Entrepreneur of the Year 2024: Tobyn Sowden is building Redbrick piece by piece

THE KICKOFF: Growing up in Chemainus, Tobyn Sowden had the opportunity to do many of the classic entrepreneurial things kids do. Like mowing lawns, setting up lemonade stands and, um, re-selling garage sale items. “I found ways to buy things at a discount and then sell them at other markets, depending on what I was acquiring,” says Sowden with a chuckle. “I’d have different values in each pocket—a $5 bill in my back right pocket, $10 in the back left, a toonie in the front. Depending on the value, I’d pull one of them out. ‘Ah geez, I’ve only got $5.’ It got people every time: ‘The kid’s only got $5, sell it to him, honey.’”

Sowden would find consignment stores to sell the items at a profit, or he’d fix them up and re-sell them to others in the neighbourhood. His most memorable find? A full piggy bank he bought for $5 that contained $11.27.

Unfortunately, that $11.27 didn’t help when Sowden eventually enrolled at UVic and found himself in a bit of debt after a co-op gig with Ontario Power Generation Inc. So, he started doing internet marketing online to get out of the hole, and ended up making some $50,000 in profit with a credit card and Google Ads. Eventually, he started a formal internet marketing business called RedWillow Media before graduating. That company would get to a million dollars in revenue in about a year.

ACTION PLAN: Sowden joined the executive team of one of his key RedWillow customers, Neverblue Media, before venturing on his own again with Redbrick (the whole colours thing wasn’t intentional, he insists). Redbrick, another internet marketing firm, this time focused on helping software companies get sales and customers, turned out to be a hit. “We grew it to around $30 million in revenue in a few years,” says Sowden. “But it was very volatile. As soon as we couldn’t make [the margins] work we’d have to stop—everything would be gone.”

So he pivoted. Redbrick started building its own software, including Shift, a browser that merges all of a user’s apps and email accounts, and Assembly, a digital publishing tool that was sold to St. Joseph’s Communications in 2022.

Redbrick was then restructured from one company and one service to a group of companies that Sowden and his team acquired, with one executive team that oversees shared services like HR, finance and marketing.

CLOSING STATEMENT: These days, Victoria-based Redbrick oversees a portfolio of five companies, including Shift, video creation platform Animoto, email marketing biz Delivra, small business sales generator Leadpages and Rebase, a browser development platform. Overall, the company has over 200 employees and will hit over $100 million in revenue this year.

For Sowden, the company’s current approach to adding businesses to its portfolio is reminiscent of his past. “It’s a lot like buying that full piggy bank for $5,” he explains. “At some point, you do the math on, ‘What if they’re all pennies?’ You just don’t know ultimately what you’re going to get, but you’re trying to estimate value in some way. It’s not going to be for months or maybe years that you realize there was $11 in the piggy bank.”

Q+A

What’s the best leadership advice you’ve ever received?

Rather than telling someone to do something, leverage  experience sharing and  storytelling to try to give  someone a data point.

Do you have any embarrassing obsessions?

Lego is something I’m into. When my now-wife and I did a whirlwind trip around the world, I said we had to go to Billund, Denmark, to see the original Legoland. I went there and found this workshop area. I designed what I thought was a cool thing and the woman at the front is like, “Wow, impressive.” She gives me a diploma paper that says “starter level.” I go, “What? There’s levels?” I asked her for the top set and built it and now there’s an “advanced” diploma framed in my office.