“When I was 11 or 12 my dad had a bad stroke that left him physically disabled and we had to teach him to talk again,” said McKay. Years later, when he got the chance to work on assisted speech technology, he “jumped at it”.
In 1994, Antrim-based McKay started out developing and selling multimedia technology. The opportunity to specialise in speech-enabled software arose when he presented some speech synthesis technology to a hospital group. Speech therapists greeted the software enthusiastically, recognising its potential benefit to people with disabilities. The concept centres on having an electronic voice read out the text shown on screen, including links to other pages.
The next step for McKay was to ask his father for some land to secure a loan of £100,000 (¤148,000) to develop communication aid software for people with disabilities such as motor neuron disease and cerebral palsy. But it wasn’t enough. McKay had his £100,000 overdraft but no sales. At one stage he even feared he might have to sell the land. “It was very close to the wall at one stage.”
McKay turned to Delta Partners, a venture capital fund, for assistance. With the firm’s finance and guidance things began to look up and by 1996 McKay was selling the software into universities in the UK. McKay then began to develop software for people with dyslexia, with English as a second language and with poor literacy. Later that year the company changed its name from Lorien to Texthelp. Today it is the market leader in Britain for dyslexia and literacy solutions and enjoys Microsoft gold partner status.
It wasn’t long before Text-help expanded into America. It now claims to have customers covering all the states in the business, government and education sectors.
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In March this year McKay launched an ambitious plan to target the American e-government market. Only 3m American taxpayers filled in their tax returns online last year. With its Browsealoud software, Texthelp hopes to raise that percentage significantly. McKay said the company is already “cash positive” after six months.
Texthelp now employs 40 people. The majority is based in its Antrim office. “We want to try to create as much employment as possible in Ireland,” said McKay.
Texthelp has annual turnover of ¤5m, almost all of it on an export basis. Growing at a rate of 35% a year it earned profits of £870,000. Having invested heavily, “2005 should be a fantastic year for us”, said McKay.
This kind of success doesn’t come easily and sacrifices were made from the start. “I lived at home and had no social life until I was 25 years old and I worked seven days a week until 10pm for at least five years,” said McKay. He was always on call and still is 18 hours a day. “The biggest risk was with the land,” he said.
The challenges facing Text-help are the size of the American market and changing people’s attitudes to using online services. “The biggest challenge was to get the product right and now that it is, we have to target the massive North American market. The e-government stuff is a new concept and getting people to buy into that is a challenge.”
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McKay said that the right people, advice and endurance are key. “You’ve got to invest in people. Try to recruit smarter people than you are. When you’re talking about funding or entering a new market, get a mentor and listen to them.”