About

I install the engine room.

I'm Francois - and HudsonRoux is the firm I built to do operations work differently. I've spent twenty-five years inside founder-led businesses - first building them, twice exiting them, and now bringing what I learned to the founders walking the same path. The work comes in a new shape now - the same operator, brought to several businesses instead of one.

What I do has always been the same: I install the engine room. The operating, finance, governance and compliance discipline that sits below the surface of a founder-led business - the part the customer never sees, but that determines whether the business can carry the weight of its own growth.

I work in the trenches, not from a distance. I join your leadership team for a defined period, build the engine room alongside your team, and hand it over running. That kind of work can't be done from outside - it can only be done from inside, with the people who actually carry it day to day.

Where the operator came from

Two businesses. Both from the ground up. Both successfully exited.

I started in IT strategy and operational leadership, then moved into commercial leadership, and from there into co-founding, directing and exiting my first business - a UK SaaS company built and run alongside my co-shareholders, and successfully exited to a strategic acquirer in 2011. Fifteen years of work compressed into one sentence; the truth is that everything I learned about how a founder-led business actually runs, I learned across those years and inside that exit.

The deeper work came next. I joined the founders of a second business at ten people, became a shareholder, director and senior officer - serving as COO and CFO across the twelve years. Across that time we built it from a UK-headquartered scale-up into a globally distributed business with a US subsidiary, a 600K-licence monthly subscription base, and a fully audited compliance posture across multiple international frameworks. Sustained double-digit EBITDA and MRR growth, year after year. I led the sell-side M&A process as the CFO and as a shareholder and director, saw the business successfully through to exit, and then led the post-acquisition integration into the buyer before stepping out to build HudsonRoux.

What changed across that arc wasn't the work - it was the scale and context I did it in. The same disciplines that turned a small founder-led team into a successful first exit turned a ten-person startup into a globally distributed, audit-ready, exit-ready business twelve years later. The disciplines transfer because they're not industry-specific or stage-specific - they're how a business stops being held together by the founder's instinct and starts being held together by structure.

Operations

The system that lets the business run without the founder in every room.

Finance

Built into how I think - not bolted on at the end. 25 years at COO and CFO level.

Governance

Statutory Directorships across two businesses, two M&A processes, UK and US entities.

Compliance

Audited posture across ISO, GDPR, HIPAA, NHS and other international frameworks.

The engine room - four disciplines, one operator.

What I believe
about the work

Three convictions,
built across the arc of the work.

01

Most businesses don't fail for lack of ambition.

They fail for lack of foundations.
Growth multiplies whatever's already there - including the gaps in how the business is held together. I've seen it in businesses approaching exit and in businesses scaling fast - the commercial engine working, the foundations not keeping pace. The work I do is to build foundations that grow with the ambition, not under it.
02

Scrutiny is the real test of an operator, not growth.

In a tailwind, anyone can look like an operator.
The harder question is what's revealed when a buyer's diligence team, a regulator, or a board with new urgency walks into your business and starts looking under the bonnet. Due diligence rewards discipline - not speed, not charisma, not good intentions. The operator who's built for scrutiny is the operator who's built something that lasts.
03

Discipline or duct tape. The founder knows which.

The job isn't to name it. The job is to fix it.
The job is to install the kind of discipline that quietly replaces the duct tape, in a way the founder can feel rather than have explained. By the end, the business runs on structure instead of instinct - and the founder gets back the bandwidth they were spending on the things that should have been running themselves.
What I believe
about leading

Leadership is lived in the moments
your team watches you most closely.

What you model becomes what they learn. The responsibility, especially as an operator inside a founder-led business, is to guide and shape the next generation of leaders with intention - because the team you build during the engagement is the team that will run the business after it.

Outside the firm

Two things that have shaped how I think.

Charitable initiative · 2025

A book that crossed thirteen countries.

In 2025 I led a global community book project - published in 13 countries, with all proceeds going to The Stroke Association. Bringing people together, giving the project structure, and shipping something that lasts. A different kind of operator work. The same disciplines.

Wildlife photography · Africa

Wildlife photography.

The better part of a decade photographing in Africa - precise, creative and analytical, with every shot framed with the end vision in mind. The image you take in the field is composed for the image you'll build in the edit. Holding the outcome clearly in view from the first decision. The same discipline as the operator work.

How to work with me

The engagement shape.

Fixed scope

Engagements are scoped, priced and committed to before they begin - defined start, defined end, fixed fee, agreed outcome. The structure is part of the work: a founder shouldn't have to manage uncertainty about the engagement on top of running the business.

Weekly cadence

Inside an engagement, I work in the room - physically, when distance allows; consistently and embedded, when it doesn't. The rhythm is weekly, not monthly. The cadence is the work.

Defined outcome

By the end, the work is yours - not as a deliverable handed over, but as a discipline being run by your team. No dependency. No retainer-by-stealth.

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