'I'd won entrepreneur of the year, but my friend said we should be doing much better'

MARK RODEN, THE entrepreneur behind promising mobile payments software company Ding, thinks that the business should be growing at a much faster rate than it is at the moment.

He added that while the Dublin-based company has expanded recently, he is hopeful that it can growing to 10 times its size in the coming years.

Founded by Roden in 2006, Ding makes software that allows people to transfer mobile phone credit to one another.

The company has expanded quickly over the last three years and employs 200 people with regional offices in Miami, Dubai and Barcelona, as well as its Dublin headquarters.

It doubled in size last year after buying US rival iSend, and the combined company now expects to have revenues of about $500 million this year.

However despite the growth – which helped Roden take home the prestigious EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2014 – the 56-year-old has revealed he is still dissatisfied with where the company is at the moment.

Ding CEO Mark Roden

‘Gutted’

Speaking at the recent Deloitte and Enterprise Ireland CEO conference in Dublin, Roden said the realisation hit home after he met a friend who was head of a publicly listed company in the UK.

“We met in London not so long ago and said, ‘How do you think we’re doing?’.

“And he just kind of looked at me and he said, ‘Do you know what? I think you should be a lot further on than where you are’. And I was absolutely gutted.

“I thought – awards, half a billion dollars … even though I wasn’t saying it, I thought that we’d done really well. I was kind of hoping that he would say that, but he didn’t and I was left shattered.”

Roden later told Fora that he “completely” agreed with the tough assessment, which came around a year and a half ago.

“We were well into profitability, but it’s all relative. What’s important is how do we become really, really big. Once you get big scale, then you can have big impact,” he said.

Mark Roden won EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2014

“I don’t see why we can’t be 10 times larger. That can be in different measurements, not just in revenues. If we execute right and we get the right talent engaged, that’s possible.

“The challenge is how do you balance building the existing team but also bringing new talent into that?”

Bonuses

Finding and retaining skilled staff is one of the top issues for Irish tech companies at present – and Roden said Ding was no different.

The firm has been offering some recruit signing-on bonuses in an effort to tempt them in, which the CEO admitted wasn’t “a universally successful formula”.

“€4,000 or €5,000 to an engineer who’s earning €60,000 or €70,000, where they net €2,000 out of that bonus (because of tax) may not swing it.”

Roden said that rather than cash bonuses, offering to put money towards extra training or education for employees often proved to be more effective.

“It would have more of an impact if we are able to say to them, ‘Look, we’re going to put all of that towards developing your career further’. That’s more personally relevant to them.

“But it’s not just about incentives, it’s about having really interesting and challenging work.”