Providing smart and sustainable business solutions to clients at home and abroad

Every business would love to be future-proofed, but often the day-to-day challenges of running an organisation are so great that it can feel an insurmountable task. Potential issues on the mind of every organisation presently are: rising inflation, Russian sanctions, supply chain issues and rising customer expectations.

By not rising to these challenges, organisations run the risk of performing below expectations and, in the worst case scenario, not having the capability to be competitive in the market.

It’s a common conundrum, and one that Gene Leonard, chief executive at Limerick-based management consulting company LBSPartners believes is only going to get more pressing as businesses brace themselves for further external ‘shocks’ to follow in the wake of Covid, rising inflation and globalisation.

For 20 years now, LBSPartners has been at the forefront of providing smart and sustainable business solutions to a wide range of clients across Ireland, the UK and the US.

The 30-strong team at the prestigious business consultancy provide leadership and operational excellence training, specialising in the areas of digitalisation, business excellence, sustainability and strategic direction.

“There are more shocks going to come,” said Leonard. “Organisations are going to have to get very agile, and almost be able to see the potential problems that they may face coming around the corner. They have to be flexible enough to be able to deal with all the different challenges that are going to come and the question is: How do you get an entire organisation comfortable with that amount of change, but still operate very predictably every day where they’re delivering a very good product or very good service out on time, all the time?

“It’s really about getting the thinking of the whole organisation aligned, but also flexible enough to respond to those kinds of shocks – that is what we spend our time focusing on.”

LBSPartners works closely with clients to help them transform into the streamlined, efficient operation they aspire to be, by guiding them in developing skills and techniques to becoming more efficient, productive and cost effective to fulfil the value proposition they offer to their customers. It also works with Enterprise Ireland and IDA to help support their work and achieve optimal results in the companies they support.

And, with a wealth of experience across a diverse range of sectors – including engineering, pharma, medical devices, food, IT and contact centres – the experts at LBS are not only well placed to identify the most important problems facing clients, but also how best to resolve them.

Leonard said: “What I see, and what I’m seeing more and more of these days, is that people are working harder and harder, but they’re not as organised as they need to be. They’re getting busier and busier and yet it feels like they’re achieving less and less, and it doesn’t need to be that way. As an organisation we try to help in various aspects to make it easier for them to achieve their objectives.”

Sometimes this means working closely with leadership teams to enable them to better articulate their vision for the organisation, and coordinate their resources more accurately to achieve that. In other instances there might be the need for a more expansive transformation, looking at how to best integrate new technology to make the business more effective and more efficient.

“We often work with clients on learning and development around operational excellence and leadership within their organisation, helping them to become a high-performing team,” he said.

He likened the role of LBS to that of a head coach, working across many aspects in an organisation to help them maximise their potential and, just like with a sports team, it’s always done with the awareness that each team, even each individual player, will require their own tailor-made solution.

The business consultancy firm currently works with several major clients in the life sciences, medical devices, pharma and biopharma industries, where the demands of the past few years have created different stresses and strains to tackle.

“New technology has brought new possibilities in the biopharma and pharmaceutical division, but to deliver that, pharmaceutical companies need to get their drugs on the market in a much more effective way,” Leonard said.

“They have very sophisticated, highly regulated supply chains, so bringing coordination to those kind of processes – while being able to respect their regulations and regulatory environment – has to be done in a very safe way all the time.”

Within the software and IT industry, a frequent issue encountered by LBS lies in enabling those writing the software to also meet the challenges presented by other aspects of the business such as coordinating supporting customers, marketing and more. Often this means working with large multinational clients that are working across multiple markets around the world. “It’s a very complicated business to coordinate all of that activity and that’s where they ask us for help,” Leonard said.

Other clients include energy trading platforms and complex web systems writers. “Often their mindset is in ‘how to write the software’,” he said. “We’re the ones that can help with all that coordination that they haven’t really time to think about – because we think about it every day.”

Recruitment is an area that can transform an organisation’s productivity, but there is a common trap that many employers succumb to. “A lot of people still think that recruitment is about getting the right technical capabilities, but to us, it’s more important to get people with the right attitude, curiosity and innate ability to work as a team,” Leonard said.

“If people come with the right attitude and would fit in the organisation, you can teach them almost anything. You’d like them to come with a technical skill, but most organisations forget that part and recruit almost by the experience on a CV. They’re more interested in where people have worked and what they might have achieved than what they’re capable of.”

Honed over two decades of experience, LBS is adept at helping organisations recruit or transition existing talent into leadership roles. The firm works intensively with leadership on how to coordinate and delegate effectively, how to instigate good processes and make those processes visible.

“If we can make all the work in an organisation visible, then it’s much easier for the leaders to intervene, delegate and coach effectively,” Leonard said.

The business consultancy operates in an interesting space between common problems repeatedly experienced across sectors over time and new, developing challenges like the pivot towards hybrid working and many issues facing global supply chains.

As the world of work shifts increasingly online, getting to grips with digitalisation has become an area of critical concern for many firms.

“Technology is coming at organisations at a rate of knots and a lot of businesses are buying into that technology, but without fully understanding how to truly integrate it into how their processes work,” Leonard said. “We can help people knit all the different solutions they have into an integrated platform that suits the business and takes full advantage of the technology.”

Leonard set up LBS with his colleague, former financial controller, Mike Cunningham, who sadly passed away a number of years ago, after the pair had worked together with a series of thriving US multinationals. “We loved helping organisations improve processes, so we set up a consultancy to see if we could bring that kind of thinking we’d learned to it,” he said.

Twenty years on and he’s just as passionate about how LBS can help companies reach their potential.

“I love to see a team of people begin to unlock potential they didn’t realise that they had. When they understand each other better, or they’ve seen a way to work more effectively and gained insight into how to give the customers a better experience. That’s great and I’m very happy we can be a part of helping them achieve that.”