“I think it would be nice to go to the moon, just to go and have a look.”
There is an almost constant sense of mischief in the air when Lawrence Tomlinson is in the room. It’s not always clear when he’s joking and when he’s being deadly serious – but it is clear that he cultivates that tone deliberately to keep you slightly off-balance. It’s more Jose Mourinho than Niccolo Machiavelli.
A simple question about unfulfilled ambitions to a serial entrepreneur with five businesses, racing trophies from Le Mans and who famously crossed swords with the UK banks with his Tomlinson Report is never going to elicit a simple answer.
He continues: “Is that an ambition or a dream? If it was an ambition, I probably would have done it.”
His deadpan delivery covers a range of subjects – why did you first set up a business? “I could make more money”; how did you react to the threat of Tesco delisting a de-icer product? “They seemed to have mistaken me for someone who cares about Tesco”; what should be done to help start-ups and people running them? “We don’t need to worry about start-ups. It’s up to them – if they can’t get to the next stage, maybe that’s just their fault”.
He becomes more animated on the subject of entrepreneurs, having made himself into a very rich man through a combination of entrepreneurial drive, vision, and sheer bloody-mindedness.
“People start a business and they want all this help,” he says. “There’s too much of the Nanny State, people have to take responsibility for their own business and what they do.”
His tip for development? “They should read a book”.
EY and TheBusinessDesk.com have worked together on a project celebrating some of the north’s most successful entrepreneurs, looking at their journey to the top and the challenges they have overcome as their business has grown and developed.
This interview is just one of many in our free downloadable 19 page PDF supplement on Driving Entrepreneurship.
But although he has a strong sense of individual responsibility, he does not believe in unfettered free markets.
“When a marketplace is broken there needs to be government intervention,” he says.
“I think the lending marketplace is broken – I am not an interventionist – but it has failed the customers, not the corporates in that space. The energy market is the same.
“Thatcherism has its limits. The current crop at the top of the Tory Party are Thatcherites. It’s good to a certain level but ultimately one company, one player, becomes dominant and creates an oligopoly or monopoly.
“You have to control the markets in some way.”
He made his own intervention into the way parts of the UK banking system was being run, specifically the way in which some businesses were treated when they were struggling, or when their bank decided they were struggling, during the recession.
The Tomlinson Report, which came out of a year spent in Government as an entrepreneur-in-residence, was particularly critical of the role of Royal Bank of Scotland’s Global Restructuring Group (GRG) and the bank’s property division West Register and the cosy relationship between the two. West Register was on many occasions the purchaser of distressed assets that were sold at the behest of GRG.
Tomlinson says: “I have to be careful what I say…I think the business world is a bit better off and a bit safer from the work I did.
“GRG, the restructuring division of RBS, has now closed, which didn’t have a good reputation for helping businesses.
“West Register is now closed and the people who ran that have now left the bank. Apparently because the economy has picked up they don’t need it now but it was just after my report came out.
“Perhaps I was a bit naive. I was truly shocked at how some of those businesses had been treated. We have had people who have lost marriages, taken their kids out of school.”
Despite the problems it caused – he had to rebank his businesses, for example – he is proud of what it achieved.
He says: “Would I do what I did again given the opportunity? Yes. Would I do it again considering the personal stress, hardship and effort? Yes.
“What did I get out of it? I think I helped a lot of businesses that would probably have been destroyed survive. Going forward, people are more aware.”
He had originally got involved – having been selected ahead of more than other 100 people – because he “just wanted to help”.
“I wanted to help government and businesses,” he says. “I currently operate five fairly diverse businesses and I just wanted to put something back.”
His first business was care homes, which he got into aged 23 when he bought one from his parents, and from there he added a care homes construction business, a software business, a company which provides weather protection solutions to the aviation, rail and facilities management industries (but no longer to Tesco), and sports car manufacturer Ginetta.
Together they sit under the umbrella of the £90m-turnover LNT Group, but Tomlinson is not taken by the label that often prefixes his name.
“What is an entrepreneur?,” he asks, rhetorically. “I really don’t know why I’m an entrepreneur. I’m just a guy who is in business. I don’t see myself as a serial entrepreneur.
“I am interested in making things and optimising situations, as an engineer. Your life experiences define you, not this rubbish about being an entrepreneur.”
EY and TheBusinessDesk.com have worked together on a project celebrating some of the region’s most successful entrepreneurs, looking at their journey to the top and the challenges they have overcome as their business has grown and developed.
EY’s annual Entrepreneur Of The Year is still open for entries. Apply here
This interview is just one of many in our free downloadable 19 page PDF supplement on Driving Entrepreneurship.
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