Taking on the role of TechWM – and thereby leader of Birmingham Tech Week – provided cyber expert Andy Hague with an enormous challenge when he joined the organisation at the beginning of the year. But as JON GRIFFIN discovers, he has just the right credentials to meet it.
He’s a highly accomplished figure in Birmingham’s burgeoning tech community – with an impressive CV which tells its own admirable career success story.
Andy Hague might have started working life in a bingo hall in one of the gun capitals of the Midlands – an experience he now looks back on with wry amusement – but he’s come a long way since his days as assistant manager of Gala Bingo in the crime-ridden district of St Ann’s in Nottingham.
He’s founded and been CEO of data security company Cyberfort, which grew into a nationally-renowned market leader with revenues of £24 million, won an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year accolade in his early 30s, has been appointed to key government advisory roles including to the Bank of England, and now he’s CEO of Birmingham’s very own TechWM, a not-for-profit tech cluster firm and key element at the heart of the region’s ever-evolving tech sector.
He’s one of the brains and key enablers behind October’s Birmingham Tech Week, helping cement the West Midlands’ growing reputation as a global hub for innovation, talent and transformative technology as the city prepares to welcome 8,000 attendees, with international delegates from the likes of Korea and Germany.
Hague has achieved a lot by anybody’s standards, but this is a man whose rise and rise up the hi-tech ladder belies a medical diagnosis which acted as a catalyst for a career change of direction to reflect new personal mid-life priorities.
This most self-aware of tech gurus – who might possibly bristle at such a description – hates small talk, would rather address an audience of 5,000 than a five-strong group, and is happy to have left behind the high-pressure world of private equity for a not-for-profit role.
As Hague reflects: “I cannot emphasise enough the shift in change from running a private equity backed business to a not-for-profit organisation – it is two extremes.
“Doing stuff that can have an impact is kind of cool. That is much more motivating to get up for in the morning than anything which is purely based on financial return.”
That switch in career direction followed Hague’s mid-life diagnosis as autistic, which had itself followed his young son Thomas’s own identical medical plight.
Both father and son share the same condition, and Hague can point to his son’s earlier diagnosis as the crucial turning point in his own journey through life, both corporate and personal.
Hague had risen to the CEO role at Cyberfort, the cyber company he founded in 2017 after a rollercoaster career in tech, when his young son Thomas was diagnosed as autistic.
“Being a private equity backed CEO is full on,” he says. “It is permanently 24-7 and you can’t do that and other things. I wanted to do stuff that would help the autism community and my son’s prospects.
“My son is profoundly autistic and that is one of the reasons I am doing what I am doing, and one of the reasons I have taken up the TechWM role.
“He got the diagnosis two weeks before his fourth birthday. That switched my entire outlook on life. I immediately started to make plans. What can I do which will improve his employment prospects and his life prospects over the next 10 years by the time he is in his late teens?
“My diagnosis followed six or seven months later when I really threw myself into that world. It became very obvious going through his diagnosis that a lot of it applied to me as well.”
By the second half of 2024 Hague admits he was actively seeking a new role after years at the sharp end of corporate tech, with the round-the-clock associated pressures.
“I stepped down as CEO of Cyberfort at the start of 2024 and I left the business at the start of 2025. In the second half of 2024 I started to look for things that I could do which would make a difference, and started speaking to the TechWM guys last October.
“I said I would take this on because it would be great to do something which would make a tangible difference for the region, and I started in April this year.”
Hague’s relatively recent ascent to the top job at TechWM marked a career crossroads in a working life which had begun as a graduate trainee with Bass Leisure, helping manage the Gala bingo hall in Nottingham in the early 1990s.
“I didn’t have any ambitions before I went to university,” he says. “I have no attention span, I rarely look beyond six months or 12 months. It is having an autistic, neurodiverse mind, I cannot plan or look beyond certain time frames.
“Because my mind works differently to most people, I could very easily do quite complex calculations in my head without the use of a calculator at a pretty young age.”
Hague looks back on his days in the bingo hall more than 30 years ago with a detached amusement, whilst also recognising the valuable life experiences he gained.
“Ten of us were taken on and two of us were given bingo clubs to run as a baptism of fire – welcome to your shiny graduate scheme. I ran a bingo club in St Ann’s which at the time was very much one of the gun crime capitals of the UK.
“I was in my early 20s and it was brilliant in many ways from a learning perspective because you have got 60 staff, most of whom didn’t want to be there.
“It had real benefits, learning to manage staff and interact with the workforce. Getting used to that kind of dynamic was incredibly useful. The audience was probably more challenging than the staff – your life is not worth living if you get the numbers wrong.
