A Chat with Melissa Hendry, MD and Co-Founder at Global Technical Services Provider: ddroidd

Established in November 2020, ddroidd is a global technical services provider. With offices in Leeds and Romania, we now employ more than 110 staff, delivering technical projects for clients and agency partners.

As experts in agile digital transformation, complex software development, and application management, our approach to software development, enhancement, and support has seen us build and manage the websites for some of the world’s biggest brands.

We live by our ethos of “big enough to specialise, small enough to care”. Our vision is to be the partner of choice that our clients rely on to determine, drive, and deliver their technical roadmap. We’re a people-first company, which means that we are open, transparent and place our people at the heart of our decisions with a core focus on health and wellbeing.

We’re also passionate about sustainability and educating people on the environmental impact (power consumption) that inefficient websites, digital platforms, and technical architecture play in consuming unnecessary power. We developed a pioneering A+++ framework, which is a dedicated approach to software development and system architecture that cuts information reprocessing by up to 90%, reducing a website’s energy consumption, improving reliability and responsibility as well as cutting costs. It is hoped this approach will become industry standard one day.

In our first year we exceeded our £3m turnover target and are on-track to beat our second-year targets to double in size.

Today we employ 110 staff, we’re focused on being an employer of choice, employing, developing, and growing the best technical experts within the industry.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
ddroidd was born from a shared love of technology and service delivery. The founding team each has more than 14 years of leadership experience in the IT industry, and we were confident in our ability to build and deliver our vision together. We knew we wanted to disrupt the market in three ways:

1. Creating sustainable technology solutions – Many businesses do not consider the role that web applications have on the environment. We knew we wanted to use our platform and technical expertise to educate and deliver energy-efficient, sustainable software.

2. Being a people-first employer – We wanted to create a company that champions our people and their happiness over profits.

3. Championing women in tech – With two out of the four founders and directors being women, it was important for us to champion diversity internally and to push ahead of the market average for women in IT and in senior leadership roles. We hire with diversity in mind, ensuring a cross-section in the disciplines we build and actively promote opportunities to develop leadership skills and mentoring opportunities. Our current male/female ratio sits at 46% female out of 110 employees, where the market average sits around 26.2%. We’re proud of the statistic and continue to push toward the 50/50 percentile.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
We actually started our business in the middle of the pandemic. It obviously came with its challenges, but as it forced the world to embrace a more digital landscape, it also created opportunities for us as a business.

While there were no face-to-face meetings or networking events, we maximised online team time and events, set clear objectives and roles and leaned on previous relationships when looking for new clients and staff.

As a global business, that epitomises technology, we were well versed in doing our day-to-day online. We have become fully remote working and opened hubs in key areas for our staff that want to be in an office environment. This has opened up a whole new talent pool for us that is not restricted by location.
 

What can we hope to see from ddroidd in the future?

 
At ddroidd, our vision is not only to be the technical partner of choice for our clients but also the employer of choice. We will continue to invest in our people, their development and provide support to help them with their career path. We will expand our team benefits with a core focus on health, wellbeing and experiences to ensure we attract and retain the best talent in the industry.

As a people-driven business, we don’t focus on what our team can do for our business but what we can do for them. This approach leads to a much more motivated and productive team that work hard to achieve outstanding results for clients.

As part of our second-year targets, we will look to double our headcount to 200 staff, with an average recruitment of 10 per month. This will enable us to have the capacity for new projects and growing clients.

Our A+++ framework, which provides businesses with a benchmark to reduce the carbon emissions of their digital platforms, has already started to demonstrate results for clients, with some seeing cost savings of up to £12k a month on hosting bills. We will continue to develop, refine and promote our sustainable technology that will hopefully become industry standard one day.

To maintain our established reputation as a global technical services provider, we will continue to increase our technical capabilities by expanding our technical disciplines into Java, Python and Big Data analytics. We are also working towards achieving ISO27001 (information security) certification.

As a truly global business, we will look to increase our presence to five geographically independent locations with two new offices.