Sean Taylor on the key to Redwood Technologies' 30 years of success

Sean Taylor says business relationships as vital today as when the company started out 30 years ago.

It started out 30 years ago with two brothers, emboldened self-belief, and a shared strong work ethic, but it was an understanding of the power of enduring business relationships and a considered approach to risk that kick-started Redwood Technologies’ early growth and continues to propel its business forward.

Bracknell-based Redwood Technologies, founded by Sean and Martin Taylor in 1993, is a home-grown tech titan which now employs 500 people, turns over more than £70 million and has operations around the world including the US, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, and Singapore.

Redwood Technologies is the holding company behind cloud solutions provider Content Guru, which uses the group’s cloud platform ‘storm’ to manage mission-critical ‘omni-channel’ communications and integration with customers’ IT systems.

Content Guru’s services are used by more than 1,000 large enterprises in sectors such as financial services, retail, travel, utilities, and the public sector. A mission-critical service example is that storm processes all 999 calls to ambulances in the UK.

Its chief executive, Sean Taylor, moved to Berkshire with his family in the 1970s. He studied at King’s College London where he did a degree in electronics and computer science and then began his career in the early nineties with a fast-growth US IT company at its regional European HQ in the Thames Valley.

The business was growing at an exponential rate and Sean was promoted and offered a post in California in Silicon Valley where the pull of starting out on his own began to gain momentum.

Sean said: “When I was leaving my job in the US, more than 100 people came to my office to wish me good luck.

“They all asked the same questions such as how much money we had (“£20,000”), how many staff (“three”) and what our sales and marketing strategy was (“Some of our contacts have said they’re interested in buying from us”). I think they thought we were mad.”

Sean, who lives in the Thames Valley and is married with two teenage children, said it was the early relationships forged during his stint in Silicon Valley that convinced him to take the plunge and start out on his own.

He said: “We worked really hard and those people who said that they were going to place an order with us did so and some were incredibly generous. It was really fun and the kind of thing you see in a film, working through the night with pizza boxes on the desk.

“One customer placed a £150,000 order with us and paid us cash in advance. We turned over almost £1 million in our first year. Some of our customers from 20 years ago are still with us. One individual has been with five different companies and brought us in as a safe pair of hands at each of those organisations.”

Looking back to the early days of Redwood Technologies, is there anything Sean feels that he would have done differently?

He said: “In the early years we dealt with a lot of older, more canny operators who really took advantage of our inexperience. There are things we sold for a tenth of the price they were worth.

“I developed a product we sold to a customer for thousands of pounds and they resold it for millions.”

Sean says having a safety net and a flexible plan is crucial for people thinking of going out on their own and he recalled what he would do if, after a year, Redwood Technologies failed to turn a profit.

He said: “I had in mind a mental safety net, which was if we were at the end of year one and couldn’t see a path to success that I knew who I would go and work for. We then understood clearly what failure meant and that took away the unknown of failure and reduced that stress.”

Managing multiple personalities and leading teams is crucial to growing enterprises, however management teams often struggle to tame egos and this can have a detrimental effect on growth.

Sean said it pays in the long term to stick with your convictions in management.

He said: “When you say ‘yes’ to proposals, of course you are liked. Dealing with people’s reactions to “no” is the challenging part of the job.

“In many cases the best decision is a crowd-sourced one but sometimes an individual has the best answer and when that’s the case you should not dilute the quality of that solution.

“Don’t shy away from saying no when that’s the right answer but always ensure you can justify why.”

Redwood Technologies is embedded within the Berkshire community with the company, its CEO and staff all giving time and money to charities to improve the lives of people living in the county and beyond.

While giving back is standard practise in the corporate world, Sean and his team approach their charitable tasks with a hunger and veracity.

He explains the poignant reason behind his own personal drive to give back.

“More than 20 years ago, a good friend of mine committed suicide. I know a few people who have done so, however this was something I did not see coming as, on the face of it, they seemed such a happy person and full of the joys of living, so it was a big shock to a number of us.

“From that point onwards, I decided I was going to do whatever I could to make people’s lives better and I have stuck with that for more than 20 years.”

Redwood Technologies has fought to remain ahead of the tech curve and has products which push the boundaries in the Internet of Things (IoT), data management and Artificial Intelligence (AI) spaces.

One area of particular excitement is ‘generative AI’ technologies such as ChatGPT.

He said: “This is going to be a game changer and will drive down the cost of software engineering in a similar way to that we’ve seen with compute power and communications bandwidth.

“Suddenly the ability to communicate with technology in a similar way to that we see in science fiction films feels very close."