A Driving Force behind British Excellence

Students attending our latest meeting of the Entrepreneurship Society last night were given a superb insight into the skills of hugely successful Yorkshire businessman (Lawrence Tomlinson) whose cluster of companies have catapulted him into the Sunday Times FastTrack for rapidly growing businesses.

LNT Group has evolved into a group making in-roads into some fascinating market spaces. Ideal Care Homes has developed a low-fee model designed to offer top value for money in the care home market. An estate of 16 homes is being extended each year and the business has a target of opening an extra 1,000 beds each year - demographics certainly help the long term growth projections but so too does the poor state of many care homes in the UK, there is plenty of scope for innovation and building homes and rooms to a high-spec at an affordable price.

LNT Construction specialises in designing and building care homes - for Ideal and other providers. Here was a superb example of vertical integration at work! LNT Construction employs land buyers, property designers, town planners, surveyors, project managers and site staff!

Perhaps the best known business within the LNT stable is Ginetta Cars - a British marque building road and race cars since 1958 and which Lawrence Tomlinson acquired in 2005. A few quick laps around the Ginetta story gave a youthful audience a great view of how to grow a brand and invest in people - from young drivers cutting their teeth in the Ginetta Junior Championship through to a commitment to employing mechanics and engineers and many other highly skilled workers at the new LNT car factory in Leeds.

And LNT is spreading it’s wings even further. LNT Solutions looks to have a very bright future supplying chemical products to the global transport industry - the stand out product seems to be a new generation airport runway de-icer which is greener and less corrosive than existing products.

Lawrence Tomlinson’s passion for business and for the people he works with was evidence throughout a totally absorbing, entertaining and well paced presentation. There were some extremely knowledgeable motor sport fans in the audience and it was a pleasure to spend a few hours in the company of an entrepreneur whose philantrophic principles shone through and who is undoubtedly one of the leading figures in British motor sport (where the UK enjoys a reputation for global excellence) and in building a future for wealth creation in the Broad Acres!