Business as usual? Business: yes – as usual: hardly!
Heike’s approach to running a company is anything but conventional. After earning a degree in translation, she began her career at Siemens, where she joined one of Germany’s largest in-house translation departments at the time. A few years later, she veered off this traditional career path and set off on her own. She joined forces with her brother, Udo Leinhäuser, with the aim of opening an innovative translation company – one that also met the translation needs of her former employer.
Throughout her life, Heike has viewed challenges as opportunities. When others stick their head in the sand, she scans the horizon. The best example: When Siemens closed its in-house translation department in 2010 as part of a carve-out, she soon found it a new home at Leinhäuser Language Services. Talk about going the extra mile for customer retention.
Nine years later, Heike put her deft entrepreneurial touch to use once again. To remain a step ahead of dynamic market conditions, she pursued a merger with a partner translation company – successfully. In 2019, the colleagues from Macklin GmbH become full-time members of the Leinhäuser team. Claudia Link-Beier, the owner of Macklin, became part of the top management trio at Leinhäuser, a team that also includes Heike and Birgit Albrecht-Klein.
In daily business operations, Heike is known in particular for her ability to come up with unusual solutions. Her primary focus is always people, be it the team or the customer.
Heike is a passionate entrepreneur and translator. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that she was elected president of the EUATC (European Union Association of Translation Companies) in 2019 in addition to or precisely because of her work at her own company.