Bijon Islam is the co-founder and CEO of LightCatsle Partners (LCP), a Dhaka-based management consulting firm that has experienced a consistent rise over the last several years. Started as a small operation, LCP is now often referred to as McKinsey of Bangladesh, and rightly so. 

We covered LCP a fair bit in its early days, including an interview with LCP co-founder and Managing Director Ivdav Ahmed Khan Mojlish in 2018. Between 2018 and 2022, LCP experienced phenomenal growth, going from a small team to an important player in Dhaka’s fast-growing consulting scene. Today, LCP is a completely different company with an expansive ambition to build a global consulting company out of Bangladesh. 

I recently had an opportunity to speak with Mr. Bijon. We talk about a wide range of topics including the evolution of LCP, secrets behind LCP’s phenomenal growth, LCP’s business today and ambition going forward, how LCP operates as a company, what are the major challenges for the company, culture at LCP, the business of consulting, consulting and research market in Bangladesh, we discuss his approach to work and productivity, lessons from his journey and much more. This is a brilliant read. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed doing it. 

Ruhul Kader 
Thank you for agreeing to this interview. We covered LightCastle Partners in its early days several times. We interviewed your co-founder Ivdav Ahmed Khan Mojlish once. But it was a long time ago and LCP is a very different company today. Can you briefly talk about LCP and what you do today? 

Bijon Islam 
LightCastle Partners is a management consulting firm. This is not a very new service. Although we now use a lot of the latest technologies and tools, the essence of the consulting service remains the same. In the past, people used to collect data manually, we now have automated data collection using various tools and processes. How you operate as a consultancy firm has evolved. But it is the same old consultancy service. 

Broadly speaking, we have four verticals at LightCastle Partners: management consulting, entrepreneurship ecosystems and investments, market entry advisory, and digital transformation. 
We say that everything that we do has to be data-driven. For instance, a company is looking for a consulting service to understand how to approach a particular market. Many consulting firms would solve the problem by running some focus groups, qualitative insights collections, speaking with the management, and then generating a report. 

Our methodology is different. We of course discuss it with the management but we'll also collect data from the market, speak with experts, run analyses using market data, and then we’ll produce a report. It is in our tagline that “we create data-driven opportunities for growth and impact.”