Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Andrew Radcliffe, co-founder and CEO UK of Spyrosoft, the global technology services company. Having held senior IT roles at, amongst others, Siemens and Ordnance Survey and as Digital Advisor to the UK Government, Andrew determined to fulfil his ambition of starting his own thing spotted a tension in the market between technology providers and businesses. Spyrosoft was founded in 2016 in both the UK and Poland by Andrew and three colleagues. Their aim, simple actually, to provide faster, cheaper, innovative digital transformation. They’re now one of Europe’s fastest-growing specialist technology companies serving more than 200 global clients across industries such as automotive, healthcare and life sciences, robotics and geospatial services too. It’s great to have you here. I love meeting people when I haven’t heard of the company and then I go in and I go, “Oh! Oh wow!” I mean back when you set this up in 2016 with your co-founders, could you have imagined in your wildest dreams – if technology enthusiasts dream like mad people like me – could you have imagined it would be this?
Andrew Radcliffe
I think no, really. We dared to dream, we had an aspiration, we tried you know to paint that picture of what good looks like but it was, I mean in our wildest dreams, we wouldn’t have thought we’d get to where we, where we are today but we had a plan and we worked hard and had a bit of luck and things have worked out quite well really.
Elliot Moss
Just make it sound like walking, I went to get the bus and then I got on the bus and I arrived at my destination. Fifteen hundred people give or take.
Andrew Radcliffe
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Fifteen countries. Fifteen offices, sorry. Eight countries, with a plan to have around three thousand people in the business within the next sort of three years.
Andrew Radcliffe
So, actually, just to correct you, it’s about twenty different cities now in nine countries.
Elliot Moss
Oh wow, keeps moving on, even since this morning.
Andrew Radcliffe
Absolutely. The rate of growth is fast.
Elliot Moss
I mean, but I mean joking aside, you know, you set this business up then and it has dramatically…
Andrew Radcliffe
Yes, it has.
Elliot Moss
…exponentially grown.
Andrew Radcliffe
Yeah, that’s right. I mean we started in 2016, in the first year we had I think twelve people and then in 2019 we had approaching four hundred people and it’s just scaled up and up since then. So, yeah, one thousand five hundred people as we are today.
Elliot Moss
I’m pleased I got that bit right.
Andrew Radcliffe
You got that bit right.
Elliot Moss
So, tell me what, in business terms not technological terms, technology terms, what it is that you actually do and give me a couple of examples. I read some amazing stuff about kelp and I read some amazing stuff about maps and Covid and skin disease and the like. Just, just in, so that I really get a flavour of the benefit of the thing.
Andrew Radcliffe
Absolutely. At its roots, Spyrosoft is a technology services business. So, we have real technical experts, deep technologists in very specific areas that really, really understand how to create, you know, sort of best in class, innovative technology and what we do is we work with our customers to help them bring their maybe digital change or maybe their new products or their innovation to life. That’s the intention of it. So we’re a trusted partner, helping hands that come to work with them together, to build these sort of new technologies and these new solutions to real world problems so…
Elliot Moss
And do they have the idea of what they want to get to or do you say, “Well, you could do that”?
Andrew Radcliffe
It’s a bit of both. Like, they have a starting point. Sometimes it’s well rounded and it’s you know, they know exactly what they need and that’s fine, we can help do that. Sometimes it’s an idea, literally, and it can be in an entrepreneur’s mind if it’s a completely new business but a lot of the time it’s, it’s a two-way conversation. We want to have a robust conversation to get the best outcome so, even if the customer’s intentions are fairly well polished in their view, we still will challenge that thinking and maybe add in a bit of extra sort of innovation if, have you thought about this technology? Have you thought about this way of doing it? And that, that gives a greater outcome.
Elliot Moss
I was teasing you before, I got to the point of saying so, what is it precisely that, what’s the benefit of what Spyrosoft does for its clients? Just give me a couple, Andrew, a couple of quick examples so that we get a flavour of, of, of those things.
Andrew Radcliffe
Sure, no problem. So I think we do a lot in geospatial. So geospatial is location based technology and that comprises looking at data really that could come from a satellite, could come from a UAV, a high altitude vehicle like an aeroplane with a highly powerful camera capturing data in different ways so, imagery in this instance. And what we do is we take that data and we can glean from that information certain things like, for example, in sustainability, looking at carbon footprints, looking at where emissions are coming from, we can help narrow that down, that search and we can identify problem areas so, looking at kelp beds for example, in the seas, looking at cities for hotspots and really using that information for good and that’s what we can do and we can work with that data…
Elliot Moss
Like Superman.
