About Amberside Advisors

Amberside Advisors specialise in providing project finance consultancy, and financial and commercial advisory services to public and private sector organisations involved in Infrastructure, Energy and Energy Transition projects. Our services include financial and commercial advisory support to transactions including Debt & Equity raises, Buyside and Sellside M&A, Refinancing, Due Diligence, financial model development, model audit and training. We have worked on more than 2,500 projects to date across a wide range of sectors and global locations and our clients are well-known companies with billions of pounds of investments.

Part of the Steer Group since July 2022, we serve a global client base through 22 offices across four continents and take great pride in providing high quality advisory, customer service and insight into our clients’ projects. Our core industry sectors are large scale energy and infrastructure & decentralised energy. We regularly advise on major projects ranging across road and rail, schools and hospitals, to wind, solar and biomass as well as Decentralised Energy projects and Heat Networks, including public service delivery contracts in sectors such as local authorities, healthcare, education and justice.

Location: London / Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. We support hybrid working, typically we expect our people to be either in the office, or with clients 60% of their working week.

Responsibilities of the role.

This role will report to Amberside’s Director, who leads on our energy transition investment mandates, advising the public and private sector on all the commercial (including contractual, financial and policy-related) aspects of decentralised energy sectors like Heat Networks, CHP, EfW, and Smart (Integrated) Local Energy Systems.

This is a key growth area for Amberside from its existing clean energy platform, and a key collaboration sector across the Steer Group globally, together with other Net Zero and Decarbonisation workstreams such as e-mobility, with executive oversight from our Head of Sustainability, globally.

This will be a senior role in the team, so it is likely to include line management and utilisation of resources across the teams. This role will also lead in the delivery of concurrent advisory mandates, driving the value-add to clients, managing relationships and programmes, and producing (and or reviewing for) high quality client outputs.

The role will be varied and expected to originate and develop opportunities for Amberside to provide its comprehensive advisory function to its existing clients, and the wider market to commercialise new offerings. This will include supporting Steer’s initiatives that may apply internationally.

Specific responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Independently (but supported) leadership on business development to grow new sub-sectors, clients and markets is imperative – growth focussed with exceptional client presentation skills and ideally a demonstrable pipeline of prospective clients.

• Delivering several complex client engagements.
• Managing commercial aspects of an individual engagement to achieve desired levels of quality and profitability.
• Executing projects and maintaining a review process to ensure projects are completed to a level that meets the high-quality standards of Amberside Advisors.
• Providing commercial/technical knowledge on projects specifics to wider members of the team, to ensure on going learning and development within the team.
• Progressing to specialise and contribute to a practice area - developing and maintaining industry knowledge and demonstrating sound knowledge of economic, political and market trends.
• Contributing towards creating innovative and repeatable solutions which strengthen business performance.
• Passing on pertinent market/client knowledge to senior management and colleagues/ teams to aid the development of knowledge.
• Managing scope and delivering timely and quality outputs.
• Understands risks and ensures project remain compliant.
• Identifying lessons learned and enhance future quality of performance.
• Working on CPD to maintain any relevant professional status/ accreditation.
• Meeting deadlines throughout the AB Performance Development Cycle for self, including seeking good quality feedback goal setting, providing input into engagement/ project reviews.
• Ensuring relevant project team members are accurately charging time to engagement codes as part of assessing profitability of individual projects.
• Taking action to ensure employee wellbeing is being actively managed in the office.
• Exhibiting role model behaviour in line with Amberside Advisors values.
• Building constructive working relationships across different teams within Steer and the wider Amberside Advisors team.
• Being able to step back, see the bigger picture and “make the numbers” talk when reviewing datasets and models, including financial models where relevant to project
• Ensure projects are “closed down” will all potential marketing opportunities exploited.
• Ensures where applicable, that team meets client expectations, budget and profit requirements.
• Developing the team through “on the job” mentoring.
• Comfortable with “working in the grey”.

• Experienced in Decentralised Energy/Heat Networks/Energy Services commercial development
• Significant transaction management and counterparty/stakeholder negotiation experience
• Private and Public sector experience desirable
• Line management experience for high performance environment
• Exceptional BD and client relationship management, and able to support the strategic/growth business planning of the commercial advisory practice
• Strong Project (and resource) and bid Management, and Project Directing
• Working in a commercial/investment or advisory/consulting role in infrastructure services for major projects, in a financial/commercial focussed environment.
• Experience in delivery of large-scale infrastructure projects, preferably the low carbon energy sector, including the commercial development and financing of assets.
• Experience of project management, business case development, report writing, due diligence, risk and opportunity analysis.
• Client-facing experience in providing technical knowledge and expertise to maximise the value of the project for stakeholders.

Qualifications required

• Degree in business administration or relevant field such as economics, law, finance, sciences, engineering. MBA/MSc/MA desirable
• ACA/CIMA/CFA/IACCM/CMI/MEI or equivalent membership (optional)
• Expert user of Microsoft Office products, including Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook & PowerPoint
• The ability to work and communicate as part of a team, and in an effective manner
• Skilled at coping well when under pressure from competing priorities and interruptions
• Able to apply research skills to solve new issues and make improvements
• The role requires working to deadlines, prioritising workload supporting wider team members, while providing a high level of conscientious service at all times to be our clients’ trusted advisor

About you

Values and skills we look for in an Amberside employee:

• Driving curiosity to solve client problems and respond to a challenge.
• Belief that solving the world’s energy and climate challenges is something to which we should all respond.
• Passion for understanding the financial drivers for each project, combined with the intellectual and communication skills to help clients understand the impact of those drivers.
• Confidence in using you own initiative and making decisions at pace.
• Exceptional attention to detail and an ability to translate this to an Excel model.
• Managing complexity; ambitious and passionate about decarbonisation and infrastructure investment
• Practiced at communicating complex information in a clear and concise manner
• Confidence in exhibiting role model behaviour in line with Amberside Advisors values.
• You must be self-motivated, a team player and find it easy to adapt to your working environment.

We offer a competitive package of benefits including

• Competitive starting salary along with discretionary company bonus based on combined company and personal performance
• 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) common across all employees with the ability to buy and sell up to 10 days leave; plus up to 5 optional volunteering days (2 paid)
• Pension (7.5% employer contribution post probation), life assurance (4* Salary), and Group Income Protection (salary protection) and employee assistance programme
• Other optional including season ticket loan, cycle to work, Gym discount, eye care, language lessons
• Relevant Learning and Development opportunities
• Steer’s employee ownership structure provides share voting rights, and ability to invest in shares through salary sacrifice
• Weekly lunch in-person paid for by the company
• Team building and sports and social club events and activities
• Flexible working hours and work-life balance
• London and Hemel Hempstead based offices