Business minds and technical talent, in one team.
Lab522 is a solutions-based consultancy based in Manchester city centre, with a satellite office near King’s Cross in London. We hire smart people who understand how businesses run and smart people who understand technology, and put them in the same team, so the people who work out what you need are the people who deliver it. We work with established UK businesses: mostly manufacturers, distributors and others where the operation is the business.
Businesses are sold products. What they need is a fix.
Nobody running a manufacturing or distribution business wakes up wanting a new IT system. They want orders to flow without re-keying, month-end to stop depending on one person, and a customer’s security questionnaire to stop being a crisis. The market answers those needs with products, sold by people who will never have to run them.
We start from the problem and stay responsible for the result. Most consultancies hand over a plan and leave. Most software companies build what they were asked for without asking why. We do both, in one team, so the advice is grounded in what we would have to build and run, and what we build is shaped by what the business actually needs.
We also think a business should own its technology. Too much of it is now rented from a handful of very large, mostly American, companies, at their prices and on their terms, with your data on their servers. Open source puts that control back with you, and we build on it wherever we can.
You deal with the people doing the work, not an account manager. The people who work out what your business needs are the same people who deliver it and run it.
Who you will be working with.
Matt Walton
A software engineer with over ten years’ experience. Four years building large systems for government, where reliability, security and audit trails are non-negotiable, then four years as chief technology officer of an AI start-up in the United States, taking it from first prototype to a seven-figure business.
Tim Vaines
A serial founder who has built and sold two UK payroll software companies, with hands-on experience of taking business software from early stage to acquisition.
Former consultants, experienced developers and cyber security specialists.
Around them is a team of people who have advised businesses for a living, people who have built and run software at scale, and people who keep it secure. They work on the same problem at the same time: nobody hands a plan over the wall for someone else to deliver.
We are hiringTalk to us about what is getting in the way.
A half-hour conversation with a founder, no slides and no obligation. Tell us how you run today and where it hurts, and we will tell you what we would do about it.