Andrew Radcliffe
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Who’s got, who is able to look through things, like x-ray vision but for land.
Andrew Radcliffe
Like, exactly, really powerful insight, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Amazing. Yeah. Brilliant and then just one more. I’ve read something about lockdown actually and some stuff that you did at that time.
Andrew Radcliffe
We did, we did, that’s right, during the Covid times, yeah, we did some simulation, some data modelling, looking at how the spread of Covid would move from city to city so we can help the State prepare for that and deploy you know resources and, and try and stay one step ahead of that expansion, so that was very much a data project, a data simulation modelling.
Elliot Moss
So cool. And look you yourself are obviously rather steeped in the technology, I found out that the Amstrad that arrived in your house when you were probably, how old? Ten or eleven or…
Andrew Radcliffe
I think it would be thirteen/fourteen.
Elliot Moss
Thirteen/fourteen. The Amstrad, a computer, if you’re not familiar with an Amstrad, it is one of the older computers, a bit like a Sinclair ZX81 which was my computer of choice, I had no choice obviously, but that’s what I got. But tell me about what it triggered for you and why now sort of forty, almost forty years later you’re in this business, this is what you do. What was the magic?
Andrew Radcliffe
Yeah, that, that was a real moment for me personally. I remember my dad came home with this Amstrad CPC464, it was the keyboard with the cassette deck built onto it. You remember, maybe some of the listeners will remember those and it was like magic.
Elliot Moss
And it never used to load up. I mean, Football Manager, you used to put it in and plug it and hope that it would load and every one in every nine times, it loaded.
Andrew Radcliffe
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
You could hear this funny sound.
Andrew Radcliffe
All the squeaking sounds, yep, yep. So, but it was like magic to me, it was so addictive and I remember I bought some of the magazines at the time, which were really teaching you how to code and it was Basic was the language and I’d spend hours going through that magazine, typing in the instructions into the computer, you know and pressing ‘Go’ and then debugging it, getting it to work and really trying to understand how did that happen and what could I then do with that information. So I did things like personal projects so, I can remember one, and it’s a funny link to geospatial which we were just talking about where I drew a map of the British Isles and I worked out how to create the different pixels on screen and highlight those in different colours and draw the shape of the British Isles and for me it was like those little bits of insight into different activities, into different projects that really drove me to learn more and more, so I took O-level computer studies off the back of that when I turned sort of sixteen and then really that gave me the spark to try and really broaden my outlook on technology.
Elliot Moss
And just describing that, that, that visualisation of the British Isles, I can see it and I’m going that must be cool because one often associates the understanding of technology and coding and things with huge amounts of logic but what you’ve just described is something highly creative. That juxtaposition, is it a juxtaposition or is it just actually, you are a very creative person who happens to be logical?
Andrew Radcliffe
I think, I think to be a software developer you need to have an element of creative about you, you need to think outside the box. It is a very logical rule based endeavour but actually to give those instructions, you need to be thinking wider, you know how do I do this in different ways, solving problems and sometimes it’s a mathematical problem, sometimes it’s you know where to position things on the screen and you as a developer, need to bring all of that together to give those instructions to the computer.
Elliot Moss
It’s really annoying when you meet someone very clever, who’s also very creative, and that’s my Business Shaper today, it’s Andrew Radcliffe, co-founder and UK CEO of Spyrosoft, go look them up, they’re doing amazing things. Much more coming up from him in a couple of minutes. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, which can be found on your podcast platform of choice. Mishcon de Reya’s Ashley Williams and Michael Rose, a senior associate at DRD Partnership, discuss how companies can navigate their AI strategies.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast, drumroll, dah dah, and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. Maybe I should have done the drumroll there, but anyway we don’t mind. My guest today is Andrew Radcliffe, he’s the co-founder and CEO UK of Spyrosoft, the global technology services company. We were hearing before about the good old days of getting into coding and building things and all that. Life obviously then moved on and you go and do, you know, proper grown-up jobs Andrew, in big companies, really big companies and then you hit a point, this is what is always interesting to me, what precipitates the bit before THIS, and the ‘this’ is, you decide to do your own thing. So, you are mid-forties, which is sort of, you know, I meet people that start in the twenties, some people in the sixties, it’s kind of a little later than some. What tipped you over? What made you think, “You know what, I’m not going to work for someone else, ever again”?
