About Nick Redding

What I do now

Today I’m a co-founder of Salience, with Carl Hendy and Edd Dawson. Salience uses a website’s own server and CDN logs to show what Google and the AI bots request, and what the site sends back. Most analytics tools count people in a browser, so they miss crawlers such as Googlebot and GPTBot, which never run a tracking script. The server log does see them.

I lead the technical practice at Salience, including the engines that turn a raw access log into something a person can read and act on. You can see the product at salience.com.

How Reddico began

I started Reddico with my brother Luke Redding in 2012. It began in a spare bedroom, and there was never a set target. We thought we could do things better, and we wanted to see whether we could make it work. I became Managing Director in 2014 and held that role until March 2024. Over that time the team grew to around 40 people, with around £4m in revenue.

Reddico grew quickly. Deloitte placed Reddico 30th in its UK Technology Fast 50 in 2017, with 851% growth, and named it the fastest growing technology company in the South East. Deloitte’s profile of Reddico describes it as founded by brothers Luke and Nick Redding. In 2019 Reddico was 309th on the Financial Times 1000 list of Europe’s fastest growing companies, and in 2023 it won Best Large SEO Agency at the European Search Awards. Those were wins for the whole team, and the full list is in the awards section of my home page.

Running the company differently

In 2017 we thought we had sorted our culture. We had beers, nights out, bean bags and table tennis. Then our internal NPS survey showed four detractors out of twelve people. That was our fault. We had values we didn’t fully live by, and we weren’t running the company in a way that was true to us.

We spent three months writing a manifesto, guided by one question: what’s stopping people from doing their best work? From March 2018 we removed managers and introduced coaches, opened the P&L to the whole team, let people decide when and where they worked, and shared profit every quarter. Leave was unlimited, with a minimum of 20 days a year, and a salary panel voted in by the team reviewed pay twice a year.

Reddico became a self-managed company and, in August 2022, a certified B Corp, with a score of 91.3 against a pass mark of 80. I also started the B Corp meet-ups in Kent in January 2023. There is more in the B Corp and culture section of my home page.

Selling Reddico and stepping back

In November 2021 Reddico was sold to private equity backed Sideshow Group. The Drum covered the news in Reddico joins forces with the Sideshow Group, and the law firm Lewis Silkin published a note, Lewis Silkin advises Sideshow Group on its acquisitions of Access and Reddico. I stayed on as Managing Director until March 2024.

Reddico built its own software, including Lacuna, a platform that tracked how a client site was performing, the Verbis content management system and the free SERP Speed tool. I led the technology side until I stepped back in March 2024.

The time felt right to step back and let the next generation lead. I left feeling that I had achieved everything I wanted to, and I know not everyone gets to say that.

Advisory and board roles

I’m open to advisory and board roles, especially with growing companies that want help with people, culture and scale, or with understanding what Google and the AI bots are really doing on their site. At Reddico I chaired the quarterly board, worked with an external board advisor and led the move to self-management.

If that sounds useful, you can email me at hello@nickredding.co.uk.

Find Nick Redding elsewhere

There are other people called Nick Redding. I’m the one who co-founded Reddico and Salience, and these are my profiles: LinkedIn, X and Crunchbase. My talks and press coverage are listed in the press and talks section of my home page.