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Longacre

Management & operations consultancy · Established 2009

Strategy is the easy half.We stay for the other.

A management consultancy for mid-market industrial, consumer and healthcare businesses. We are hired when the plan is right and the operation is not — and we stay past the recommendation.

Start a conversationRead three engagements in detail

Five sectors. Fourteen-week median. A partner on site throughout, with a fifth to two-fifths of the fee contingent on impact your finance team verifies.

Engagements closed since 2009
184
Cumulative EBITDA impact, client-verified
$1.4B
Median operating years per partner
19
Of revenue from returning clients
71%

01 — The firm

Founded by operators who got tired of handing over a deck.

Longacre began in 2009, when two operators left leadership roles at listed manufacturers. Both had spent a decade watching consulting reports stall at the point where somebody had to change a shift pattern or tell a plant manager their line was coming down.

The firm exists to close that gap. Every engagement is led by a partner who has run the function being fixed, for businesses between $40M and $900M in revenue — the band where one operating decision still moves the whole P&L.

Engagements closed per year from 2009 to 2025, rising from 2 to 18 and totalling 184.20092025
Engagements per year, 2009–2025.
184 in total.
“We are not in the recommendations business. We are in the business of the number changing.”
Meera Vaidyanathan/Founding Partner

02 — Consulting services

The five problems we are called in to solve.

Five practices, and no general management consulting. The line under each heading is the sentence clients use on the first call.

  1. i

    Margin Recovery

    10–16 weeks · Partner + 2

    Gross margin has slipped three quarters running and nobody agrees on why.

    We rebuild cost-to-serve from transaction data, down to SKU and customer. Most clients are selling 8–15% of revenue below true cost.

    • Cost-to-serve
    • Price architecture
    • Procurement reset
  2. ii

    Post-Acquisition Integration

    6–9 months · Partner + 3

    The deal closed, day one went fine, and month five is chaos.

    We run the first 200 days: the integration office, synergy tracking against the approved model, and the org calls acquirers postpone.

    • Integration office
    • Synergy realisation
    • Org design
  3. iii

    Operating Model Redesign

    12–20 weeks · Partner + 2

    Headcount has grown faster than revenue for two years running.

    We map how decisions are actually made — who signs, who is consulted, how long it takes — and rebuild the structure around the answer.

    • Spans & layers
    • Decision rights
    • Shared services
  4. iv

    Supply Chain & Network

    8–14 weeks · Partner + 2

    Service levels and working capital are being traded against each other with no model behind it.

    Footprint, inventory policy, supplier concentration and the logistics contracts underneath them — modelled together, not one at a time.

    • Network design
    • Inventory policy
    • S&OP cadence
  5. v

    Performance Turnaround

    3–12 months · Partner-led, scaled to the situation

    Covenants are close and the board wants a plan with dates on it.

    Thirteen-week cash, a ranked action register with named owners, and weekly evidence the lending group can rely on.

    • 13-week cash
    • Lender reporting
    • Stabilisation

03 — Sectors

Five sectors. We decline the rest.

Sector depth is the difference between advice and opinion. A partner who has not run a plant cannot usefully challenge a plant manager — and the plant manager knows it within ten minutes.

  • Industrial Manufacturing

    Multi-plant footprints, capex sequencing, OEE recovery, and the make-versus-buy calls that set a decade of cost structure.

    Auto components · Building materials · Speciality chemicals

  • Consumer & Retail

    Trade spend nobody can reconcile, assortment economics, and cold-chain distribution where margin dies in the last 40 kilometres.

    Packaged foods · Household goods · Multi-format retail

  • Healthcare Delivery

    Throughput and theatre utilisation, diagnostics network design, and the clinical governance that makes generic advice unusable here.

    Hospital groups · Diagnostics networks · Day-care chains

  • Logistics & Distribution

    Line-haul design, last-mile cost per drop, 3PL contract structure, and warehouse labour models that survive a peak.

