The Role
The role sits within the Company and Personal Insolvency (CPI) Team, a specialist sub-team within Teneo’s Australian restructuring and insolvency practice. The team manages a broad range of corporate and personal insolvency appointments, including liquidations, voluntary administrations, receiverships and bankruptcies. The role is responsible for leading the day-to-day management of both new and existing insolvency appointments, including strategy setting, statutory compliance, investigations, stakeholder communication, financial analysis, asset realisation and team supervision within the Australian insolvency framework.
Key Responsibilities
As an Associate Director, the primary nature of work that you will get involved with will likely include:
Engagement leadership, administration and compliance
- Leading the day-to-day administration of a portfolio of corporate and personal insolvency appointments from commencement through to completion.
- Developing and implementing case strategy with appointees and junior team member and taking ownership of the efficient progression of matters.
- Ensuring physical and electronic case files are complete, accurate and maintained in accordance with firm procedures.
- Overseeing case checklists and statutory diaries, and ensuring all critical deadlines are identified, allocated and met.
- Reviewing and approving statutory lodgements with ASIC, the ATO and AFSA.
- Ensuring compliance with statutory deadlines under the Corporations Act 2001, Bankruptcy Act 1966 and other relevant legislation.
Reporting, stakeholder and client management
- Preparing and reviewing reports to creditors and other stakeholders, including progress reports and estimated outcome statements.
- Leading the preparation of reports and strategic updates to secured creditors and other key stakeholders.
- Managing external stakeholder queries and sensitive correspondence in a professional, timely and commercially appropriate manner.
- Acting as the primary day-to-day contact for directors, insolvent individuals, creditors, solicitors, agents, valuers, financiers, regulators and other external stakeholders.
- Leading meetings of creditors and other stakeholder meetings, where appropriate.
Team leadership and broader contribution
- Leading and overseeing site attendance and ongoing site operations, including trading businesses, securing assets, managing employee matters and addressing other appointment-specific requirements.
- Supervising, delegating and reviewing work performed by onshore and offshore team members, and providing timely coaching and feedback.
- Providing concise, strategic updates to Appointees and senior stakeholders on case progression, key risks, commercial decisions and deadlines.
- Ensuring best practice, firm standards and regulatory requirements are reflected in all work performed, reviewed and issued by the engagement team.
Financial, investigative and asset realisation work
- Directing investigative workstreams and maximising use of technology to achieve efficiencies in high-volume reviews.
- Leading investigations into potential antecedent or voidable transactions, including unfair preferences, uncommercial transactions and insolvent trading and developing recovery strategies with Appointees and legal advisers.
- Leading asset identification, recovery and realisation processes.
- Overseeing the adjudication of creditor claims, dividend calculations and creditor distributions.
- Preparing and reviewing estimated outcome statements, cash flows and other financial analyses to support strategic and commercial decision making.
Business development and commercial management
- Managing engagement budgets, work in progress, recoverability and financial performance, and proactively addressing commercial issues.
- Developing and maintaining relationships with lawyers, accountants, financiers and other referral sources.
- Identifying opportunities for new engagements and contributing to proposals, fee submissions and pitch documents.
- Representing Teneo at industry events and contributing to thought leadership and the growth of the CPI practice.
Key Skills & Experience
The successful candidate will ideally have:
- Approximately 6 to 10 years of corporate and personal insolvency experience gained in a specialist insolvency practice or accounting firm.
- Advanced experience working with insolvency case management systems, such as IPS Cloud or similar.
- Demonstrated experience independently managing the lifecycle of corporate and personal insolvency appointments, including medium and complex matters.
- Strong working knowledge of key statutory requirements, reporting obligations and compliance deadlines under the Australian insolvency framework.
- Excellent written communication skills, with experience in preparing and reviewing complex correspondence, reports and statutory documents.
- Strong attention to detail and a demonstrated ability to review and deliver accurate, high-quality work across an engagement team.
- The ability to lead a portfolio of engagements, manage competing deadlines and allocate resources to prioritise work effectively.
- Strong commercial judgement and risk awareness, including the confidence to make recommendations, escalate material issues and resolve issues appropriately.
- Strong financial analysis skills, including the ability to interpret financial statements, cash flows, bank statements and complex transactional data.
- Highly developed professional communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to independently liaise with senior clients, regulators, creditors, directors, employees, solicitors, agents and internal stakeholders.
- Demonstrated experience supervising, mentoring and developing junior staff, including reviewing work and providing constructive feedback.
- Experience contributing to business development, client relationship management, proposals and market-facing activities.
- Proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
- A strong, flexible work ethic, a practical and team-oriented approach.
- Relevant tertiary qualifications in accounting, commerce, business, finance or commercial law.
- Relevant professional qualifications such as CPA or CA membership. ARITA Advanced Certification, or progress towards certification, will be highly regarded.
- Experience using AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot etc.) to improve productivity, analysis and workflow efficiency is desirable.
About Teneo
Teneo is the global CEO advisory firm. We partner with our clients globally to do great things for a better future.
Drawing upon our global team and expansive network of senior advisors, we provide advisory services across our five business segments on a stand-alone or fully integrated basis to help our clients solve complex business challenges. Our clients include a significant number of the Fortune 100 and FTSE 100, as well as other corporations, financial institutions and organisations.
Our full range of advisory services includes strategic communications, investor relations, financial transactions and restructuring, management consulting, physical and cyber risk, organisational design, board and executive search, geopolitics and government affairs, corporate governance and ESG.
The firm has more than 1,800 employees located in 50+ offices around the world.