Managing Director in Sowerby Bridge

Role Overview & Purpose:

This is a highly dynamic and transformative leadership opportunity, offering the chance to shape and lead two businesses in the electrical infrastructure sector. The role will inherit the strengths of two well-established UK-based businesses (TOFCO CPP and Lucy ZODION), while being tasked with driving growth, cultural alignment and technology innovation in a competitive and evolving market. The businesses primarily serve the UK and Middle East markets today, with the opportunity to further grow sales across these geographies as well as expanding into other international markets. With the support of experienced teams, the role will have the scope to make a lasting impact on both heritage and new opportunities, and backed by the Lucy Group, a strong international technology group with a resilient growth strategy.
The role will be responsible for growth, achieving annual revenue targets and further strengthen profitability within the next 3 years.
To succeed in this role, the role will need to deliver across three fundamental areas:

• Strategic Growth – define and execute a clear vision for the future, positioning the businesses for suitable expansion and competitive advantage
• Transformation – Manage high performing businesses, aligning people, processes, and culture.

• Operational Excellence – establish efficient structures across all operations and ensure governance, compliance and risk management are firmly in place

  
  This is an outstanding opportunity for an experienced and highly motivated leader with considerable senior leadership capability. This role will require a driven leader with substantial prior experience of business performance, growth and people management.

Role Context:

The appointment of a new leader to take forward two well-established businesses (Lucy ZODION and TOFCO) following the stepping down of the Managing Directors of both businesses. This leadership role is being established to bring fresh perspective and drive, building on the strong market expertise and operational foundation of both well established and respected organizations. The new leader will benefit from a transition period formally assuming leadership over both businesses in 2027, ensuring they have deep insight into the businesses while preparing to guide them into their next phase of growth. This role is ideal for a leader ready to take already solid businesses to their next phase of development, product expansion, and operational maturity, while maintaining continuity, culture and momentum. The position reports to the CEO of Lucy Controls.

Key Accountabilities of the Role:

The leader will have full executive responsibility for leading all core functions of the businesses. This includes:

Strategic Leadership
Provide strategic leadership, setting and executing a vision for growth, innovation, and operational excellence.
Build and lead high performing teams fostering collaboration across businesses.
Embed a forward-looking culture that balances continuity of established strengths with the adoption of new ideas and practices.

Commercial and Market Development
Enable commercial performance, further strengthen market positioning and support the commercial team to identify new opportunities for growth in the UK, the Middle East and other identified international markets.

Operational Excellence
Lead and optimize operations across manufacturing and supply chain to enable sustainable and cost-efficient scale.

Product & Technology Oversight
Drive product innovation and roadmap alignment ensuring market fit, whilst developing new opportunities.

Key Customer Segment Understanding & Relationships
Ensure clear understanding of key market and customer segments which set the businesses apart.

Financial Stewardship
Full P&L ownership, budgeting, financial planning and investment allocation to support growth and profitability targets that will be reviewed by Lucy Controls CEO and Group Executives.

Driving Business Performance and Execution Against Strategy and Business Plans
Relentlessly driving the businesses performance against the business plans/budgets and priorities.

Setting and Reviewing the Business Plan and Priorities
Building on the unit’s strategic aims and the identified Group priorities, producing the annual business plan, budget and priorities for the business.

Regulatory & Global Execution
Navigate compliance, certifications, and local requirements across the products and sectors.

Talent & Organizational Leadership
Build and develop high performing cross-functional teams, foster a culture of accountability and innovation, and lead through change and growth phases.

Leadership and Mentoring
Mentoring and guiding direct reports and the business leadership teams. Creating a culture of integrity, trust and teamwork.

Enhancement of Our Values & Brand
Ensuring the business lives the Group’s values, including delivering the highest quality of customer service across all products and services.

Regular Engagement
Continuous engagement with key stakeholders including employees, customers, suppliers and other teams across the Group as well as industry and wider market participants.

Governance & Reporting
Working closely with the leadership team and Group service lines to ensure the Group’s governance and processes are being appropriately implemented and maintained. Overall responsibility for ensuring high quality and timely reporting to Group executives and service lines on key aspects of the company’s performance and compliance.

Qualifications, Experience & Skills:

• Minimum 8 years in executive leadership roles, with full P&L ownership and accountability for business performance.
• Proven track record as a senior leader leading complex, multi stakeholder organizations.
• Strong commercial acumen, underpinned by deep product, technology and manufacturing leadership experience, with a proven ability to drive innovation, operational excellence and sustainable growth.
• Exceptional leadership and people management skills, with the ability to unite diverse teams under a shared vision.
• Brings significant UK leadership and market experience, with international experience highly beneficial.
• Background in electrical infrastructure – hardware equipment, or a related industrial sector preferred.
• Demonstrated experience in driving organizational transformation or large-scale change programs.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to scale organizations through different growth phases.
• Career history shows clear progression of increasing responsibility, strategic decision making and tangible impact on company growth and direction.
• Substantial experience in leading cross functional teams with proven ability to recruit, develop and retain top talent.
• People management experience across several company functions.
• Degree educated, with MBA and/or executive education beneficial.

Job Specific Skills & Attributes:

• Inspirational Leadership - builds trust and confidence within their team and stakeholders and understands their audience whilst communicating and delivering their message and vision with clarity, passion, and energy.
• Resilient, adaptable and innovative leader with the ability to balance strategic thinking and operational delivery.
• Achieving Excellence - understands customer requirements and what needs to be done to fulfil the business goals and objectives.
• Continuous improvement - fostering a culture of persistent continuous improvement across all aspects of the business unit to drive increased productivity, efficiency and quality.
• Strong Operational Mindset - a clear grasp of balancing R&D investment and business scalability.
• Collaboration – promotes a collegiate culture that encourages difference and respects diversity. Builds active strategic relationships with others’ functions.
• Communication - applies comprehensive knowledge to act independently while providing guidance and training to others on using clear and effective communications skills for internal and external communications to express ideas, request actions, and formulate plans or policies.
• Engaging and Developing People - understands and discloses own true ideas and feelings to encourage others to do the same in an open and honest forum.
• Strong diplomatic and negotiation skills in multi-stakeholder environments.