was an incredibly hard job. Slowly though, Elanguest was making its way back and pulled even two years later.
We have forgiven those who caused us so much harm and we are grateful to God for answering our prayers. We prayed our sons would show some interest in the school and take over. This they have done, and things are moving in the right direction. Praise God. His ways are incomparable. We trust Him and over two years, God has met our need. We entrusted everything into His hands and feel sure He will look after all our needs.