Managing Partner – Sector Advisory — Beauty And Personal-Care Business

The mandate

Beauty and personal-care companies are facing a margin problem that no single function can solve. Premium ingredients and packaging remain exposed to cost volatility, promotions have become harder to withdraw, and digital channels make price differences immediately visible. At the same time, reducing product or pack complexity can damage brand meaning if decisions are made from a cost ledger alone. Clients are seeking advisers who can join consumer proposition, formulation, claims, revenue management, sourcing and operating execution rather than deliver another isolated procurement or pricing programme.

The partnership is appointing a Managing Partner – Sector Advisory to build that proposition from Singapore. The leader will own the regional beauty and personal-care agenda, originate and steward significant client relationships, shape multidisciplinary engagements and develop the senior team required to deliver them. The mandate combines market-making with professional responsibility. Revenue matters, but it must result from advice that changes a client's economics and capability; the role is not a licence to sell large teams against loosely framed transformation themes.

Gross-margin recovery is the initial focus because it exposes the need for sector judgement. A packaging change can alter shelf impact and production loss. A formulation substitution may affect efficacy, claims, registration and consumer trust. A price increase can be undermined by pack architecture or channel conflict. The Managing Partner must help boards choose among these consequences and build programmes in which brand, commercial, scientific and operational leaders share the same value logic.

Scope and operating context

Based onsite in Singapore, the role reports to the Global Managing Partner and regional partner council. It will shape work across an ecosystem of approximately 1,075 employees and material partners, although only a focused sector team will report directly. The leader will draw on strategy, consumer insight, revenue growth, operations, data, organisation, transactions and implementation capabilities across the firm. Their authority will depend on the quality of the client problem and the trust they create across practices, not simply on formal ownership of resources.

Clients include multinational groups, founder-led brands, regional champions, manufacturers, retailers and investors. Their needs range from formulation rationalisation to protecting unit economics during retail entry or testing a margin thesis against regulatory and capacity constraints. Those situations cannot be forced into one diagnostic.

The partnership already has relationships in consumer goods and adjacent sectors. The new Managing Partner must decide where a specialist beauty and personal-care proposition adds value, where existing sector leadership should remain primary, and how credit and accountability will be shared. Internal collaboration is therefore a commercial requirement as well as a cultural one.

First-year agenda

During the first three months, the Managing Partner will develop a fact base on client demand, existing credentials, active relationships, talent and competitive differentiation. They will review recent engagements to identify where the firm produced durable margin improvement and where recommendations failed during product, customer or supply implementation. The output should be a small number of priority client situations and a clear explanation of why this partnership is equipped to address them.

The leader will then codify a margin-recovery approach without turning it into a template. Common analytical foundations may include the gross-to-net waterfall, cost-to-serve, formulation and component complexity, channel price architecture, claims constraints, consumer switching risk and implementation readiness. However, hypotheses, sequencing and evidence must be rebuilt for each client. Tools should accelerate understanding and make assumptions auditable; they must not predetermine the answer.

Within six months, the Managing Partner is expected to have mobilised several senior client dialogues and converted the strongest into well-scoped work. Engagement letters must define the decision to be made, executive ownership, access to evidence and conditions for value realisation. Where a client wants a cost target without confronting portfolio or commercial choices, the leader should reshape the work or decline it rather than promise unsupported savings.

Talent formation will run in parallel. The Managing Partner will identify practitioners who combine category knowledge with functional depth, create apprenticeship around live problems and recruit selectively where essential capability is absent. Sector expertise should reside in a community that can challenge one another, not in a single rainmaker supported by interchangeable delivery teams. By year-end, succession and client coverage plans should reduce dependence on the appointee personally.

The first year should produce selective, evidence-led insight on issues such as premiumisation, refill adoption or creator-led demand. Its worth will be judged by stronger executive conversations, with confidential client learning protected.

Leadership responsibilities

The Managing Partner will be accountable for the quality and economics of the sector portfolio. They will sponsor major proposals, select engagement leaders, review hypotheses and intervene when delivery drifts from the client's decision. Commercial forecasts must distinguish qualified demand from relationship optimism, and staffing plans must protect quality rather than maximise utilisation blindly.

On client work, the leader must reconcile executives with conflicting definitions of value. Consumer evidence, technical constraints and economics should be challenged together, and recommendations must state what stops, which management behaviour changes and what remains to be tested.

The role carries partnership obligations beyond the sector. The appointee will contribute to governance, talent decisions, risk management and the development of intellectual capital. They must share relationships, recognise colleagues' contributions and uphold independence when the firm has multiple interests around a client ecosystem.

Measures of success

The regional partner council will assess high-quality client origination, realised engagement margin, repeat work earned through impact, executive references and the proportion of assignments that progress from diagnosis into client-owned execution. Claimed client value must be supported by an agreed baseline and tracked after recommendations; proposal value or identified opportunity will not be counted as realised impact.

Practice health will be measured through senior-team strength, cross-practice participation, retention of critical talent, apprenticeship quality and concentration of revenue by partner and client. Risk indicators will include scope disputes, independence concerns, write-offs and client complaints. Thought leadership will be judged through the senior conversations it creates, not impressions or publication volume.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring at least 28 years of relevant leadership, including a sustained record advising beauty, personal-care, cosmetics, ingredients, packaging or closely adjacent consumer businesses. They may be a senior consulting partner or an exceptional industry executive with extensive board advisory and business-development credibility. In either case, they must show that they have personally shaped ambiguous, cross-functional decisions rather than only overseen delivery.

The successful candidate will understand how brand equity and consumer behaviour interact with formulation, manufacturing, sourcing and channel economics. They should have led material margin programmes in which the obvious cost answer was not necessarily the right enterprise answer. A credible regional network is important, but portable relationships must be represented carefully and never assumed to transfer without client choice.

Partnership behaviour is non-negotiable. The appointee must be generous with credit, direct about risk and capable of earning followership from senior specialists who do not report to them. They should write and speak with precision, tolerate intellectual disagreement and remain involved when implementation reveals that an original hypothesis was wrong.

Compensation and appointment terms

The indicative annual base is SGD 600,000–850,000, alongside performance-linked and long-term participation appropriate to partnership contribution. Structure and entry terms will reflect verified client impact, practice-building record and any approved pathway into partnership economics. Treatment of deferred awards or mobility needs will be considered through a documented individual process.

Confidentiality

The advisory firm is not identified in this public brief because the role intersects with partner succession and active client relationships. Deeper information on governance, economics and the existing opportunity set will be provided after identity, conflict and confidentiality checks. Candidates must not submit client names, protected proposals or proprietary methods as evidence of suitability.