Entrepreneur Sarah Wood on comparing meerkats, pushy women and flash mobs

 

Not your conventional entrepreneur, Sarah Wood previously lecturered in literature at Sussex University, worked at the Old Vic Theatre, managed cafes and run a tutoring business before setting up social video marketing agency Unruly Media. Founded with fellow Cambridge University graduate Scott Button and with Matthew Cooke, who worked with Button at an earlier tech start-up, Unruly was born in January 2006. 

 

Wood explains: "Between us we had tech skills, commercial nouse and the ability to build a team. It was the point where web 2.0 was just breaking and there was a lot of excitement about the social web and how it was going to revolutionise not just information but the way we communicated with each other.”

 

In September 2006 Unruly Media launched viralvideochart.com, the project that propelled the business into the limelight of the social web. She explains how immediately the chart gained traction and showed the team exactly what success looked like. "The Guardian syndicated the content within days, Google was on the phone asking us about our technology and viralvideochart was on the front page of Delicious," says Wood. 

 

Following this, Unruly built the first scalable social video platform and began distributing branded content to media partners across the globe. Working on a cost-per-view business model, brands and media agencies submit their video files to Unruly's RAMP [Real-Time Amplification and Measurement Platform], which then transcodes, tags, and optimises the video content before sending it out to bloggers, app developers and discovery engines across the social web.

 

Now totalling over 1,400 campaigns, Unruly has worked on some of the most infamous viral campaigns from Compare the Meerkat to Old Spice to the Evian rollerbabies campaign, which became the most viewed online ad ever. 

 

With no investors, Wood and the team got the business to the stage it's at today through self-funding. Asked about the challenges and risks of a self-funded business, she explains it helped keep the team focussed and determined. "One of the advantages was precisely the fact that it was our own money – every decision we made we made we did so very carefully," she explains.

 

"With some start-ups, when they have a lot of investor funding, there's a tendency to spend it in places where it's not necessary. We didn't have a fancy office or have any marketers. We were very much a lean start-up with a lean-start-up philosophy. Being self-funded gave us the discipline and really forced us to be resourceful and thrifty and make hard decisions about what we were going to invest our time and money in," says Wood.

 

Situated in Fashion Street in East London, Unruly Media forms part of the community David Cameron labelled Tech City, a technological hub intended to rival the US' Silicon Valley. Wood explains how she had no idea of the creation of Tech City, or that her company was part of it, until approached by Reuters wanting to talk to Unruly about the prime minister’s Tech City announcement. 

 

"The first thing I knew was when Reuters called me up one morning in November 2011 and said 'I'm assuming you're going to the Tech City event, as it's in your building, can we come and interview you?' I didn’t know anything about it, nor did most people in the building as it turned out! 

 

“The Unruly staff conducted a flash mob pillow fight outside the Truman Brewery, which garnered lots of attention as all the dignitaries shipped in from West London were leaving. We got some great exposure; it was free PR for us which was brilliant! But I do feel that at that point there hadn't been much of an effort to include stakeholders who were currently already living and working in the area," says Wood. 

 

However, since then, the entrepreneur believes the government is making much more of an effort to consult and include local businesses in the decision-making around Tech City developments.  She recently attended a meeting at Westminster with minister Diane Abbott to discuss the future of Tech City and how it could be more inclusive to companies in the area and the future of the community. 

 

"Shoreditch feels very vibrant," she says, “but for East London businesses to be taken seriously as global players, we should avoid representing ourselves as a little roundabout, as a small pocket of creative and digital activity. We need to see ourselves as part of a European tech hub encompassing cities such as London, Cambridge, Paris and Berlin. That's the kind of scale that’s required to come up with a plausible European alternative to Silicon Valley."

 

Unruly's success, growing from a three-person start-up to a company now employing almost 100 people worldwide is mirrored by the long list of trophies the team has picked up. In 2011 alone, Unruly Media won eight awards including Growth Strategy of the year at the National Business Awards and three awards at the Chambers of Commerce Awards, including UK Business of the Year and Outstanding Business Achievement of the Year.

 

In October, Wood was personally recognised for her work as a woman in business and won the Fast Growth Business' Female Entrepreneur of the Year award. Quick to attribute the award to the rest of her team, Wood talks of the importance of women in business and how at Unruly, women are promoted as often as possible. 

 

"What is very important to me is ensuring that the talented women in the company are promoted as fast as the guys – making sure that we have as many women in the boardroom and senior positions within the company as we can," she says. 

 

"Despite being a tech company – traditionally a male-dominated work environment - we have a lot of women working with us at senior level, and that's no accident. That happens because we believe a diverse team, with people of different ages and backgrounds, will be a more successful team."

 

Asked why she thinks there are so few companies with women at senior level she explains that within the technology industry, it's partly because of a lack of interest. Unruly Media currently employs just the one female developer following the company's active two-year search to find a woman to fill the position.  

 

She adds: "It's also partly because women are not necessarily as pushy - it's difficult to explain the glass ceiling without falling back on gender stereotypes, which I really don’t want to do, but female employees don't necessarily push themselves forward in the same way and nor do they necessarily have the same opportunities." 

 

"I see a lot of friends around my age – mid 30s – who have great careers in their 20s and early 30s and have to make difficult decisions choosing between family and work," explains Wood. "A lot of them made the family decision and come back to work part-time or have come back to work full-time but feel unable to take on all the additional responsibility and risk that might come with having your own business or being part of a senior management team." 

 

To help bring more mums back into the workplace Unruly accommodates with part-time work and job-share options. The company also has a lounge area and games room to help parents with children off school sick. She explains: "We're committed to doing everything we can to help mums back into the workplace and to help them succeed at the highest level. At Unruly we’ve made the company feel like an extended family.

 

"It's not just mums that face challenges. As a business we understand that we're all going to face difficulties in life and it's important that businesses, wherever possible, can support their employees through those difficult times."