    3PL · Express & parcel · B2B distribution

  • Agri & Food Processing

    Procurement at the farm gate, yield loss before the pack-house, and the seasonal working capital swings that wreck healthy businesses.

    Spices & plantation · Seafood export · Edible oils

  • Not on this list? We will usually know a firm that should take the call.

04 — Method

How the work actually runs.

Four phases, every time. The first is fixed-fee and ends where stopping is a legitimate outcome — about one engagement in nine ends there.

A typical
30-week engagement
A typical engagement: four weeks diagnostic, six design, eighteen mobilise, two handover — with a stop point at the end of the diagnostic.4w6w18w2wstop point — about 1 engagement in 9 ends here

  1. Diagnostic

    01

    3–4 weeks

    We go to the site, the floor, the depot. Twenty-five to forty interviews and 24 months of transaction data, ending in a written finding: the size of the prize, where it sits, and what it costs to get.

  2. Design

    02

    4–6 weeks

    Options with numbers attached, stress-tested against your real constraints. We deliberately do not present a single recommended option — that is the moment ownership transfers to the consultant.

  3. Mobilise

    03

    8–30 weeks

    Execution alongside your teams, not in place of them. The weekly review is chaired by the client from week one, and value is tracked into the management accounts as it lands.

  4. Handover

    04

    2 weeks, then two audits

    We hand over the model, the cadence and a named owner, then leave. Two audits at month three and six, included, published to the board whichever way they read.

05 — Difference

Four things clients say are different here.

Four commitments, written into our engagement letters — a more reliable place to look than a values page.

01

Senior-only teams

No pyramid and no leverage model to feed. A partner and two principals, all with line operating experience. You will not meet twenty-four-year-olds on your factory floor.

02

Fee at risk

Twenty to forty percent of our fee is contingent on impact your finance function verifies, against a baseline agreed before we start. We have been paid below list eleven times.

03

We leave

Median engagement is fourteen weeks. No partner here has an incentive tied to extending one, and we do not take rolling retainers.

04

Evidence, not opinion

Every finding traces to transaction data, an observed process, or a named source. Our reports carry an appendix designed to be audited.

06 — Impact

What the work produced.

Across 118 engagements closed 2019–2024. Figures are the client finance function's, taken at the six-month audit rather than from our own tracking.

Return on fees at 12 months · 118 engagements · 2019–2024
Return on fees at twelve months across 118 engagements: 13 returned under 1×, 14 returned 1–2×, 26 returned 2–4×, 32 returned 4–6×, 22 returned 6–10× and 11 returned over 10×.<1×1–2×2–4×4–6×6–10×>10×median 4.2×
Cumulative EBITDA impact, verified by client finance
$1.4B
Median return on fees at the twelve-month mark
4.2×
Median engagement length, start to handover
14 wks
Of committed value still in the accounts at the six-month audit
92%
Of revenue from clients who have hired us before
71%
Diagnostics that ended with us recommending no further work
1 in 9

07 — Selected work

Three engagements, in enough detail to judge us by.

Client names are withheld — several of these engagements touched people's jobs. Figures are the client's own, taken at the six-month audit. Named references on request.

01

Margin Recovery

  • Speciality chemicals
  • $310M revenue
  • Gujarat & Tamil Nadu

A price book nobody had rebuilt in nine years

The situation

Volumes at a record, EBITDA down 340 basis points. The commercial team blamed raw material inflation. The board had stopped believing the monthly pack.

What we did

We rebuilt cost-to-serve for 1,900 SKUs across 640 customers from invoice and freight data. Twenty-two percent of volume — and 41% of the sales bonus base — was priced below fully-loaded cost. We then sat in the customer conversations for eleven weeks, because a price book nobody will defend is just a document.