“A member of the audience died in the middle of a session whilst he was playing. At no point did the game stop, and we had to carry the gentleman out on a stretcher. I have been held up at knifepoint and we had people come in with guns shooting the place up.”
Hague left behind the knives, guns and demanding punters to work on demographic analysis – helping to choose new sites for bingo halls – before going to work for Bass Leisure Machine Services in Burton upon Trent, running its marketing and management information. There he applied his mind to the analysis of raw data, including potentially implementing huge savings by digitising CDs in juke boxes to replace hundreds of vans driving around the country.
“The project stalled because the Performing Rights Society couldn’t get their heads around it,” he recalls. “We never quite got that commercial agreement but we got the technology sorted and working beautifully. That was such a positive result of real-world technology application.”
After five years with Bass Leisure, Hague left at the height of the dot-com boom in 1998 for an ill-fated Manchester IT start-up which collapsed into administration. Sensing its potential Hague bought the firm and turned its fortunes around by building a distribution network which sold pre-paid phone cards to newsagents.
“We turned ourselves into a tel-co by definition and that accelerated the turnover which grew it to £5 million turnover, and eventually it was sold to an AIM-listed company. I ran it and did the buyout. We were only a single-figure team operating above a Pizza Express in Knutsford.”
Following the sale, Hague moved on to a role as director of the cyber division at the NCC Group, today a £300 million plus cyber security business listed on the main UK stock exchange.
“I learnt a lot, all at absolutely rapid pace. But my history dictates that four years tends to be a max. It is not about career progression or delivering things – it is just like my mind will switch off.”
Another career switch saw Hague headhunted by Dutch information services company Wolters Kluwer to run their outsourced HR and employment legal arm, transforming products and services into the digital arena. A buyout attempt failed and Hague was again looking for pastures new, armed with a voracious appetite for the cyber industry and invaluable insights into capital raising and private equity finance.
Armed with private equity backing he struck out on his own to launch Cyberfort, which grew into a £24 million powerhouse as one of the biggest privately owned cyber companies in the UK.
But his son’s autism diagnosis changed Hague’s perspective on life’s priorities – and would eventually bring him to Birmingham as CEO of TechWM.
“TechWM has been going for years really successfully and this year’s Birmingham Tech Week is the seventh iteration. The company and Tech Week are so inter-linked. The first one was very modest, with maybe a few hundred visitors, but we are now aiming for 10,000.
“It is held all over the city centre at different venues, including the ICC, NatWest, HSBC and Millennium Point. We are basically taking over the city centre for a week.”
Running from October 20 to 24, Tech Week is supported by some of the biggest local tech giants, multinational corporations and universities, with thought-provoking discussions on frontier technologies such as AI, cyber security and quantum computing.
“It is a showcase for the region on all the great cool stuff that is going on,” he says.
So with the region’s biggest manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover brought to a production standstill at the hands of a cyber attack just weeks before the biggest event in the region’s tech calendar, how does Hague view the West Midlands’ tech ecosystem?
“I am an anorak on this. Everybody at some point will be hit, fact. There are breaches going on right now, there will be another one in an hour. It is relentless.”
But cyber attacks will not stop the equally relentless march of technology, according to Hague.
“We titled Tech Week ‘a quantum leap for the West Midlands’. This relates to the speed and acceleration of technology by advancement.”
Cyber attacks notwithstanding, Hague is candid about the challenges facing the tech sector, particularly in the West Midlands where inadequate access to finance is often viewed as a problem for start-ups which may then fail.
“I don’t buy that,” he says. “Most of the time it is not necessarily finance, it is access to help and guidance and mentorship and management advice. It is not hard to start a tech business.”
He is also sceptical of the oft-quoted view that AI will decimate large swathes of the workforce.
“I don’t know how much I subscribe to that, a lot of that has already happened in terms of stuff that can be automated and replaced.
“There are also two sides of the same coin. Equally it creates opportunity and new jobs. We just don’t necessarily know what those jobs are yet. The shape of the world is going to change so rapidly.”
With such change inevitable, Hague stresses that whilst Tech Week provides a high-profile showcase for a sector with apparently no limit on its potential and capacity, TechWM’s small four-strong team is continually working to future-proof tech’s prospects in the region.
“Tech Week is a showcase, a great celebration, but it’s the other 51 weeks where the work gets done, where we are creating the opportunity to create the jobs and push the agenda forward.
“There are just four of us. They are superstars, people that really care and want to make a difference. Our biggest asset and biggest point of making a difference is the level of connectivity we have.
“We are the go-to people if you have a tech-related question. We may not be able to answer it or solve it, but we will categorically send you to the right person.”
For a man who once had to confront raiders armed with knives and shotguns at a bingo hall, navigating the complex landscape of 21st century tech to make that difference is surely a challenge Hague will take in his stride.
