Chief Business Development Officer and board director at Operio Group, the $90M+ global manufacturer he founded in 2022 through the combination of LFA Machines and Vivion. Today Operio employs more than 220 people across 9 international locations. He also serves on the board of the WTI.
Alastair left formal education at 17 and, after a stint as a store manager and a brief return to Brighton University to study Business with Law, started what would become his career with a small stock of artwork and a market stall in London. That business, London Fashion Arts, pivoted in 2010 to selling small-scale pharmaceutical and nutraceutical manufacturing equipment and rebranded as LFA Machines. Over the following decade LFA grew from a single Oxford office into a global operation, opening in Fort Worth, Texas in 2016 and Taiwan in 2018.
In 2022, he took the business through its most significant structural change: combining LFA with Vivion, Inc to form Operio Group, then leading two further acquisitions to create a vertically integrated industrial platform. He served as Operio's founding CEO from 2022 to 2025. In January 2025, he recruited Declan McLaughlin as his successor and moved into the Chief Business Development Officer seat.
Nine completed transactions — four acquisitions, four divestitures, and one sale-leaseback. End-to-end experience across origination, diligence, SPA and APA negotiation, post-acquisition integration, and portfolio rationalisation. Hands-on financial structuring including debt raising, leverage management, and GAAP compliance across ASC 606, 820, and 842. Operational oversight across seven countries.
Less quantifiable but material: a willingness to close underperforming units, consolidate centres of excellence, and make the decisions that founders are typically slow to make.
More than twenty ventures across supplements, events, trading, contract manufacturing, and education. Four exited successfully, including: Bar de Cru (a luxury mobile cocktail bar), Educake (educational software), and The Oxford Health Company. Others closed or were wound up along the way — a track record he talks about openly, because the lessons of the ones that didn't work are part of why the ones that did.
See the full record →Alastair looks for board seats at mid-market ($25M–$500M) manufacturing and industrial businesses pursuing inorganic growth, particularly those operating across borders. He brings a founder's perspective on capital allocation and value creation, a practitioner's fluency in M&A and post-merger integration, and a direct line into what day-to-day operations actually require at scale. References available on request.
Board CV and Business Development CV available on request — get in touch.
An endurance runner, climber, sailor, and overlander, with time spent in more than a hundred countries — including Afghanistan, North Korea, and Liberia. He has run the Chicago Marathon, summited Kilimanjaro, driven around the world, and sailed across the Atlantic; he is now working through a three-year polar build — Svalbard in 2026, the Greenland ice cap in 2027, and in 2028 an expedition to the South Pole and Mount Vinson.
He is dyslexic, which he treats as a feature rather than a fault — an angle on problems that has shaped how he reads opportunity, structures deals, and builds teams. Woodworking is one of the quieter pursuits he keeps for himself. He lives in Overland Park, Kansas with his wife and two children.
Beyond the Boardroom →