Tom Hudson
Independent technology advisor to UK businesses. I help MDs, COOs and CFOs challenge expensive assumptions before budget is committed and fix the foundations that make the decision worth making.
Dexlab
There was nothing in the middle.
If you run a UK business doing roughly £1m to £100m in turnover and you need technology leadership, the options are poor. A large consultancy sells you seniority, sends in a junior to do the work, charges you for both and leaves when the engagement ends. A contractor fixes what you point them at but rarely challenges why you pointed them there in the first place.
Neither is what most mid-market businesses actually need. They need someone who reads the whole picture, challenges the decision before the budget is committed and stays accountable to whether the problem gets fixed. Not to a day rate. Not to a vendor relationship. To the outcome.
"Most big consultancies will get you on a call with a senior consultant to hard sell you, then send out a junior to follow a guide and collect the information. A senior reads it to you very convincingly. Then they leave. You just paid a fortune for a presentation. If all you needed was a presentation you would have already started."
Background
Where the experience comes from.
Enterprise architecture, AI governance and responsible adoption
Managed a £10m IT budget across one of the UK's leading NHS teaching trusts. A 3,000-strong specialist user base within an 11,000-staff estate. Every stakeholder. Every layer.
Legacy server migrations, elimination of technical debt, operational automation and a data-first digital strategy built for long-term scale. I founded an AI Community of Practice inside the NHS, built the governance framework and trained non-technical staff to use it compliantly.
"If I can do that in one of the most controlled environments in the UK, I can do it anywhere."
Cloud architecture and delivery for government clients
Full commercial and technical lifecycle management for public sector clients on AWS and Salesforce platforms. Legacy infrastructure migrations to cloud within strict security-cleared environments. G-Cloud procurement and service design. When security and compliance are non-negotiable, you build differently. That standard transfers to every client engagement.
CRM, data architecture and automation at scale
Volume is a stress test for every decision made before it. What holds and what breaks under pressure tells you more about the architecture than any audit. Most businesses do not find out their data structure was inadequate until they try to grow. By then it is expensive to fix.
Technology leadership in a regulated financial environment
Regulated industries do not tolerate ambiguity. Compliance requirements, audit trails and data obligations are non-negotiable. The discipline that comes from working inside that environment applies to any business facing increasing regulatory pressure on AI, data and information security.
A full rebuild of systems, process and ways of working
Not a blueprint applied from above. The existing operation mapped first, then rebuilt around how the business needed to run. The sequence mattered more than the tools. This engagement is as close as it gets to the work Dexlab does now.
Technology strategy and large-scale change
Growth does not create technology problems. It reveals the ones that were already there. Across several UK businesses in high-growth phases, the pattern is consistent. The organisations that handle it well build the foundations before they need them.
Philosophy
Most businesses are trying to solve the wrong problem.
They want AI. They want the automation that will make the technology budget worth spending. That is a reasonable thing to want. The problem is they are looking at the output and ignoring everything that makes the output possible.
I have worked inside organisations where governance was non-negotiable and where a technology failure had consequences that went beyond a balance sheet. That experience taught me one thing above everything else. The technology is almost never the problem. The foundations are.
Dexlab is built on that belief. Not that AI is overhyped or that technology investment is a mistake. The opposite. Technology investment is one of the highest-leverage decisions a mid-market business can make. When the foundations are right.
Work
A few things to know before we speak.
I do not recommend before I understand.
The audit is not a precursor to a sales pitch. It is where I find out what is actually broken. Most of the time it is not what the client thought it was. The findings come first. Everything else follows from what is really there.
The work does not get handed off.
What I present at the end of an audit I found myself. What I recommend in a sprint I stay accountable for. There is no junior in the background. You deal with one person from the audit to the final delivery.
You can take the findings and do nothing else.
The audit exists to give you a clear picture of where your business stands. If you take that away and fix the problem yourself, that is a good outcome. I would rather you solved it than felt obliged to pay me to do it.
Team
Two people. One business.
The advisory work is mine. The operations, client experience and marketing are Rio's. We run this together. That matters because clients are not dealing with a solo operator trying to do delivery, admin, follow-up and growth alone. The work stays personal, but the business behind it is handled properly.
All audit work, client engagements and advisory delivery. Every finding is mine. Every recommendation is mine. That is not a marketing line. It is the operating model.
LinkedIn →
Marketing, operations and client experience. Enquiries are answered quickly, clients are looked after properly and the work around the advisory is held to the same standard as the advisory itself.
LinkedIn →Name
Named after my son.
Dexlab is named after Dexter. That is the reason it exists. Not as a lifestyle business. As something that has to work, has to justify the time it takes away from him and has to be worth building properly. That context shapes how the business runs and who we choose to work with.
Discipline
The approach is consistent.
I lost 100kg. I did not do it by hoping the outcome would change on its own. I changed the inputs, followed the system and kept going until the result moved.
That is how I approach business problems too. Build the system. Trust the process. Do the work. Foundations first. Everything else follows.