Calum Smeaton, 53, founded TVSquared in 2012 to use technology to help advertisers understand if their campaigns worked. He raised more than $35 million in funding and led it as chief executive to revenues of $20 million and a team of 120 before selling the business to the US group Innovid for $160 million in March. After the first lockdown he moved with his wife Rosie and their two border collies to the Isle of Tiree, a five-mile-long island in the Inner Hebrides, from which he ran the business for two years.
I spent my life on a plane
When we started the business I lived in Los Angeles for a while. And we now have offices in New York, Munich, London, and Dubai, as well as the head office in Edinburgh. So I was used to spending my life on a plane. Then March 2020 came along. We were living in the city centre of Edinburgh at the time and were nine months into having two new border collies. With lockdown the city lost a lot of its benefits.
We started looking in June that year at houses in East Lothian to stay close just in case the office came back, but there was nothing on the market. Rosie, my wife, suggested moving up to Tiree and renting. We had bought a plot of land in Tiree three years prior, having been visiting for ten years. It had taken forever to get planning permission to build a modern blackhouse.
We had never thought about moving up there full-time. It was always going to be that Rosie would go up there for six months and I would commute where I could, and we would live in Edinburgh for the rest of the time. We flew across on August 9, 2020 into rental accommodation.
The phone signal had been awful
Three years before, if I went to Tiree for a week my team would hate it because they could never get hold of me. You would have to go to certain beaches with your hand out the car and you might get a signal if you were lucky. Getting emails took hours.
Advertisement
Then they put up an EE mast and there is a Vodafone mast on the neighbouring island, and that has transformed the connectivity. So now you get 4G and it’s absolutely fine.
When we first moved up I didn’t actually tell the team. I thought: “Everyone is doing Zoom, no one is going to know, let’s see what happens.” We had fewer wifi problems than anyone else. People in the central belt of Scotland were losing connection and we were fine. So I told them. It really did change my ability to do telecommuting.
My wife has her own law business, with 12 to 14 clients, and she realised the same thing. No one minded where she was and she could work where she wanted.
Without Zoom and everybody else being in the same boat I don’t think we could have done it
When we did open up the office, I would go across, stay there for a couple of days and fly back. The youngsters want to be in the office. Last July we moved into a WeWork space on George Street. It’s flexible and it’s a great working environment. People appreciated us doing that.
The world keeps changing so it would be stupid to make hard and fast rules about the number of days working in the office. My own view now is that we will see more and more people go back to the office for two to three days a week.
Advertisement
But for a lot of people, going back to five days is just not going to happen again. For those who want to enjoy living in a different place, it is no longer going to be detrimental to your career.
Island living is easy
Rosie and I both kite surf and paddle board and suddenly we had all that available to us, compared with my previous life of being on a plane at least two weeks a month. When you suddenly drop a transatlantic commute you get a lot of time back. It was fantastic.
I could take the dogs out and enjoy the amazing beaches and weather. It’s always in the top three sunniest places in the UK. It is known as the sunshine island. The weather comes in from the gulf stream so you have these amazing Caribbean colours in the waters, the beaches are white sand. That said, you don’t always get Caribbean temperatures and it is windy.
The technology allowed us to continue to run the business the way we wanted to. It was a blessing. We started the build in April 2021 and went for solar, with batteries and a converter. So we will be fully off-grid. We were keen to do that for environmental and practical reasons, avoiding the power cuts that can happen in winter.
Winters can be difficult
In the summer, flights are no problem at all. There are two a day, 40 minutes to Glasgow. So it would be a two-hour door-to-door trip for me to the office in Edinburgh from Tiree. The benefit of a small island airport is you can turn up pretty late.
Advertisement
But the airport doesn’t have the electronic landing you need if it is low visibility. The planes can get turned around. The ferries are a bit more challenging. It is a four-hour ferry and then it’s a three-hour journey to Edinburgh, so a full day of travel. The windier it gets the more difficult it is for the smaller boats to dock. Last January, February and into March you are talking about one or two ferries a week, which is a problem as we only have one shop on the island. It does an amazing job, but things can get tight.
We first got approached in August 2021 about selling the business
At the end of last year, I got special permission from the US embassy to fly to New York, for the first time in almost 18 months, and went out in early October. A lot of deals did get done during the pandemic, and the investment bankers and lawyers were used to it. They were remote but I wanted to do it face-to-face. When you are selling a company, cultural fit is really important. Since we struck the deal with Innovid I have stepped back from full time. I am taking some time off now. Kite surfing is what’s next.
Calum Smeaton was talking to Richard Tyler, editor of Times Enterprise Network