Andrew Radcliffe
So, yes, it was a key moment really in my life. I was working at the time for Ordnance Survey, which is the UK national mapping agency and I had an incredible opportunity to create effectively a business within a business. Ordnance Survey needed to innovate, they, they, paper map sales were in decline and the rise of the new sort of Google Maps and other providers were really coming strongly and Ordnance Survey needed to create a digital solution to meet that and I had this opportunity to effectively create from a blank piece of paper, a digital engineering function inside that business and that opportunity allowed me to think really broadly around culture, around technology choice, partners, you know the whole ecosystem of building out a very new delivery capability but inside a government company and I had this opportunity and started work, me, Employ One, on Day One and added my sort of team, chose those technologies, put agile working into this. For anybody who may not know what agile is, agile is a set of behaviours. It’s where people work together very transparently, very collaboratively and work in an iterative fashion towards very well-defined goals and we started working in this fashion and it proved really powerful because the results and the software that we were building were visible, every two weeks there was a visible, almost tangible outcomes.
Elliot Moss
Here’s where we’re at. Got to share it and have a look and go, “what about this?” and everyone went, “what about that?”.
Andrew Radcliffe
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
And off you go and then you iterate again.
Andrew Radcliffe
And you iterate more and more.
Elliot Moss
And you love doing this basically.
Andrew Radcliffe
Absolutely.
Elliot Moss
And then, and then how did it go into, “Do you know what, I’m going to do this for myself”? Because once you’ve established that bit, it’s kind of obviously you’re enjoying it but very different thing to then say, “I’m now going to go and get clients. I’m now going to build my own thing.”
Andrew Radcliffe
So, I’ve always had a little entrepreneurial streak in me and I’ve, I’ve…
Elliot Moss
Like a dirty secret.
Andrew Radcliffe
I… yeah, a bit like that. I just, I feel like I don’t want to be restrained in my working environment.
Elliot Moss
Where was that from, Andrew? Where’s that come from do you think?
Andrew Radcliffe
I think well, in my mid-twenties actually, I went overseas, I lived in the States. I lived in Florida. I went there, just a set of golf clubs and a laptop under my arm, literally, on the plane and I had a job working for Siemens, just north of Orlando and it was a nine month contract, it turned into five years and it was me on my own, in a different country, building technology and from that I learned so much about you know looking after myself, my own personal growth, but also from a career context, you know meeting new people with different cultures, looking at how they go about their daily life at work, the different ways they do things and so on and so on, and I think that sort of independent streak really stuck with me from that point on.
Elliot Moss
But just, and that’s brilliant and I just, I’m intrigued though, to jump on the plane with a computer and your golf clubs at that age, that’s pretty ballsy stuff, that’s a, a brave move. Can you, if you will go back just very briefly because I’m going to bring in Charlie Parker in a minute, because that’s a natural thing to do, if you, if you very briefly go back to that moment, where did that come from, that gumption to just go, “I’m going to go now”?
Andrew Radcliffe
I just, it was an opportunity. I see opportunities and I’ve always lived my life by if opportunities come to you then you should try and grasp those and what’s the worst that could happen, you know, you stop and you change direction.
Elliot Moss
Just now jumping forward to the moment of setting up the business, so this, the Ordnance Survey sort of bit works, you’re doing what you need to do and then you say I’m now going to go into this fulltime. What tipped you over into that state?
Andrew Radcliffe
So I saw a lot of success at Ordnance Survey that we really created something quite amazing. Delivery of great technology, there were some awards and things that were won at the time, it was a real success and I’ve always been in my career, I think I’ve always been a builder, you know that’s the nature of a software developer and once it’s built, I’m looking through really for the next thing and I think what drove me then was, well I’ve created this now and I was in my mid-forties and, and I decided well actually, I think I can do this for other people. This was so successful and it worked so well.
Elliot Moss
So, who was Client Two?
Andrew Radcliffe
Well, so…
Elliot Moss
Client One, I guess, actually.
