By James Heffernan -- Daily Staff Writer

In 1979, Kathleen K. Diamond, armed with a master's degree in French, walked into the Washington offices of Berlitz, a language instruction company, in search of a job.

"In those days, when you studied a language, your horizons were fairly narrow," she says. "You were going to teach."

But Diamond, who also is fluent in Spanish, was not particularly interested in working with children. After completing her master's, she was encouraged by her professors to continue on the track to a Ph.D. and an ivory-tower post in the world of academia.

"I had a pause," she recalls.

Diamond began accepting students for private instruction, which led her to Berlitz.

The company was impressed with her credentials, and offered her a position teaching French. But on the way home, Diamond could not understand why the pay was so much lower than what the firm was charging students for its services.

"I said to myself, 'What happens to the money?'"

That question proved to be the entrepreneurial spark behind one of the country's most successful language interpretation, translation and instruction companies.

At the time, a women's entrepreneurial movement was gathering momentum, and Diamond, along with other like-minded females, met at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington for a series of seminars on small business ownership.

"Being the good student, I wrote down everything they said."

Diamond soon developed a business plan for her company, and she already had a name in mind: Language Learning Enterprises.

"I liked the 'Enterprises' part, and the 'Language Learning,' well, that sort of encapsulates what we do."

She debated whether she would first need to recruit students or teachers. She decided on the latter, and put an ad for instructors in the Washington Post.

Diamond interviewed about 200 teaching candidates in a coffeeshop in Old Town Alexandria.

"Only two people asked me why I was interviewing them in a coffeeshop," she remembers.

With a full staff, the next task was to find clients. It occurred to Diamond that the federal government would be a logical place to start, so one day she walked up and down Connecticut Avenue, asking the various departments' procurement officers whether they had a need for language services and informing them that her company planned to bid on their next requests for proposals.

The U.S. Information Agency — now a part of the State Department — was the first to bite on the offer, but first their representatives wanted to tour her facility.

Diamond did not panic. She went to one of her favorite churches in the city, St. John's, located near Lafayette Park across from the White House, and asked for permission to rent out their classroom space during the week. The pastor obliged, so Diamond invited the feds to tour the rooms. Despite some reservations about the lack of furniture, they awarded the contract to LLE.

Still, as a woman, the road to entrepreneurial success was not exactly paved. It was difficult, she recalls, not to be discouraged by the word "no."

"In the beginning, I heard a lot of 'she's crazy,' not only from prospective buyers, but also lenders. It wasn't so much that men didn't want to work with women, it was that they didn't know how."

On top of that, the concept of a private firm providing language services was relatively new in the early 1980s. But Diamond pressed on, and by 1985, the company began leasing its own space. By the end of the decade, it had moved into document translation, and in the 1990s, it added a 24-hour over-the-telephone interpretation service to its portfolio.

In addition to her titles of president and CEO of Language Learning Enterprises, Diamond is a former officer of the National Association of Women Business Owners. In 1999, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Femmes Chefs d'Entreprises Mondiales. Currently, she serves on the board of directors of the Center for Women's Business Research, and she recently served as a corporate ambassador to Morocco.

"The advancement of technology has provided an avenue for me, my company and other entrepreneurs who desire to follow their own dreams."

* Contact James Heffernan at jheffernan@nvdaily.com