Our Story

Blaine & González, LLC is several things:

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*An Amazon-Certified Desktop, Remote, and Print Publisher.

*A US Federal Translation Vendor (GSA since 2015)

*A 100% Fully-Remote Company since before the Pandemic made it cool

*Based in a house outside Woburn, Massachusetts, USA

*A woman-owned, minority-owned business owned and operated by husband & wife team Dr. Margarita Corral-González of Salamanca, Spain and Mr. Justin Pickering of Winchester, Massachusetts, USA.

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The "B" is B&G stands for Blaine - Justin's Father's middle name.

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Justin's Dad was a Waterford Crystal Sales Executive in the 1990s. His Mom was a middle school English teacher at McCall Middle School in Winchester, MA where Justin learned Spanish from Gigiola Panico, his 8th grade Spanish teacher.

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Like a lot of kids at age 18, Justin felt tired and confined by small-town life. Everybody knew one another and everyone knew one another's business and they were good people in a small place, but Justin knew there was something MORE out there, beyond the boundaries of Winchester.

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So, his mother made him apply to 15 colleges in 1997. but there was only one that resonated with him: Tulane University in New Orleans.

 

After attending Tulane in NOLA and meeting some really interesting characters, being Vice President of his class and being chased past a giant fire truck for telling a story about a fraternity prank gone bad in the school news paper, Justin became a high school teacher in Massachusetts.

 

From 9/11/2001 and the fear we all faced that year, to the football field, Justin taught high schoolers and got told "Those who can't do, teach." a lot.

 

From 2003-2005, Austin, TX was the setting of the story. Awesome Latino graduate student companions, learning about amazing stories by Cortazar, Borges, Cervantes and Dario, just got back into teaching once he had his Master's Degree from UT-Austin.

 

2006: Westford Academy and the Grey Ghosts. A school that sounds private, but it's not. It's public. And Justin was a lacrosse coach, loved running the track with his Freshman team who went 10-1 that year, robbed of a perfect season by a bad call. 

 

2007: Justin was admitted to Vanderbilt University's #1-globally ranked PhD in Spanish Literature at the time. He was excited and thought he was on his way to becoming a literature professor.

 

Little did Justin know that fate would have other plans.

 

2008-2010: Great couple of years working start-ups, helping to raise several million dollars working on key green energy issues, a television project, and being in charge of research and communication in Spanish and Portuguese.

 

When all of the sudden, while teaching in a public school classroom one day: BLAM!

 

The lights go out. Incapacitated and dizzy, Justin looks up and sees the faces of his colleagues standing around him and the shocked, terrified face of the student who had just assaulted him in an unprovoked manner.

 

Nashville Diploma Plus School in Nashville, TN was part of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program aimed at assisting at-risk youth to gain back lost school credit.

 

Justin was soon after diagnosed with PTSD and unable to teach in a classroom again, a job he loved very much, despite the ups and downs, long hours, and low pay.

 

So, unable to work in a traditional work environment, newly-engaged to his wife Margarita who was getting ready to graduate Vanderbilt, Justin said to himself: "What am I gonna do?'

 

That was in 2010 in a little apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts.

 

One, one-page, $25-dollar translations over 14 years has turned into millions and millions of words served to customers like Amazon, JD Sports, the DEA, FBI, 27 public school systems (IEPs for kids with disabilities), and lots of amazing journeys and stories for Team B&G, made up of:

 

Challenge Nyakuritsika

Musab Abdalhadi

Tarek Nahabet

Dr. Margarita Corral

Joey Wehbe

Bryon Pickering (Unofficial Board Member!)

 

Justin can no longer work in a typical work place (even though he worked at United States Postal Service for one year we told him not to!)

 

So, B&G is a company that has no walls, no co-working spaces, no brick, no mortar and only one door: the door with the sign of our original logo.

 

To visit Team B&G's world, click "Play" On the Video below.

 

This is the office of the "littlest, biggest translation company" on the East Coast and also the room that love built: love of a group of friends who became a team and helped an former teacher find peace in a challenging world.

 

Thank you very much for stopping by everyone.

 

I am Justin Pickering, Founder, and this is B&G. :)

 

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