Co-founders Mark Shields and Matt Spry setup Roda with one mission in mind, to create a tool that empowers business owners to effortlessly streamline their strategy. Through live updates, comprehendible data visualisations and a platform that your whole team can access, Roda is enabling teams to spot issues and stay agile.

We caught up with the team to learn more about their journey so far and plans for the future ahead.

1 – In your own words, what do you do?

Roda is a platform that helps organisations create and deliver their business strategy better. It uses the power of the flywheel effect to enable leaders and their teams to simplify their strategic plans and build momentum together. 

The Roda flywheel shows the repeatable steps an organisation must take to achieve their goal – whether growth, social impact, or better operations management, for example. Key measures for each step are then tracked so that teams can see the progress they are making or where they need to improve. 

Both of us have worked as strategy consultants for the last 10 years and have been using the flywheel to help our clients deliver their strategic objectives for the last 3 years. It struck us a few years ago; why are we doing this on spreadsheets and PowerPoints for them, when we can provide a much better service via a SaaS product, at a fraction of the price! 

We worked with Nesta as a capacity development partner in 2020, providing business planning and commercial strategy advice to 30 of their grant recipients of their £6m CareerTech Challenge Fund, who were launching or running EdTech products. This was our first consultancy work focused on the tech scene, and I think really opened our eyes to how we could use tech to augment or in this case replace lots of our consultancy work. 

2 – What’s the most exciting thing about what you’re doing?

Helping our clients to deliver the things that are important to them. 

In our experience as consultants – and the evidence supports this too – most strategies do not fail because the organisation has diagnosed the wrong problem or created a poor plan. They fail because they are not executed properly.

Many organisations struggle when their plan hits reality. Roda is a direct response to this problem and is built round a clear philosophy of what it takes to deliver strategy effectively:

  1. Alignment across all teams around a common goal
  2. Shared understanding of priorities and performance
  3. Clear accountability for delivering outcomes 

3 – What are you most proud of so far?

We have really focused on making Roda as easy to set up and start using as possible, to make sure that users see value quickly. 

It would have been easy to dive into the weeds and try to build everything we thought would be useful. However, keeping close to our customers, getting great advice from our advisors and a positive challenge from our tech partner Gravitywell have helped keep us focused on building a product which retains integrity to our three key principles.

4 – What have you found most difficult about being a startup?

Making tough decisions about product features and scope when you are in the initial stages. We have such a strong vision for Roda that we can be impatient about building all the features we want to help our customers.

Juggling time 50/50 between managing our consultancy days jobs – to contribute to the mortgage and food for kids – alongside building Roda has meant long hrs and a fair amount of travel; but we’re doing something we love, so it’s not so bad! 

5 – What would you do differently if you started now?

In practical terms, we’d hire sales and marketing resource earlier! Marketing and sales are the oxygen for your business and the importance of getting this right for a startup like ours cannot be overstated. 

We’d probably have engaged with the regional startup & tech networks earlier too. We are getting loads of value out of these relationships. 

6 – Where do you think you’ll be in 12 months?

We are aiming to get Roda in the hands of 100+ customers, and to have our core team in place. This will allow us to generate sector benchmarks from the use of the product to feed back into product development and add even more value to our users. 

7 – What tools/people/services/organisations from the cluster have helped you most?

Our tech partner Gravitywell has been invaluable in constructively challenging us to ensure the philosophy we have for Roda is articulated in the product. Their depth and breadth of expertise and experience has been an enormous help in keeping us focused on making the right decisions at the right time. 

8 – What’s the best thing about the Bristol & Bath tech cluster?

How easy it is to navigate the cluster is, how welcoming and positive people are and how much goodwill there is around. That’s a reflection of our region. It is great to be part of a community filled with so many interesting and energetic people doing exciting things!

9 – Who will you be nominating for a SPARKie next year?

Gravitywell

10 – Where can we find out more about you?

On our website here and follow us on LinkedIn

Shona Wright

Shona covers all things editorial at TechSPARK. She publishes news articles, interviews and features about our fantastic tech and digital ecosystem, working with startups and scaleups to spread the word about the cool things they're up to. She also oversees TechSPARK's social media, sharing the latest updates on everything from investment news to green tech meetups and inspirational stories.

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