Andrew Radcliffe
Yeah, well first client was a company called GeoPlace which is in London, the City of London. So we set up the company with some trusted friends, we were all really, you know we were experts I guess in our specific domains and pooling those people together with a drive to be successful, to make this work, because we all took risks setting the company up, you know we left good jobs, we had a conversation with our wives and so on that, you know, this is what we want to do and we had this vision and it was just about making it work, you know, the option of failing just wasn’t there, we were very single-minded and it was about finding, finding those customers, setting up those teams and just doing what we do best and that’s building that technology and getting on with delivery.
Elliot Moss
And finding the customer that was going to pay some fees, that was going to lead you to be able to put food on the table, was that easy?
Andrew Radcliffe
It wasn’t easy, no, but what I think, one of the sort of lessons I think I would pass on to people maybe listening is, if you have an idea for a company, make sure you tell everybody about it. So, the power of your personal network, getting a business off the ground, is really significant and I made sure that other people I knew that worked in technology that probably had some challenges maybe around innovation or lowering costs or access to software engineers, their talent, whatever it may be, to sort of share those concerns or issues or challenges and through that discussion with my personal network, we were able to identify opportunities and they, those opportunities became real customers and that’s kind of how we got going.
Elliot Moss
Amazing. And now here we are, you’ve grown this company, it still sounds like it’s very values driven, I’ve listened to you talking about a happy person delivers better work and that will probably chime with pretty much everybody. What have been the, if you could isolate one or two really big inputs into why we’re sitting here talking about your successful business now, just give me, give me those, top two only, what would be the Andrew secrets?
Andrew Radcliffe
I think our company is a people company, you know, it’s a services business so it’s all about the people and the behaviours that they have so, you can teach technology to people but you can’t really teach the behaviours so, we hire based on behaviours of people and sure, we want to make sure they have, you know, technical competence but it’s about behaviours and the relationships those people have with those end customers. So that has enabled us to really scale the company, I think, you know, taking that stance and that way of working also breeds happiness off that success so, people like to be recognised for the quality of work that they do, they like to feel part of a team and really playing on those behaviours brings all those things naturally to, to the experience of coming to work and…
Elliot Moss
I read something about also this strong team mentality thing, would that be the other bit? So, it’s all very well, you’ve got the right people, I know you’re based here on I think it’s called the Silicon South, Bournemouth, who knew that Bournemouth would be called the Silicon South but there it is, Poland which is, as people will know, a fantastic place for high level, very high skilled technology people, community, and this team bit must be, you know, talk to me just a, just briefly about what you mean when you say “strong team mentality”. Beyond the obvious.
Andrew Radcliffe
Sure. And it comes back to those agile values, agile behaviours. So, so when you work in an agile team as it’s called in the software world, it’s all about working together to a common goal. Transparently, you hold each other to account, everybody knows what everybody is doing in that team, there are daily reviews amongst the team members to show the things that have been completed or outstanding or are they blocked, in which case those are problems to address. So it’s a, it’s a very day by day approach and everybody is communicating in the team so it’s a very open place and by understanding that approach and taking that approach, it breeds that iterative nature of delivering something and I think the customers really like that because it, they can see the product almost appear before their eyes and it’s touchable and they have direct input into it. In the old days of software development, you used to take the requirements, go away, maybe two, three, four, five, even six months or more later, you would come back with the product, you know, dah dah, there it is, here is the product and guess what, the customer goes, “well actually, I didn’t want it, you know, green, I wanted it blue. I wanted this button, you know to say this different thing” and you know, it’s too late, now you’ve got a finished product, you’ve now got to go back and change which is really expensive to do and time-consuming, why not address those things much earlier in an iterative fashion along the way.
Elliot Moss
You make it sound so simple but I know it isn’t. Final chat with my guest today is coming up, it’s Andrew Radcliffe just in case you didn’t catch that before. And we’ve got some music from Kokoroko, that’s in just a moment.
Andrew Radcliffe is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. You’ve talked about where business has got to and you talk often because your clients need this, they need to have their problems solved, in simple terms. What are the problems that your business has to solve in order to, to get to the next stage, to grow, because people talk about growth and they think that intrinsically that’s a good thing, it isn’t necessarily so. Why do you want to grow and what’s going to stop you growing?
Andrew Radcliffe
So we have some quite aggressive growth plans that are publicly published. We’re one thousand five hundred people today and we want to double our company’s size within the next few years. So that is a significant, you know, amount of growth in a relatively short amount of time. The way that we do it, you know, is the pattern that we’ve followed always so, we, we look for centres where, you know, engineers are bred so, we look at the technical universities, we look at where the sort of populations of these people are and we make sure we’re present in there, we go to the events, we make sure that our brand is recognisable to those, those communities of people.
