From executive change firm to tech scale-up – LCap’s leadership journey

Over the last 20 years, LCap Group has evolved from a pure-play executive change firm into a rapidly scaling product and tech-led leadership advisory business; a journey which has only been possible through making the right leadership decisions along the way. Here we look at how our leadership journey has shaped the business, while also influencing the insights tools that we now use with our clients.  

Every business goes through its unique leadership journey, making hiring decisions, changing, and restructuring the executive team at key points in its growth. These decisions can have a critical impact on the direction of a business - and its ultimate success.  

It’s no different with the LCap Group – formerly Drax - which over the last 20 years has grown from a founder-led small business to a tech-powered people analytics firm of 140 employees - driven in large part by making the right leadership decisions at the right time. In our case, that leadership journey has had another impact too – in influencing the thinking behind our leadership analytics platform, Leadership Dynamics.   

Behavioural dynamics was hardwired into the business from day one. Co-founders, Graham and Ruby, always talked about starting a business together and they got their chance in 2003, buying Drax out of administration. But while they knew they worked well as colleagues, Ruby and Graham recognised immediately that their behavioural profiles wouldn’t make for a successful founding team on their own.  

While they share many of the hallmarks of business founders, including high curiosity, execution, and proactivity, they wanted to ensure the founding team had a good mix of complementarity and diversity to drive performance and avoid groupthink. This led to a third co-founder, David, also from an executive change background, to bring a more focused, and methodical approach to business planning. Graham and Ruby knew that having this counterbalance would ensure the business would grow in a sustainable and structured way.  

From founder-led to functional heads  

The founding team were pure executive change specialists, and this domain focus suited the LCap Group well initially. However, as the business grew, its ambitions also evolved, introducing new demands on the leadership team.  

As the business became more focused on the data and analytics of leadership, this required specialist functional leaders and the situational experience to scale as a product and tech company. My own role developed to Chief Product Officer and now, Chief Strategy Officer. We brought in a Chief Commercial Officer to focus on bringing our tools to market, and a Chief Technology Officer with expertise in product development and digitisation. Finally, we hired a CFO who combined strong finance experience with a situational background in building value through software.  

As we made this transition, our tools became integral to helping us map out and understand the leadership change we needed, and for simulating new hires. And the final combination of a functional, domain and situational competencies put us in a strong position to scale.   

From charismatic to professional leadership 

Bringing in functional heads also meant shifting the roles of the founders, to allow for the new structure. While Graham remained as CEO, Ruby and David forged their paths heading up business units, where they could contribute value through their deep domain knowledge. Our PACE behavioural profiling tool was pivotal in facilitating this transition while ensuring the new leadership team could work effectively together. 

During this process, we have also seen a shift from charismatic, founder-dominated leadership to a more professional, corporate approach. LCap is still a highly entrepreneurial business, where the founders have had an outsized influence on the culture, and complementarity with the founders is vital for leadership hires. However, the business is gradually bringing in greater structure to support the original team, to ensure that it can deliver on the value creation strategy.  

What’s next – marketing, people, operations… 

As with every fast-growth business, LCap Group’s leadership needs are constantly evolving, and we are currently using Leadership Dynamics to map the next steps in our journey. For us, this means focusing on building out our operations function, introducing a greater focus on governance, and making marketing a C-level issue. Based on our value creation plan, having leaders in these areas will give us the specialist skills we need for the next phase of our growth, and the new demands that it will put on the company.  

Every stage of our leadership journey has provided lessons that we have fed into our leadership tools. From finding behavioural balance in the founding team to hiring functional heads to scale and understanding the importance of situational experience in building value, our tools have been built to address the challenges that fast-growth businesses face. Now, as with our clients, Leadership Dynamics ensures we stay one step ahead in identifying and planning our leadership evolution, highlighting gaps early, and ensuring that we identify the best leadership fit when the time comes to hire.