Gross margin bridge: price +310 basis points, procurement +140, volume lost −40, SKU rationalisation +70, netting to +480 basis points.+310Price+140Procure-40Volume+70SKU+480Net
Where the 480 basis points came from — price first, structure last.
Gross margin
+480 bps
Volume lost, all of it loss-making
3%
Start to handover
19 weeks

02

Post-Acquisition Integration

  • Healthcare diagnostics
  • Four-lab roll-up
  • Karnataka

Month five of an integration nobody was running

The situation

Four regional lab networks acquired in fourteen months. Each still ran its own information system, courier contracts and price list. The synergy case had assumed otherwise.

What we did

We stood up an integration office reporting to the chief executive and sponsor jointly, and sequenced around sample logistics first — the only workstream touching revenue. Redundancy decisions were taken in week six rather than month nine, where the plan had parked them.

Integration sequence across 200 days: sample logistics first, then organisation and systems, with pricing last.Sample logisticsOrganisationSystemsPricing & payerday 42 — org decisions
The 200-day sequence. Sample logistics ran first because it was the only workstream touching revenue.
Annualised synergies, against a $7.8M case
$11.2M
Integration run time
200 days
Accreditation lapses
Zero

03

Performance Turnaround

  • Building materials
  • $140M revenue
  • Family-owned, third generation

Nine weeks of cash and three lenders in the room

The situation

Sixty-three days of inventory, 118 days of receivables, a covenant test nine weeks out. The family had never met lenders without the founder, who had died four months earlier.

What we did

A thirteen-week cash model in eight days, taken to the lending group before they came to us. We stopped three of eleven product lines, released working capital from slow inventory, and renegotiated terms with the four largest distributors.

Thirteen-week cash headroom rising from below zero to $4.1M, clearing the covenant threshold in week five.covenant floor$4.1Mweek 1week 13
Thirteen-week cash headroom. The covenant floor was cleared in week five.
Covenant met, with headroom of
$4.1M
Working capital released
$9.2M
Refinanced, tighter by
140 bps

08 — References

What clients say when we are not in the room.

We do not publish client logos. Attribution is by role; named references go directly to prospective clients who ask.

“They spent the first three weeks on our shop floor and the fourth telling our board things we had been avoiding for two years. The second part is what we were actually paying for.”
Group Chief ExecutiveListed auto components manufacturer · Client since 2021
“I have used four of the large firms. Longacre is the only one where the people who sold the work were the people who did the work.”
Operating PartnerMid-market private equity fund
“We asked them to extend. They declined, and told us our own team could run it from there. They were right, and it saved us about $600,000 in fees we did not need to spend.”
Chief Operating OfficerDiagnostics network, South India

Who we work for

41%
Private-equity portfolio companies
34%
Family-owned groups
25%
Listed mid-caps

Share of fee revenue, 2024. Excludes pro bono work.

09 — Insights

What we have written down.

Six pieces a year, each drawn from work we have done. Nothing gated, no newsletter.

  • June 2026Post-Acquisition Integration

    The synergy number in the model is not the synergy number

    Deal models book synergies at the point of decision. Operations deliver them 7.4 months later on average. Everything that goes wrong lives in that gap.

    9 min read

  • March 2026Margin Recovery

    Cost-to-serve is a sales problem before it is a finance problem

    Every under-priced customer has a name, an account manager and a commission attached. Until the incentive plan changes, the price book will not.

    6 min read

  • November 2025The firm

    Why we end engagements at fourteen weeks

    Long engagements usually mean the client's own team was never put in charge. We treat duration as a failure metric, not a revenue one.

    4 min read

10 — Enquiries

Send us the problem in three lines.

You do not need a brief, a budget or an RFP. Describe what is not working. Within two working days a partner will tell you whether it is something we should look at — and if it is not, which firm we would call instead.

Start a conversationenquiries@longacre.co
Who reads it
Every enquiry is read by a partner. There is no business development team here, because the people who would staff it are the people you would end up working with.
Response time
Two working days.
By telephone
+91 495 402 1180