LPE Consultancy is the specialist engine room advisory and support service launched to help its clients operate smarter, faster and better.
Luke Bancroft-Smith, Director of LPE Consultancy Ltd, a specialist advisory and support firm serving the utilities, telecoms and property services, has the experience needed to lead a mighty business. “I launched LPE after working at board level across multiple infrastructure companies,” he explains.
“I saw how larger delivery businesses needed agile, trusted support on the strategic and compliance side and built LPE to provide exactly that.”
LPE, which was launched in April 2022, offers crucial, specialised support including strategic consultancy, operational oversight and technical support to infrastructure businesses. One client of theirs is BRM Group, a utilities contractor with a hefty national reach.
Bancroft-Smith saw a gap in the market for LPE to thrive as there was a need for a “behind-the-scenes problem solver” designed to help other firms “operate smarter, faster and more compliantly.”
In the business world, it is rare to find a business that doesn’t just do a job for a client, but actually seeks to make the client better at delivering its service, or services. LPE, Bancroft-Smith maintains, is one such business. With a function that goes beyond advising to actually enhance level of delivery, LPE prides itself on “translating high-level requirements from ISO accreditations to project recovery into practical frontline solutions.” The framework of the firm is both hybrid consultancy and “embedded delivery partner,” where the aim is to “enhance capability, not replace it.”
Like with any successful and scaling business, there have been challenges. One of these challenges has been, in Bancroft-Smith words, “proving our worth not through branding but through impact whether it’s preparing for audits, streamlining telecoms workflows, or tendering for multimillion-pound frameworks.”
Because LPE’s work “happens inside the engine room” of a business, becoming that trusted “extension” of their clients without being in the “spotlight” has taken some hard graft, but clearly it has paid off with clients like BRM Group on their rota.
Aside from early-stage challenges, LPE has current ones too. These include managing operational capacity as the client list grows, maintaining sky-high advisory standards that enhance client service delivery and “balancing compliance, innovation and execution across diverse sectors and client needs.”
The next year will present its own challenges for the firm in the form of ambitious goals. These include “supporting clients in rolling out a smart scheduling and job management platform across its telecoms and property arms” and “targeting £1m+ revenue via new tenders.” Of course, continuing to build up the firm’s reputation as a “go-to strategic engine room for companies ready to grow,” is part of the long-term plan. The five-year-plan is similarly ambitious. Bancroft-Smith envisions LPE becoming “established as a critical operational support partner to major infrastructure businesses, particularly those scaling fast” and working mostly with an exclusive group of “high-growth contractors.”
As a senior business leader, he is willing to share a few leadership lessons learnt along the way. The first is “the best support partners are invisible until needed.” Another golden nugget is “clarity and pace matter more than bureaucracy especially in high-volume delivery sectors.” The most profound? That “true leadership means knowing when to lead from the front and when to enable others from the side.”
For the folks at LPE, success is measured via impact and not merely through “invoices.” This impact is evident in the fact their clients “have grown from £4m to over £35m turnover during our support period.” A rather impressive feat. “As our clients grow, so does LPE. We are always in support, never in competition,” he concludes.
Well, if we have ever met a business truly passionate about helping their clients succeed and really grow, it has to be LPE.
