A COMPANY which pioneered the idea of advising businesses on winning awards is spreading overseas.

Boost Marketing, which opened in Bournemouth last year, is to help French companies add trophies to their cabinets.

Director Echo Ilott hired native French speaker Paula Serre to represent Boost France, believing only someone with French as their first language would have command of the subtleties involved in doing business there.

Boost Marketing company, which was founded in Brighton in 2006, now employs 22 people in Gervis Road, Bournemouth, and had long been planning to go international.

An expansion to the US is in the business plan.

“We were so busy in the UK it had to go on the back burner,” said Echo.

“We knew it was inevitable because we lead in the UK by miles in terms of win rate. We knew we were at the top of our game and if we were to continue to grow, it was inevitable we would go abroad.”

The team researched the market and discovered the French business world was as full of award schemes as the UK.

“We spent a lot of time looking at how many awards there were around, what the market was like, what the form of those awards was like,” said Echo.

“Once we had the data, that’s when we decided to bullet.”

She said it was important to understand business etiquette in France, where the tone tends to be more formal than in the UK.

“We can’t just take our model and apply it for France,” she said.

But the said awards in France were fundamentally similar to the UK.

“They’re looking for exactly the same thing. It’s all about innovation and impact. They’re still asking for evidence. There was nothing there we weren’t familiar with,” she said.

She said she had head-hunted Paula Serre, who studied at Metz in northern France and is experienced in linguistic history, translation and teaching.

“I was right; it worked out perfectly. She can support us with the UK side but ach also can write the French submissions,” she said.

“We needed someone who had a flair for writing but who can think strategically.”

Boost offers a package of services for businesses planning to enter awards, from advice to writing awards entries in full.

It boasts a 40 per cent win rate for clients.