A L Consulting was founded on 1st April 1986. Founding director, Dr Fred Ayres looks quickly back over the last 30 years.
In 1986, after 25 years of working initially in the accountancy profession but mainly in the private and charity sectors, I gave up my post as Chief Executive of a £32M turnover company to start a new business as a management consultant and trainer. Being the boss of over 1000 people one day and only of myself a few weeks later, was quite a change. I even had to make my own coffee!
Initially the main source of income came from delivering outdoor management courses for predominantly large organisations. As a life-long outdoor enthusiast this was a very enjoyable way of earning a living but it quickly became apparent that lessons learned in the outdoors were not readily transferred back to the workplace.
This refocused our activities on organisational development issues, my area of academic interest, to enable clients to operate more efficiently, more effectively and above all, more profitably. To do this we utilised a wide range of sophisticated tools and models and, most importantly of all, well researched data.
Around this time we were also appointed Advisors for a number of Government initiatives around new business start-ups.
In 1992 we became Assessors for the Investors in People initiative and remain involved to this day. Over the last 24 years we have assessed over 3000 different organisations, mainly SMEs in all sectors.
It occurred to us that although the scale of the challenges faced by large businesses is clearly greater than those faced by SMEs, the principles are exactly the same. Furthermore, if we could simplify some of the sophisticated tools and models we use with larger organisations without losing their integrity and validity, they could be effectively utilised to help improve the performance of SMEs. After several years of piloting various modified techniques, we had sufficient hard and anecdotal evidence to bring all the component parts together into one cohesive approach – The Road Map to Higher Performance – which we launched earlier this year.
Over the years we have developed something of a niche of helping a diverse range of faith based organisations to assess the compatibility of secular models to their particular beliefs.
The last 30 years have seen us grow and diversify. However, the development of people and organisations and finding innovative solutions to business problems not readily resolved by conventional problem solving techniques remain our main interest.
