Associate - Energy Transition

About Amberside Advisors

Amberside Advisors Ltd (‘AAL’) specialise in providing project finance consultancy and financial and commercial advisory services to public and private sector organisations. AAL combines marketleading financial modelling capability with experienced project finance expertise, and our services include advisory, refinancing, due diligence, 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 low carbon, transport, decentralised energy, large scale energy and infrastructure, and we regularly advise on major projects ranging across heat networks, wind, solar and biomass, road and rail, schools and hospitals, as well as public service delivery contracts in sectors such as local authorities, healthcare, education and justice.

AAL are an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to eliminating discrimination and encouraging diversity across our employees. In addition, staff wellbeing is a key focus for AAL, and annual events are dedicated to reconnecting with colleagues, welcoming new joiners and having fun together as a team. Furthermore, weekly social events provide an easy and enjoyable way to get to know your peers.

About the role

This role will report to Amberside’s Director of Commercial Advisory, 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.

This will be a senior role in the team likely to include line management, utilising the resources across the teams, but also prepared to take a leading role 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, and whilst the focus will be in the delivery of advisory mandates, will also include working on tenders, presentations, and reports.

Requirements

Specific responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Managing several complex client engagements or components independently
• 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.
• Business development to grow new sectors, clients and markets.
• Providing commercial/technical knowledge on projects specifics to junior staff and feeding back any perceived knowledge gaps to senior management to deal with.
• Progressing to specialise and contribute to a practice area - developing and maintaining industry knowledge and demonstrating sound knowledge of economic, political and market trends.

• Ensuring relevant project team members are accurately charging time to proposal / engagement codes as part of assessing profitability of individual projects.
• 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.
• Ability to understand clients’ needs and translate that into a scope.
• Deliver timely and quality outputs. Communicating risk and issue early to appropriate colleagues.
• Holding/attending reviews on completion of projects to identify lessons learned and enhance future quality of performance.
• Working on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to maintain any relevant professional status/ accreditation.
• Meeting deadlines throughout the AAL Performance Development Cycle for self, including seeking good quality feedback goal setting, providing input into engagement/ project reviews.
• 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.
• Participate in team meetings to support with resource allocation.
• Takes ownership of complex projects.
• Being able to step back, see the bigger picture and ability to translate datasets and models into a value-add analysis, 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.
• Uses resources effectively and efficiently on project/task.
• Effectively manages director expectations of project outcomes.
• Developing the team through continuous mentoring.
• Comfortable with “working in the grey”.

Ideal Professional Experience:

• Experienced in Decentralised and Renewable Energy/DHN/ESCO commercial development
• Private and Public sector experience desirable Significant transaction and counterparty/stakeholder negotiation experience
• 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 for tenders (potentially 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...

• 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 commercial drivers for a 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/from an Excel model
• Practiced at communicating complex information in a clear and concise manner
• Confidence in exhibiting role model behaviour in line with Amberside Advisors values.
• Exceptional commercial acumen
• Knowledge of the investor sphere in the UK
• Managing complexity; ambitious and passionate about decarbonisation and infrastructure investment
• You must be self-motivated, a team player and find it easy to adapt to your working environment.

Benefits

Why join us

We offer a competitive benefits package including:

• Steer’s employee ownership profit share bonus (discretionary), share voting right, and ability to invest in further shares through salary sacrifice
• 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) common across all employees with the ability to buy and sell leave; plus up to 5 optional volunteering days (2 paid)
• Pension, life assurance, and permanent health insurance (salary protection) and employee assistance programme
• Private medical cover after probation period of 6 months and health screening taxable benefits (optional)
• Other optional including season ticket loan, cycle to work, Gym discount, eye care, language lessons
• 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