Lomond Capital
Lomond Capital operates in the rapidly growing UK Private Rental Sector.
Lomond’s business model is based on acquiring good quality regional firms, scaling those firms through acquisitions and broadening the business model. Regional partnership businesses retain and equity stake in the business with Lomond providing funding and support to build the regional business to be the dominant business in the region.
Significant benefits have been realised by business owners either wanting to become a Lomond Partnership Business or by selling their business to Lomond. Partnership businesses benefit from the opportunity to realise value from the existing business, subsequently building the business via the on-going support for acquisitions, support on generating significant organic growth and the ability to rely on central resources in such areas as regulation, compliance, IT and HR, together with opportunity to benefit from a significant uplift on the exit multiples enjoyed by all
Lomond has acquired 34 businesses since November 2010 and now manages in excess of £2.7bn of assets shareholders including vendors from the enlarged business in the longer term.
How we helped Lomond Capital
The problem Lomond Capital faced
Bruce Evans, Chief Executive of Lomond had worked with us previously when he was part of Country Wide. Armed with the knowledge of what we managed to achieve for Country Wide he got in touch and asked us to how we could help Lomond Capital.
Bruce explained that through acquisitions and organic growth, Lomond currently have 29 branches with 5 different brands across the UK. As they have grown through acquisitions, they had over 17 different telecoms providers across the group. This was completely unmanageable.
Each site had a different telephone system, that worked differently, some without basic features like called ID. Service levels varied dramatically across the group. There was absolutely zero central management, If support was needed at a site and the person that normally dealt with this was away from the office it was a real challenge to identify who to contact and what service levels were in place. This was not only inefficient but posed huge security risks to the group. The other major challenge was with the billing It was a huge task for them to manage 17 bills each month, all coming in on different days. Trying to understand if they were being billed the correct amount was impossible
Once Bruce made contact and explained his situation, we set to work collecting all the data available. We looked at what was being billed and more importantly what was needed. We then presented Bruce with a single document to explain his estate fully along side our proposed solution. This was, and still is, an invaluable document.