Damian Robinson Announced As Newly Appointed Managing Director Of Advisory Services, Lucion Group

During the past two years, Lucion Group has onboarded five businesses into the Group. In September 2022, we announced a strategic business alignment of roles to reflect the structure required for our acquisitive business and expanding service lines.

During the past few months, we have been looking closely at how we can best present the Lucion Group, and its subsidiary companies; Lucion Services, Delta-Simons, Aberdeen Radiation Protection Services, Landform Surveys Ltd, Ground Engineering Ltd, and Midland Surveys Ltd, and diverse service offering. After a thorough review of the 400+ services we offer, we are pleased to present our three operational service areas; Inspection, Assessment, and Advisory, as well as announce Damian Robinson as our newly appointed Managing Director of our Advisory pillar.

Our three core service groups

Inspection - Headed up by Managing Director Jeremy Meredith, our Inspection team provides all our on-site hazardous material testing and surveying services in the built environment, facilitated by our in-house laboratories.

Assessment - Headed up by Managing Director Simon Clennell-Jones, Assessment includes all our services relating to ground investigation, geoenvironmental, geotechnical and contaminated land services.

Advisory - Headed up by Managing Director Damian Robinson, our Advisory services include all of our consultancy services across the group including our Environment, Health, Safety (EHS) and Sustainability services, Environmental Social Governance (ESG), Environmental Planning and Environmental Transaction Services.

Taking the helm for advisory services in December 2022, Damian Robinson, Managing Director - Advisory, confirms his new Senior Leadership Team and outlines his career progression within the Environmental industry.

When I accepted the role in December, my first big task was to select the Senior Leadership Team (SLT), who will be fundamental in helping me to drive Advisory forward. Now this is confirmed, I’m keen to share the team with you, along with a little more information about their background and what they’ll be doing. 

You may know me as the Divisional Director of Environmental Planning Services at Delta-Simons, or some may not know me at all and may be wondering how my background and experience fits with bringing together the new Advisory pillar for the Lucion Group, so I’d like to give some insight into this too.

Why do we need the SLT?

Our intention for Advisory is to focus on our people and our clients by delivering great work and excellence through our services. Our SLT will ensure we remain on track to deliver this through frequent engagement with our people and clients and we will hold ourselves to account and act quickly where corrections to our chosen path are required. 

The Advisory SLT team is made up of experienced technical discipline experts, but more importantly, all our leaders have a multidisciplinary outlook, with the ability to look beyond their own technical area and deliver solutions for our clients drawing on our Group capabilities. This is key to ensuring we continue to cross-sell, develop new services and work together as one team. It’s really important to me that collectively the SLT creates an environment of empowerment, listening and knowledge sharing to allow our people to flourish and therefore be engaged.

Introducing the Advisory SLT

	Ali Yarrow  - Technical Director, Environmental Planning Services & ESG Ali has been with Delta-Simons for almost 7 years now and is a specialist in EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment), ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) and forward funding with investor clients. Ali is great at creating concepts and ideas based on new legislation to help us shape new products and services. She’s commercially minded with a skill for identifying and mitigating risks. A widely respected member of the team, her broad background and sector knowledge will be a huge asset to Advisory.
	Simon Johnson - Unit Director, Environmental Planning Services  Simon is approaching 6 years with Delta-Simons and is a fully qualified Town and Country Planner and a proven multidisciplinary project director. He specialises in planning, and Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and gained and retained the company's large EIA producer status - IEMA quality mark through his engagement and coordination of our technical teams. He has also been an integral part of the development of our external ESG services and is a recognised go-to person on complex projects.
	Charlotte Buffoni - Unit Director, Environmental, Health and Safety Charlotte will be leading the EHS team moving forward after nearly 5 years with the business. She is an experienced EHS Lead and Project Manager with over 16 years delivering Global EHS Compliance Programmes for some of the world's leading tech companies across the EMEA region and beyond.
	Rob Molyneux - Unit Director, Sustainability Services Rob will be underpinning our sustainability services within Advisory and has 18 years of operational experience in the energy and sustainability field, primarily in energy and carbon for the built environment and corporate sustainability. Rob is coming up to 4 years with Delta-Simons and I’m really excited about how this area of Advisory will grow with him at the forefront.
	Aaron Cousins  - Unit Director, Environmental Transaction Services (ETS) Aaron has 18 years of consultancy experience primarily specialising in contaminated land assessment. He has recently been promoted to Unit Director and will be leading ETS going forward. Aaron has a strong background in multidisciplinary projects and will be a key factor in expanding our due diligence services in several key areas including ESG, compliance auditing, development monitoring and more. Aaron will be an integral part of helping to shape the future of our due diligence offer moving forward and I am very much looking forward to working with him.
	Graham Duffield  - Client Services Director, Advisory Graham will be taking on a new role as Client Services Director within Advisory. This is a commercial, externally focused role which will play to Graham’s commercial strengths. We’re keen to use Graham’s skills to support Advisory as a whole, as we shape the business plan and direct our efforts where there is growth and the most favourable financial returns. Graham will be monitoring the marketplace and feeding back to the SLT where there are opportunities for future products and clients, supporting our work-winning strategy and driving initiatives forward.
	Hazel Gillings  - Group Internal ESG Lead and Technical Director, Transactional ESG Hazel will be continuing her role as Group Internal ESG Lead, as well as joining the Advisory SLT as Technical Director to support Aaron with the continued evolution of our external transactional ESG offer. This is a fast-changing environment and requires continuous investment in skills and monitoring to ensure we remain at the forefront of this space. We are also seeking to tap into Hazel’s knowledge of the private equity space from her time supporting our investors Palatine to grow our presence in the corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) arena which represents an area of opportunity.

