“I was trying to put more black CEOs on the map,” says Bobby Idogho
(Picture: Handout)Bobby Idogho confidently names three reasons why he quit corporate life as a management consultant to start his own digital agency.
“I knew how key creativity was in tech, and realised that most businesses’ customers are incredibly diverse, from different socio-economic backgrounds, and ethnicities, and neuro-diversities.
“But if you have a team of middle-aged, white Oxbridge graduates, they’re only going to think like middle-aged white Oxbridge graduates. I wanted to do something differently.”
He also wanted to address the skills gap: “I aspired to establish the kind of consultancy that I, personally, would want to work in.”
There was also a more personal reason why Idogho decided, at 25, to set up his own firm.
“I was trying to put more black CEOs on the map,” he says.
“I am almost unique to the business world today, which I feel needs to be addressed.” Idogho had joined Deloitte in Ireland on its tech consultancy team straight after graduating from Trinity College, Dublin.
“I felt the clichéd thing of being a small cog in a big machine — in such a large organisation it’s hard to really feel like you’re making an impact.”
Idogho decided to move to London, first working at a small digital agency, then teaming up with co-founder Oliver Smit to set up Radically Digital.
“I wanted to solve clients’ digital problems more creatively,” he says.
“It takes a blend of people with strong technical skills and strong emotional intelligence. A lot of organisations have people who have been doing the same thing for decades — when our young whippersnappers come in to tell them what to do, we need to guide the business rather than dragging them to the right solution.”
Idogho and Smit initially pooled £10,000 a month to hire their first employees, winning their first client, broadband business Community Fibre, six weeks after starting up in 2019.
“We were initially hired to build a customer-facing website, a £30,000 piece of work, but then it grew — we ended up running most of their technology, growing from a team of five to 20.”
It’s still a client; other big names including OVO Energy and Wagamama have helped Radically Digital’s turnover grow from £400,000 in its first full year, to £3 million by the end of 2021 and £5 million last year.
“Our target for 2023 is £8 million — rapid growth for a company in this industry,” Odogho adds, “but once we get into a new client, they tend to expand our remit quite quickly.”
Today Radically Digital straddles two headquarters, in Shoreditch and in Lisbon, “because demand for digital talent in London was becoming volatile,” Odogho reports.
“Part of the reason for the massive wave of redundancies [in tech now] is due to VC-backed tech companies paying unsustainable salaries for employees in the UK. We knew a correction would come at some point but until that happened, we wanted to have two pools of talent, which allows us to still tap into the European market after Brexit.”
Odogho is now 29; launching a business in his twenties came, the entrepreneur reports, with some hurdles: “You are constantly starting from a position with no previous experience when it comes to things like opening a second office.
“But being young suits the nature of the business we are in — I have the freedom to take the big risks necessary for innovation.”
Now he wants to expand Radically Digital across the UK, and into Africa.
“We did a digital transformation project for a large Nigerian fintech, which led to plans to launch an office in Lagos and run a boot camp there too to polish up tech talent to join us as consultants.”
Four years after starting the firm, Odogho laments that in London’s tech ecosystem, “it’s still a very small pool of black founders that are leading the charge across the UK”.
“Radically Digital is as diverse as it is without quotas or initiatives to actively pull in certain groups, but just because the best people for the job tend to be diverse, and we have diverse interviewing panels which weeds out unconscious bias,” he says.
“Rather than trying to persuade others to try to change their companies, I’m tackling the problem [of under-representation] by building the company that I want to see, and show how well it’s doing.”
Radically Digital | |
Founded: |
2019 |
|
Staff: |
56 employees, 12 contractors. |
Turnover: |
£5 million |
Headquarters: |
Shoreditch and Lisbon |
