Fast facts: Deal advisory

Q What’s a little-known fact about deal advisory?

Our work spans diverse projects: from wind and solar farms to toll roads and airports, and LNG plants to data centres – sometimes all in the same week! As the focus of RPS’ deal advisory team is on due diligence, we do many site visits, physical inspections of infrastructure zones, which means at any given time we could be inside a mine in Australia or travelling down a highway somewhere in Asia.

Also, our work tends to be predominantly private sector based with key clients being Private Equity funds, investors, banks, and traditional commercial sponsors.  

Q What’s a new trend in deal advisory that’s exciting?

AI is set to bring great changes to the consulting world. Already, a lot of the data crunching and data visualisation can be simplified with some of the new generative tools being released. Yet, knowing the difference between what AI can do and what it should do in deal advisory will be what’s powerful; it’s a point of difference that will create a competitive edge. 

Q Career vs reality: what’s deal advisory really like?

A core role of the RPS deal advisory team is to interpret technical information and how that relates to commercial outcomes in buying, selling, or lending to an asset. To do this, we often reach out to our wider RPS specialists, as well as experts in our parent company Tetra Tech, to tap into their skillsets. It has been fun learning about, and working with, the expanded Tetra Tech family. As we’re a global team, our strength is our diversity and world-wide outlook. 

Often, once an asset is acquired by a client, further work needs to take place to maximise the value of that capital – creating opportunities for planning, environmental studies, project management, and so on. Given the collaborative nature of deal advisory, our advisors need to be generalists who can coordinate inputs from specialists across a broad range of subjects. 

Deal advisory attracts consultants who are drawn to how complexity affects the bottom line – costs, revenues, and commercial value. 

A typical day consists of… 
Day to day, there is a lot of proposal writing. Before we can get to work, we have to win the jobs in the first instance – and that starts with composing a convincing proposal. 

Alongside writing, we also do a lot of reading. We’re provided large amounts of information on assets, and the main skill we bring to the table is the ability to filter through that volume of material, and then being able to isolate the important data in terms of the risks we are helping to address.    

The nature of this role also requires continuous learning – every day we’re weighing up and examining leading-edge ways to solve new and emerging problems. Our clients expect us to find answers to issues or challenges that they have little knowledge about, and our role is to make complex problems easy.  

The greatest challenge is…
To define the scale and scope of the work we can deliver to clients requires us to build strong internal connections across our international team. Externally, growing our influence, reputation, and reach also relies on us building and fostering relationships. Yet, lack of time and availability for networking (internal and external) and balancing networking needs with core deliverables and important tasks poses the biggest challenge to the deal advisory team. 

Q What’s an unexpected scenario someone working in deal advisory is likely to encounter?

• On a proposal for a buy-side investor into a fleet of ships, we asked around to see if there were any marine architects – it turns out there are several, and another few through associate links.

• Generally, the ongoing discovery of pockets of skills and resources within the enlarged group we didn’t know existed! 

Q Who’s a living legend in the field of deal advisory?

RPS’ Executive General Manager, Nick Turton is a living legend. He has pioneered the deal advisory or technical due diligence service offering in the industry. As such RPS’ deal advisory team has provided advice on world-leading initiatives, including playing a role in one of the most-anticipated energy transition deals in Europe.