Larry Thomas

Larry Thomas is a Senior Director with Alvarez & Marsal’s Private Equity Performance Improvement practice in Tampa. He specializes in pre- and post-transaction assessment and delivering rapid improvements through business process redesign. With more than 30 years of experience in chemical and process industries, Mr. Thomas has led businesses at every stage, from emerging growth to mature commodities.

Mr. Thomas’ notable assignments include: creating a critical asset care plan to optimize maintenance spending and improve onstream availability for a $1 billion global PE-owned chemical company; reducing the cycle-time of customer acquisition for a PE-owned packaging company by 30 percent, and improving its opportunity-to-close ratio by 25 percent; re-designing supply chain for a $200 million, four-site manufacturing division to reduce scrap rates by 20 percent, reduce working capital by 40 percent and improve safety incident rates by 80 percent; conducting strategic, operational and product-line reviews to prepare a $400 million specialty chemical division for spin-out and IPO; and restructuring an eight-site chemical manufacturing division through the shut-down of two sites, the sale of two others and an aggressive debottlenecking effort to improve overall capital utilization by 40 percent.

Prior to joining A&M, Mr. Thomas served as Vice President & Managing Director at Ranpak, where he helped prepare the company for sale and IPO. Previously, Mr. Thomas was Director of Investment Banking at Spouting Rock Capital Advisors, VP Chemicals at Toyota Tsusho and CEO at emerging-growth company Primet Precision Materials. Earlier in his career, Mr. Thomas held leadership and managerial roles at Air Products and Dow Chemical.

Mr. Thomas earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He is fluent in Spanish, is a licensed investment banker and an Adjunct Professor at Lehigh University.