Cycling and purpose: The entrepreneur who rides his way to business growth

About 15 years ago, John Readman was taking part in a cycling event from Paris to Geneva – and he was struggling. He was, he confesses, more of a rugby player than a cyclist and a headwind was getting the better of him. Just as he was considering giving up, a fellow cyclist pulled alongside him, gave him some energy bars and said to him: “Follow me, I’ll get you there.”

That person was Bonamy Grimes, one of the co-founders of the Edinburgh-based travel website Skyscanner. He would go on to help Readman set up his marketing businesses as a co-founder and investor in 2019. That is businesses, plural.

Readman is a very busy man, as a quick glance at his LinkedIn profile will confirm. As well as leading the digital marketing agency Ask Bosco, he is also actively involved in two other companies he founded: another marketing business called Modo25 and corporate cycling events firm Ride25, which he founded in 2014.

Ride25 focuses on round-the-world cycle adventures for business leaders, which are a chance to explore the world, network and get fitter, while also raising money for the charity 1moreChild (more on that later).

If there’s one thing that connects all these businesses, it’s Readman’s passion for cycling. “If you look at my angel investors,” says Readman, “the majority of them I met on the bike.” Many of his colleagues are keen cyclists too and their headquarters in Leeds is not a bad place to be based if that’s your passion.

These days, Readman is concentrating most of his efforts on Ask Bosco and Modo25. He spends around 75 per cent of his time on the former because that’s the one currently scaling the fastest.

Running all these companies is a lot of work, but Readman knows what keeps him motivated and how to retain balance in life. “I like running at 100 miles per hour all the time,” he says.

So how does he do it? “You have to recruit super-smart people who you can then delegate to and empower,” explains Readman. All the key people in his marketing companies are people he met and rated during his corporate career.

He built up an A-team wish list, then recruited them so they could ride together in business. The underlying trust from their shared history allows the companies to move at speed – like a peloton.

He has another recommendation for multi-tasking business people. “It sounds fancy for a start-up, but I have a full-time executive assistant to organise my time, which is the best money you can spend,” says Readman.

She books travel for him, reads his emails and organises his meeting calendar. “It’s about valuing your tasks,” says Readman. This system, he says, allows him to focus more time on the “expensive tasks”.

Pivoting on an idea

The idea for Ask Bosco came from working as commercial director at Summit Media, where he oversaw growth and revenue. The company built a digital marketing forecasting tool for Argos that could predict metrics including ad spend and return when investing in advertising on Google.

It’s a big problem for lots of companies, explains Readman: how to monitor the effectiveness of digital advertising spend and get the best return. The big question is: “Where do you spend your next pound?”

Sometimes brands rely on their ad agencies for this information, but they often struggle with the metrics too, he says. “If you ask Google, they will say, ‘Give us more money.’ If you speak to Facebook, again they will say, ‘Give us more money!’ It’s complicated, but machine learning can help.”

The tool Readman and his team built for Argos only really worked for companies with big budgets and inventories, but Readman saw the potential to build a similar tool for SMEs, which had the same needs.

“I thought, there’s a product in here,” Readman recalls. He knew that small companies could feel overwhelmed with reports from companies such as Shopify, Facebook or Google and needed a helping hand.

Ask Bosco organises all the data into a dashboard that can be configured and personalised without any coding knowledge. Employees can also interrogate the data in a conversational way using chatbots, which is where generative AI comes in.

Early on, his team recruited data scientists with PhDs in areas such as machine learning to help build the tech in-house, mainly for predictive modelling around ad spend. Ask Bosco has gone on to win recognition for its work, gaining prestigious grants and loans from Innovate UK, for example. Its clients include companies such as AllSaints and Cult Beauty, but also many digital marketing agencies.

Making charity central to your business

Both Modo25 and Ask Bosco are committed to investing 10 per cent of their profits in a charity based in Uganda called 1moreChild. “A lot of businesses talk about purpose: it’s on their website or in their annual company statements,” says Readman. “But we wanted to put it at the core of what we do.”

Once again, the connection is explained by cycling. Readman’s business partner at Ride 25, Rob Hamilton, had a friend called Harry who was working in the charity sector in Uganda. He became frustrated at what he saw as the inefficiencies of the big charities working there, so he set up a grassroots organisation supporting 280 children through an orphanage.

Modo is the name of one of the children at the orphanage and Bosco is the man who runs the 1moreChild charity in Uganda – so these personal names are embedded in Readman’s businesses as a constant reminder of their purpose. Around 70 per cent of the teams he works with choose to donate part of their salary to the charity, while they also hold fundraising events.

“I want something in my life that has a broader purpose than just making money,” says Readman. That’s the belief that has driven him to integrate both charity work and cycling trips into his digital marketing businesses.