Associate Director, Transaction Services

Leeds / Birmingham / Edinburgh (Manchester, Bristol and London also considered) Circa £90,000 to £100,000 plus significant bonus potential

Hybrid working, with travel as the role requires

You are very good at this. That is no longer the interesting question.

Somewhere around Senior Manager, the job quietly changes. The diligence itself stops being the hard part. What starts to matter is whether anyone will let you build something.

If you are in a large firm right now, you probably already know the answer to how long that takes. There is a queue. There is a structure. There is a partnership that has to be navigated before you can pitch a client someone else has a relationship with. None of it is anyone's fault. It is simply what scale costs.

We are recruiting for an independent advisory firm where that cost has not been incurred.

What is actually on offer

Room to run. Fewer layers between the person with the idea and the person who can approve it. Pricing, pitching, scoping and hiring decisions get made in days rather than sent round a committee. If you have spent the last two years thinking you could move faster with less around you, this is where that gets tested.

A bigger market than the one you have now. No audit practice means no independence conflicts. No checking whether a colleague three floors up audits the target, the buyer, or half the bidders. You take the call and you go and win it. For anyone who is measured on origination, that is not a culture point, it is a commercial one.

A brand you can build in public. Senior people here run their own events, publish their own sector views, and are quoted in their own name. Profile-building is treated as the job, not as something you fit in around it.

Progression that tracks contribution. People at this firm have gone from Director to Managing Director inside eighteen months. The most recent promotion round was the largest in its history. This is a business adding senior structure, not defending it. The route is clear and the pace is largely yours to set.

Ownership. There is a route for people at every level to hold a stake in the business. Bonuses at this grade have reached 30 to 35% in strong years, and the wider incentive arrangements open up further as you progress.

A package built around the person. Core and optional benefits span pension, private medical, dental, critical illness cover, group income protection and life assurance, alongside cycle to work, gym membership and retail discounts, competitive maternity and shared parental leave with return-to-work coaching, and a dedicated training portal. The firm has been clear with us that the overall package will be structured to attract the very best person for this role. If your numbers sit above the range quoted, that is a conversation rather than a reason not to have one.

What you would be doing

Leading buy-side and sell-side financial due diligence, vendor due diligence and vendor assist for private equity and mid-market corporate clients. Running engagements end to end and owning the client relationship through them. Building and developing the team around you. And going out and winning your own work.

What they are looking for

Deep Transaction Services experience is assumed rather than assessed. What is being judged is everything on top of it: commercial instinct, appetite to originate, genuine interest in a sector rather than availability to one, and whether you actually want to build something with your name on it.

Sector is open. TMT is of particular interest, but consumer, industrials, healthcare, business services and financial services are all live.

Not sure yet?

That is fine, and it is expected at this level. Before any application, CV or process, we can arrange an entirely off-the-record conversation so you can understand the firm properly and decide in your own time. Nothing is submitted anywhere until you say so.

Javed Bobat, Co-Founder, iFF Talent jav@ifftalent.com | 07471 155006

Transactions Services - Associate Diector