Plans to establish his own, small design practice with a couple of clients didn’t last long – by its second year Daniel Taylor’s metro design consultants was handling million-pound schemes.

Daniel Taylor, head of Metro Design Consultants and one of JPMorgan’s list of the 100 most influential black people in Britain, makes a compelling point: ‘It’s interesting when businesses say they’re equal opportunity employers because, if you are an equal opportunity employer, you don’t need to say it. It should come naturally.

According to Taylor, positive discrimination isn’t necessary for building a diverse workforce: if you’re open to everyone, even those with unusual surnames, diversity will take care of itself.

Taylor established Metro Design Consultants in 1998. ‘It was one man and a car, operating from my house and a designer operating from his house,’ he says. But Taylor describes himself as having ‘tunnel vision’ when it comes to his career, a fact he attributes to his upbringing. ‘I didn’t come from an affluent family’, he says, ‘but my parents [both of whom migrated from the West Indies to London in the Fifties] made me who I am today – they believed strongly in education.’

After going to grammar school he went on to study interior design (‘It was either that or become an airline pilot’). ‘I was interested in design, particularly shapes and forms, and my speciality has always been furniture. I’m very interested in classic pieces and how they’ve been used and can be reused,’ he says.

After graduating from the Royal College of Art, Taylor went to the USA where he worked his way up to becoming European MD of office furniture manufacturer Allsteel. It was great position to be in at the age of 30, but he had already begun to dream of starting up on his own. ‘After that, I decided I wouldn’t go and take on another big job’ he says. The plan was to have a small company with just a couple of clients, but by the second year the company, now nine strong, was designing million-pound schemes. A technophile and self-proclaimed ‘gadget freak’, Taylor, and his fast-growing company, were in the perfect position to take advantage of the dot-com boom. But despite a very healthy turnover, three years after starting Metro, it dawned on him that the company had just three clients. ‘I realised that, if those markets change, Metro could actually have a big problem, so I expanded it to capture more clients.’ It worked. ‘To date, we’ve had 2,000-3,000 clients.’

One of the problems often associated with running a relatively small business is a high staff turnover. ‘People sometimes come into the company with the intention of using at as a stepping-stone’, says Taylor, ‘but they often find that it’s where they want to be after all. You could work for us and you could be working on a 4,000 sq m project, but if you work for one of our competitors you could end up designing doorknobs all day, every day.’

‘We all work on the job, we all share ideas, and this really helps designers to learn as well as helping the company retain experienced people. We haven’t made anybody redundant in this recession. In fact we’re actually growing.’

A broad range of very successful office projects in the past decade includes the Conservative Party headquarters at Victoria, offices for the trade union UNITE in Glasgow and a good portion of the FTSE 500.

So what gives the Metro its edge? ‘Metro doesn’t have the ego that some of the larger practices might. We’re not precious in terms of design, to the extent that it overwhelms the client,’ says Taylor. ‘I’m very comfortable sitting with the CEO of a company and understanding what they have in mind.’

I was going to ask Taylor what the office of the future would look like, but before I can, he shows me (on an interactive smart-board, of course) the plans for Metro’s new headquarters, to be built in a site beside the existing office in Southwark, south London. It features a huge touch-screen movie wall, with graphics and sound and a revolving table on which plans can be projected. Designs are constantly being honed, perfected and tested to make sure that each element serves its purpose perfectly.

Coming back to the issue of ethnic diversity, Taylor is keen to point out that there is still a long way to go for the architecture and design industry.

He says he feels honoured to be named as one of the 100 most influential black people in Britain, but points out that there are still very few black owners of design and architecture businesses in the UK. But as well as building a successful and ethnically diverse company himself, Taylor also sits on the board of the Creative and Cultural Skills Council, which, among other things, is helping people from the nation’s most deprived communities establish a career in the creative industries. ‘My job is to keep the board righteous’, he says with a smile.

This article was first published in FX Magazine.