Elliot Moss
Where are they? Just give me a couple. We’ve mentioned you are in nine different um…
Andrew Radcliffe
Sure, I mean the obvious ones of course are London and Manchester and so on in the UK but you know we’re a global business so we have to think outside of the UK too. So, major cities, looking at the good engineering universities because out of that you get spin out companies, you get those people really wanting to progress in their careers. So we make sure we’re present in those areas. Acquisition of clients of course drives everything else so, revenue comes in, that allows us to invest and hire those people and you know open up offices in other locations. In the UK specifically over the next few years, you know our headquarters is in Bournemouth but of course now we’ve opened…
Elliot Moss
Haven’t heard that before actually, Andrew, those words put in the same sentence but that’s cool isn’t it, I mean, in a, and just a quick one on that, why? Why Bournemouth?
Andrew Radcliffe
Bournemouth is, is home to me, I live just outside Bournemouth. One of the ambitions I had right at the start was that, almost like a legacy, I want to have a presence in my home town for our company, which will be like a lasting mark, employ local people, put jobs into the local communities, build some great technology from Bournemouth and put Bournemouth on the map as a sort of a place to be, not only for the beach and the sort of lifestyle aspects that you get in that part of our country but also that it can be a place that a technologist can have a great outdoor, active life but be able to connect with the right technical communities, to be able to innovate, to be able to use their skills to the best means. So that really is kind of a legacy, a lasting mark that I always wanted and now we have a reasonably significant presence now in Bournemouth, the brand is growing and hopefully becoming more recognisable and hopefully, you know, one day when I do hang my keyboard up, there will be a lasting mark there.
Elliot Moss
So finally, these senses of great skill, high skill from the universities and the spin outs as you mentioned, that’s a part of it and the new business you talked about, is there anything else, I mean this sounds like, that sounds like just a I’m going to do this and you’re going to keep on going. Is there anything that’s going to stop you?
Andrew Radcliffe
No. We’re very single-minded about this and we, we haven’t really talked about the way the company is funding, it’s all organic growth and so we reinvest into the business and that really has helped us keep the focus, you know that we’re spending the profits on the company and that reinvestment and that fuels the, the focus of what we’re doing. We had one acquisition along the way, I should say, we had, in Poland, Better Software Group joined us a couple of years ago, they were about two hundred people in size when we made that acquisition so, I think acquisition will be part of our plan as we go forward but it’s all about hiring people, winning customers, you know maybe pushing more into the UK public sector than we are today but the plan really is to just keep growing and that’s, that’s what we’re going to do.
Elliot Moss
And is that the joy? Is the joy just the whole thing?
Andrew Radcliffe
Yeah, I love it. I have to say, I love it. What drives me really is that building the technology, solving business problems through technology, that’s what drives me on and technology as we all know is moving so fast, you know, there’s going to be a new app you know out every day and the new iPhones coming and so on and so on and it’s becoming much more accessible. AI of course is a big buzzword, everyone’s talking about it and we’re all scratching our heads about the best ways to deploy it ethically and Spyrosoft is right at the heart of that story. We have huge experience with data, working with data and data feeds AI, you need the data to train the models and we’re at that centre of that story so hopefully we can guide the growth and penetration of AI into different industries, to help with people’s day jobs, to accelerate how efficient they are and, and when we go from there.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great to chat to you, thank you and I’m pleased that you’re a human, I mean I’m very, a big fan of AI but I think the human in front of me has, I very much enjoyed listening to you. And you will also be choosing, you will be choosing your song and you will be telling me and it won’t be the AI, it will be Andrew Radcliffe, what is your song choice and why have you chosen it.
Andrew Radcliffe
Thank you, yes, so the classic, Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World. Personal reasons for that choice. 21 years ago, I became a father at that point when that song was being played on the radio so, lots of fond memories and that actually, was this weekend 21 years ago.
Elliot Moss
What a Wonderful World from Louis Armstrong, hardly needs an introduction does it. The song choice of my Business Shaper today, Andrew Radcliffe. “I see opportunities” he said but it isn’t just about seeing them is it, it’s about grasping them and that’s exactly what he’s been doing. “I’ve always been a builder.” Again, another key characteristic of founders. And if you have an idea about a business, tell everybody you know about it. Dead simple but boy, should everybody do that too. Great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.