“In the case of a company that is selling, it’s the most important transaction that they’ll go through in their lifetime. It’s a transaction that can take up to a year to get done and be the culmination of a ten to sometimes 50+ year journey that they’ve gone through in building their company. It’s hard not to be passionate about it,” said Brian Smith, founder and managing partner of LCG Advisors.
Founded in 2003 by University of Tampa Alumni Brian Smith and Paul Epstein, the advisory firm specializes in loan and investment due diligence, investment banking, risk mitigation, and other select advisory services. LCG has grown into a leading financial consulting firm with 11 divisions and over 115 employees nationwide, working on over 1,500 transactions a year.
However, getting where they are today has been “quite a journey,” Smith said. First meeting in a finance capstone course as undergraduate students at the University of Tampa, Smith and Epstein soon discovered that they made a fantastic team. “In one of the courses we ended up writing up a business plan and talked about how much fun it would be, going into business together,” Smith said, “but it was really just talk at that point in time.” Little did they know what began as a joke between students would become reality years later.
With their first jobs out of college at the same company, Smith and Epstein once again had the opportunity to work together. “After three years or so at the company, we each went our separate ways for probably another 8 or 9 years and when the opportunity came up in 2003 to start a company, I thought about the projects that we had worked on and how effective we were as a team and reached out to Paul,” Smith said. And that’s how LCG began, 2 men in an office above a pizza shop in Ybor City. “We could only work until five O’clock when the music started blasting and chased us out of there and then we would go over to Green Iguana and do a couple more hours work at the bar,” Smith said. Twenty years ago, they were the only two employees. Today, the company is 120 employees strong.
According to Smith, the key to their success is “by being nimble, listening to our clients and having good employees and always being willing to hire new employees and create new positions for people we thought would be a good addition to the firm.” Their footprint spans from Tampa to Los Angeles, Portland to Boston – 27 major cities in every U.S. time zone.
Employees are at the heart of the company, with the LCG emphasis on five core values: integrity, quality, professionalism, cooperation, and employee and family focus. Through these core values, the advisory firm has created a fun, relationship centered company culture, garnering recognition as a 2023 Best Places to Work Honoree and 2023 Small Business of the Year finalist. They’ve also has been able to maintain client relationships that have spanned over the 20 years they’ve been in operation. “It’s incredibly rewarding seeing our clients be successful, but it’s also just as rewarding seeing our employees develop,” Smith said.
A Member of the Tampa Chamber since July 2022, LCG Advisors was selected as a finalist for the Chamber’s 2023 Small Business of the Year award and encourages their employees to attend chamber networking events and get involved with the Emerging Leaders program to assist in their professional development.
“The mission of the company is to provide world-class mission critical strategic and financial advisory services around transactions, but also beyond transactions,” Smith said, “We are doing more and more work with businesses leading up to a transaction and after a transaction to get their companies to the next level.”
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