L.E.K. Consulting Brand Guidelines: Three Bain Partners in London and a 1983 Start

Three partners leave a London office.

L.E.K. Consulting was founded in 1983. English Wikipedia says three partners from the London office of Bain & Company — James Lawrence, Iain Evans and Richard Koch — left that year to start the firm. Consultancy.uk, reporting on the firm in January 2015, gave the same origin: a consultancy founded in 1983 by three former Bain partners in the UK. The company’s own website gives 1983 as its founding date.

Richard Koch’s English Wikipedia entry adds detail. It says he began his career at the Boston Consulting Group, became a partner at Bain and, after leaving in 1983, co-founded L.E.K. with Evans and Lawrence. He later left consulting, invested in companies including Filofax, Plymouth Gin and Betfair, and wrote The 80/20 Principle (1997), a book that applied the Pareto principle to business and daily work.

The firm’s first large step came a decade in. In 1993 it merged with the Alcar Consulting Group, English Wikipedia says. Alcar had been founded in 1979 and, Wikipedia says, pioneered the principles of value-based management, which judges business decisions by the shareholder value they create. The merger brought that financial lens into a firm whose founders came from general strategy work.

A partnership on two sides of the Atlantic.

L.E.K. is organised as a partnership. English Wikipedia describes it as a global strategy consulting firm based in London and Boston, with its headquarters in Boston, and lists its main areas as corporate strategy, marketing and sales, mergers and acquisitions, and operations. Its sector work runs from life sciences and healthcare services to consumer products, financial services, energy, technology, travel and transport, and retail, Wikipedia says.

The firm has grown steadily. In January 2015 Consultancy.uk counted more than 1,000 professionals in 21 offices across the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe, in a report on seven new partners, all promoted from inside the firm and based in the US, the UK, France, Australia and Singapore; their fields ranged from biopharmaceuticals and medical technology to consumer products, retail, industrials and operating models. Its website now lists 27 offices, more than 200 partners and more than 2,300 employees in 16 countries, and says it handles more than 2,000 cases a year. In October 2025 Consultancy.uk reported that partners had re-elected Clay Heskett, based in London, as global managing partner for a second consecutive four-year term; he was first elected in 2021. Under his tenure, the report said, the firm opened seven new offices, including Atlanta, Taipei and Zurich, added more than 50 partners, and built up its work in operations, supply chain, pricing, digital, and data and analytics. Its five European offices were listed as London, Zurich, Paris, Munich and Wrocław.

Leadership is spread across regions. The company’s website names Heskett as global managing partner, François Mallette in Boston as board chair, and separate heads for Europe in London, Asia-Pacific in Singapore and the Americas in Chicago. Its profile on Consultancy.uk describes a practice serving global corporations, entrepreneurial businesses and private equity investors since 1983, with work in digital strategy, major capital projects, post-merger integration and sustainability.

Books are part of how it presents its thinking. The company lists Predictable Winners, a handbook on developing and launching new products by partners Stuart Jackson and Ilya Trakhtenberg, published by Stanford University Press in 2025, as well as Edge Strategy by Alan Lewis and Dan McKone and Where Value Hides by Stuart Jackson.

How consultancies present themselves.

Management consultancies sell advice, so their brands have to stand in for something a client cannot hold. Most begin with a name — often a founder’s surname, a set of initials or a coined word — set as a confident wordmark, and pair it with one signature colour that runs from the website to the cover of every report. The visual system is usually restrained, leaving the work itself to carry the message.

Much of that work is published. Firms put out thought-leadership articles, surveys and recurring indexes, along with yearly outlooks on trends in a sector; many also run podcasts and newsletters. Their websites are organised around industry pages and capability pages, so that a hospital chief, a utility executive or a private-equity partner can find the team that speaks to them.

Case studies are a staple, but clients are often anonymised: a “global insurer” or a “regional health system” rather than a named company, with the results stated as outcomes. Alongside them sit the signals of scale and standing that firms like to show — office maps, rankings and awards from business magazines, and partnerships with technology companies.

The people side is just as visible. Large consultancies keep alumni networks for former staff, many of whom go on to become clients, and their careers pages explain the hiring process in detail, often with guides to the case interview. Many also publish annual impact or responsibility reports. The guides that follow look at how individual firms handle these conventions, and where their own stories — origins, owners and names — set them apart.

Three letters with full stops.

The name is written with full stops, as L.E.K., in the company’s own materials and in the trade press that covers it, and the firm usually adds “Consulting” in full. It has kept the same three letters since its founding, while the partnership grew to more than 200 partners, according to its website.

The firm describes itself in plain, outcome-led language. On its Consultancy.uk profile it calls itself a global strategy consultancy working with business leaders to “seize competitive advantage and amplify growth,” and says its insights help clients “master their moments of truth.” Its website summarises the approach in three steps — identify patterns, uncover value and deliver solutions — and lists five values: excellence, enablement, collaboration, empowerment and drive. Under collaboration it promises supportive teams where someone always “has your back.”

Its public face leans on numbers and research. The website opens its about page with figures for offices, partners, cases a year, nationalities and languages spoken, and the same site lists books written by its partners. In his October 2025 re-election statement, quoted by Consultancy.uk, Heskett pointed to the partnership model and the firm’s people as the centre of its success, and to clients facing inflation, rate shocks, tariffs and disruption from AI.

For a design guide, L.E.K. Consulting shows how a firm named with initials can build an identity on restraint: a compact name, a measured tone and a steady list of values rather than a slogan. Compare Bain & Company, the firm its three founders left in 1983, and Oliver Wyman, another strategy name formed from surnames. For this guide we use navy, ivory and a brick red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep L.E.K. Consulting’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.