Q + A with Adam Mead, COO at The Lucion Group

The Lucion Group has made four acquisitions in only twelve months. As COO, how has data management helped the company with this fast-paced growth?

With the integration of any acquisition, we initially focus on two key areas: people and process. Naturally, as a people-focused business, the people element always comes first, so we get to know our incoming team members well and how to support each other in the early stages of integration and beyond. The ‘process’ element follows shortly after, enabling Lucion to gain central visibility of key business data such as sales, utilisation, etc. By taking the time to understand the acquiredbusiness processes and by understanding the corresponding data produced along the way, we then work together on a digital transformation journey to align data sets, ultimately providing management with the data insight we need to focus and support our people, our teams and our businesses performance during this fast paced growth.

As COO, you have had strategic oversight of a large company data project. Can you give an overview of the project and its implementation of change and efficiency?

In my 17 years with Lucion, we have always had a strong ethos placed on digitisation to realise the value technology can bring to a business. Not just any old technology, ‘tech’ that can support our great people to deliver a great service and improve our business performance. To support our digitisation strategy, Lucion has recently introduced data warehousing to our capabilities. Having built our own in-house Enterprise Resource Planning system (NexGen) and having the luxury of our in-house development team, I was initially sceptical as to why we would embark upon a data warehousing journey.

However, seeing the scalable power of data warehousing and very clever data analysis tools, Lucion is already benefiting from enhanced analytics, automated KPI analysis and historic trend analysis of newly acquired businesses, to name only a few areas of improvement. All of which have been engineered within the warehouse to automatically produce results in seconds, enabling the management of incredibly large data sets to be ‘crunched’ in no time, providing scalable efficiencies as the business grows with its data needs.

How do you think the company will change and grow in the next two years, and how do you see yourself and data creating that change?

The company will continue to grow organically over the years by maintaining excellent service delivery to our expanding customer base. This will drive significant growth, but larger change will come with our continued acquisitive growth at the fast pace we are familiar with.

I can’t answer exactly what will happen over the coming years; however, to best create and support this growth, we must ensure our digital strategy remains agile to seek and adopt new technologies. We will utilise data to maintain our best-in-class user and customer experience, continue to embrace thought leadership, continue rolling out new developmental solutions to maximise business efficiencies and drive innovation through our operating platform to support our integrated approach to all acquisitions that will join Lucion in the years to come.

How has the investment from the Palatine PE supported the digital approach taken by Lucion?

The digitalisation journey can sometimes be daunting upfront as we may find ourselves seeking external technologies and consultancies to help us achieve our vision. From the outset, Palatine has always been incredibly supportive of this and has offered significant value by making introductions to their vast network of trusted people and businesses from the portfolio and beyond. By leveraging shared experiences, project successes and pitfalls to avoid, we have gained valuable insight from Palatine and the connections they have been able to support us with.

What has been the most challenging and enjoyable part of your career to date?

I would say it is the same answer for both. From 2006 until now, Lucion has seen tremendous growth. We have a saying in the business that we borrowed from Heraclitus, “The only constant is change,” For me, this mantra gives the most challenge and enjoyment. The past few years have been very interesting, to say the least. From COVID to war to recession, multiple external demands have been placed upon our people and business to change, adapt, and find a way to thrive in this new world we find ourselves in. Throw in multiple acquisitions over that timeframe…it’s fair to say we’ve had a bit on! However, by running towards change and embracing challenges, I have taken a huge amount of enjoyment from seeing the successes our people and our business have achieved in a very challenging environment. Knowing that we are positively impacting our people and planet far outweighs any challenge I have been presented with to date.