Global advisory and consulting
The lowest-friction way into a market you do not yet know.
An advisory engagement creates no office of director. There is no registry filing, no regulator pre-approval, no work permit, no residency arithmetic and no statutory liability. In most cases it is delivered largely remotely, with periodic presence.
That is why it is so often the right first move. A board considering its first foreign appointment can take advice before it takes a director; a director considering an unfamiliar market can work with a board there before committing to a five-year term and personal liability under a legal system they have never operated under.
What boards actually ask for
Four engagement types, and what each one is really solving.
Every one of these arrives at the Exchange described as something else — usually as a search. Naming the engagement correctly at the outset is most of the value.
Board effectiveness and composition review
An external assessment of how a board actually works, and a specification for the next two appointments. Increasingly required rather than optional: several markets now expect an externally facilitated review on a defined cycle, and a board approaching a tenure cliff needs the sequence mapped before it starts nominating.
Typical shape — Three months. Interviews, observation of a board meeting, a written report, a session with the chair.
Governance design for a pre-IPO or family group
Moving a founder-led or family-controlled group from owner governance to a board that satisfies its market's listing regime — committee charters, the board calendar, the separation of ownership from management, and the specification for the first independent directors.
Typical shape — Six months, phased, with a defined deliverable set at each phase.
Shareholder and investor engagement
Preparing a board to hold a conversation it has not had before — an engaged or activist shareholder, a first-time overseas investor base, a contested resolution. Substance and sequencing, not media training.
Typical shape — Three to six months, with board attendance by invitation.
Controls, risk and regulatory readiness
Getting a board to the point where it can make a declaration it has never made before, or hold a supervisory relationship it has just acquired. Assurance mapping, committee charters, and an honest account of where the evidence does not yet exist.
Typical shape — Four months, roughly five days a month, with audit-committee attendance.
A line we hold
An adviser to a board is not a candidate for it.
If you conduct a board effectiveness review and then present yourself as the answer to the gap you identified, the review was not independent — and every subsequent recommendation you made becomes suspect in hindsight. Boards know this, and the ones that do not are the ones that later regret it.
So the Exchange scopes advisory engagements with the independence position stated up front: whether the adviser is eligible for a subsequent appointment, and if so after what interval and on whose decision. Several of the briefs on this board specify independence from any search that follows, and that is a requirement of the engagement rather than a courtesy.
It is worth being clear that this cuts against our own commercial interest — an adviser who converts to a director is a second fee. It is also the reason a chair is willing to let us near the board in the first place.
How an engagement is scoped
- 1A conversation with the chair or the committee chair about the problem, not the deliverable. Most engagements are mis-specified at this point, and it is cheap to fix here and expensive later.
- 2A written scope: what will be examined, what will not, who will be spoken to, what is produced, and by when.
- 3The independence position, stated: whether the adviser may be considered for any appointment that follows, and on what basis.
- 4A fee, fixed against the scope. Day rates where the shape is genuinely open-ended, and we say which it is.
- 5Delivery, with a session at the end that is a discussion rather than a presentation.
Open now
5 advisory engagements across 5 markets.
Advisory — Internal Controls Readiness for Provision 29
United Kingdom·Financial Services
UK-listed specialist financial services group
The board must make its first declaration on the effectiveness of material controls for the financial year beginning in 2026, and does not yet have an assurance map that would support it.
Board Advisory — Overseas Shareholder Engagement
Japan·Industrial & Precision Manufacturing
TSE Prime Market issuer facing engaged overseas shareholders
The board has received a substantive letter from an overseas institutional shareholder on capital efficiency and board composition, and has no director who has been on the other side of that conversation.
Advisory — Board Skills Matrix and INED Succession
Hong Kong SAR·Property & Real Estate
HKEX-listed property group with long-tenured INEDs
Three INEDs are inside the nine-year transition window, and the issuer must publish a board skills matrix under the Corporate Governance Code amendments that took effect on 1 July 2025.
Governance Advisory — Board Formation for a Pre-IPO Group
Saudi Arabia·Healthcare & Logistics
Saudi family group preparing for a Tadawul listing
A family group intends to list and must move from family governance to a CMA-compliant board within the next two board cycles, including the independence and committee requirements it has never operated under.
Advisory — Board Effectiveness and Composition Review
Netherlands·Energy & Chemicals
Euronext-listed chemicals group
Two supervisory board members approach the twelve-year ceiling and the board's statutory gender balance constrains the sequence of replacements. The chair wants an external effectiveness review before the nomination process begins.
How to read these briefs
Every card states its provenance. A retained mandate is a search Gladwin has been engaged to run. Actively sourcing means a demand profile the Exchange is sourcing against, with the sponsor not yet confirmed on this board — we say so rather than implying a signed mandate. Organisations shown as descriptions are archetypes, never masked real names.
Global advisory and consulting
Advise first. Decide about the board afterwards.
For a board, it is the cheapest way to find out whether outside judgement helps. For a director, it is the only way to work inside an unfamiliar governance system without taking on its liabilities first.