Lawrence Tomlinson

Lawrence Neil Tomlinson is an English businessman, who with an estimated fortune of £550 million, ranks 151st on the 2011 Sunday Times Rich List.

Tomlinson grew up in Batley, where he attended grammar school before going on to study engineering at Huddersfield College at age 15. Early on in his studies, engineering company, Wellman Bibby, spotted his skills and sponsored his engineering degree at Bradford University. He was head hunted by Holset Engineering for their Graduate Trainee Programme in 1987.

Throughout most of his youth, his father was a haulage driver and his mother worked at Fox’s Biscuits. When he was in his teens his parents started a care home. Tomlinson was involved from the start, writing software on an Amstrad 8256 to aid them with the management of the care home. After completing his studies, and whilst still in training at Holset Engineering, Tomlinson bought the care home from his parents in 1988. This was the start of Tricare.

Tomlinson initially started with a single care home in 1988, which has since grown into the LNT Group and employs over 2,000 people across five core businesses:

The LNT Group was ranked 28th in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 Companies in 2010.

Tomlinson was the Institute of Directors’ Overall Director of the Year 2013 and advised Government on business issues as the Serial Entrepreneur in Residence in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills in 2013-14.

Tomlinson started in business importing ski boats and classic cars into the UK. Borrowing £526k from his local bank in 1988, he bought out his parents care home company and, spotting a gap in the market for bespoke purpose built care homes, he went on to design, build and operate new facilities, establishing LNT Construction in 1991. LNT Construction has built 20-25% of all the new elderly care homes in the UK, operating under a vertically integrated model since 2008, when Tomlinson purchased their main subcontractors for cash.

From there, he launched further businesses including LNT Software, which develops and sells bespoke software for the care home industry. LNT Software’s care home management programme, CoolCare has been installed in over 1,000 care homes across the country.

A further addition to the LNT Group was LNT Solutions, a chemical company that Tomlinson bought from his motor-racing instructor in the pub following a track day. The business initially produced domestic products which, whilst demonstrating good technology, were not best suited to business-consumer sales. LNT Solutions supplies Network Rail with a chemical that stops trains slipping on the leaves, de-ices the third rail and supplies runway and aeroplane wing de-icer to airports across North America and Northern Europe.

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