Bringing It Home to Delta-Simons

Some of you may be surprised to know that I actually began my career as a graduate consultant at Delta-Simons back in 1997! 

I spent my first couple of years as a remediation engineer, before moving into contaminated land investigations and asbestos surveys. After 4 years I moved to a global multidisciplinary consultancy, where I worked in their due diligence team supporting real estate transactions, and M&A deals and following the 2008 crash, supported banks and insolvency practitioners to preserve value in distressed asset portfolios. After nearly 12 years, I joined VolkerStevin as their UK BDM, helping them to secure frameworks and contracts on some exciting infrastructure projects. I re-joined Delta-Simons in 2014 as part of the senior leadership team to help stimulate the growth of the business - at this point, we only had 3 offices and 40 staff. I led on opening the Leeds and Manchester offices and looked at new service areas such as air quality, acoustics and water services to establish the environmental planning services division. 

These days I class myself as a ‘specialist at being a generalist’. My varied career has always involved a multidisciplinary approach, bringing different specialisms together in order to provide great services and products. I’m now excited to bring together our new Advisory team, and with the help of the SLT, my plan is to ensure silos do not develop as we get bigger and collectively use resources to make the most of future opportunities, providing new revenue streams both within the UK and beyond. This will allow our people to thrive and develop... I’m really looking forward to the new challenge!

To support these shared services across our 3 pillars; Inspection, Assessment, and Advisory, Alex Ferguson Group Managing Director for the Lucion Group, the parent company of Delta-Simons, will be responsible for leading our company Managing Directors at the Executive Board level, and for the overall commercial success of the Group. Commenting on Damian’s appointment as Managing Director - Advisory, Alex said;

“Damian has been fundamental to the growth of Delta-Simons since his return to the business in 2014, taking the lead on the diversification of services and geographical expansion of the business and creating and leading our Environmental Planning Division.  This growth platform was fundamental in the expansion of the business, ultimately leading to the acquisition by Lucion Services and the formation of the Lucion Group.  Our new structure now reflects the range of services we offer and provides a platform for the growth of our teams within the business and for acquisitive growth.

Damian is a client-facing leader with a great breadth of experience and contacts across the industry and within the Lucion Group and our Inogen Alliance.  With his experience of starting up new service lines and growing teams Damian is perfectly placed to take on the MD role for the Advisory team working alongside Jeremy, Simon and the other leaders to continue to take the business forwards.  Damian has appointed an excellent SLT with a wide range of expertise and complementary characters.  I’m looking forward to working with Damian, the MDs and the other leaders in the business to take us into another exciting period of growth.”

As we enter our 20th year of operation, Lucion Group has 25 UK locations and directly employs over 600 specialists, offering a wide range of professional environmental services. We are a purpose-driven company, dedicated to protecting people from hazardous environments and protecting the environment from the impacts of people. Our team proudly provides environmental risk management, inspection, assessment and advisory services through our collective group of companies to 12 key sectors.

If you have any questions about our three service groups or wish to discuss our services, please click ‘make an enquiry’ or speak to our Lucion Group team by calling 0345 5040 303.