UNLOCKING POTENTIAL

winner Martin McKay, Founder and CEO of Texthelp, is passionate about using technology and data science to help people in education and in the workplace.

Q: Have you always had a business head on your shoulders?

Martin McKay (MMcK): I always had summer and weekend jobs when I was growing up and was always trying to earn money, but a er university I decided to work for myself. I have never been to a job interview. I was born on a farm near the village of Upperlands in Co Derry. When I was young my Dad had a pretty severe stroke. He lost the ability to communicate and use his right arm and leg. at got me exposed to disability and also to the impact of someone not being able to make themselves understood. at is when I learned rsthand about some of the barriers that can exist in the world for people with di erent sets of abilities.

Q: What inspired you to set up the business in 1996?

MMcK: At that time assistive technology was not broadly available. Most people were unaware that assistive technology even existed at all. In those days most written communication was on paper. My Dad couldn’t communicate or access information or services without help. Until then he was a very driven and independent man. He remained driven, but lost a lot of independence. I know he didn’t enjoy having to depend on others for communication and o en people were making assumptions about what he wanted to say. I believe that we all deserve to live and communicate with as much independence as possible. I decided to work hard to make a change – and I knew that technology held a possible answer.

Q: What would you say is the secret of Texthelp’s success?

MMcK: e 360 people who work at Texthelp are what make it successful. Our people care about making a positive impact on people’s lives. We work hard to understand what our customers need and make products for them that are easy to use and deliver a real bene t.

We are constantly pushing to advance our technology and are investing in big data, learning analytics, machine learning and natural language processing. Always working on new ideas, our commitment to innovation has helped us stay ahead of the market and deliver products that are simple, accessible and help to deliver inclusive classrooms and workplaces. For example, when Google introduced Chromebooks in 2014 we were rst to market with a special education product and in 2016 were named as Google’s Technlogy Partner of the Year.

Q: Can you outline your global growth strategy to date?

MMcK: ere are four vectors of growth in the business. e rst is expanding into the underserved markets that we operate in with our existing products. For example, we have achieved almost 20% market penetration in the US and we believe we can double that in the coming years. We have 11 global o ces now and half of our business is in North America.

e second is product-led growth. We have good relationships with our existing customers, and understand their needs and can grow our existing customer market by introducing new products. irdly, mergers and acquisitions have allowed us to establish a global presence with market-leading products in the UK, US, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Australia.

Finally, we believe that the potential of the workplace market is signi cantly bigger than the education market. Employers are starting to value neurodiverse talent and nally understand that there are lots of incredibly bright, intelligent and driven dyslexic people who can thrive in the workplace with a little support. We are proud to be working with partners such as EY and PwC to help build a more inclusive working world.

Q: Where do you expect to go from here with Texthelp?

MMcK: Texthelp is a pretty exciting business to be working in at the moment. We made a few acquisitions over the past two years in Norway, Denmark and the US. Integrating the businesses has been really interesting. Our acquisitions have given us access to more technology and we plan to roll out some great new features across the product range as a result.

I believe we can achieve huge growth in the markets that we currently operate in. I think I am most excited about our workplace market. Since we released a workplace version of our core product Read&Write in