Overview
We’re looking for a leader who understands where circular systems are heading and wants the platform to shape what comes next.
This isn’t a role focused on producing strategies alone. You’ll help clients design pilots, prove commercial value, build infrastructure, unlock investment and scale solutions that work.
You’ll set the direction for a global practice, grow a significant business, and help some of the world’s leading organisations turn circularity into a value system.
We’re looking for a builder. Someone who’s spent years deep in sustainable products and packaging — EPR, PPWR, eco-design, chemistry, reuse and refill — and is ready to build a global practice around it.
You’ll inherit a strong client portfolio, an experienced technical team, and a market moving faster than most firms can keep up with. Your job is to set the vision, grow the business, and make Anthesis the leader in this space.
If you’re the kind of person who reads a new regulation — or a shift in trade flows, raw-material costs, or consumer behavior — and immediately sees the commercial opportunity inside it; who can build the strategy, marshal the team to model the ROI, and help a client pilot and scale it, not just hand them a deck — keep reading.
Key Responsibilities
- Set the vision, own the strategy. Craft a compelling, forward-looking vision for where this portfolio goes next — grounded in client need, market reality, and Anthesis’s ambition to 2030 and beyond. Define what winning looks like: which solutions to accelerate, which to incubate, which to sunset — and rally the organisation behind it. Translate that into a multi-year growth plan with clear milestones, investment priorities, and measurable outcomes.
- Know the landscape cold. Maintain a deep, continuously updated read on regulatory and market shifts across jurisdictions — EPR evolution, DPP timelines, green claims enforcement, chemical and packaging mandates. Translate that complexity into clear strategic options, bring in the right teams to quantify the impact, and lay out the path forward — whether that’s meeting what’s required or getting ahead of it for advantage.
- Know our client’s world. Build a deep, ongoing understanding of what your clients are facing — competitive dynamics, supply chain complexity, cost pressures — and the commercial opportunities that sit inside that complexity. Be the partner who sees what’s coming and helps them get ahead of it. Position Anthesis as more than an advisor: the partner that truly understands the client’s business and helps them win.
- Go beyond decks — build, test, scale. We don’t toss strategies over the wall and hope they land. We get into the trenches with clients and go the full distance — helping them innovate, test, learn, and then actually do it: pilot new approaches, prove the economics, operationalize what works, and scale it. [reuse systems, reformulated products, new packaging formats as examples of what gets built] … partner with specialist teams to build the business cases that give executives the confidence to invest at scale. Harness AI, digital tools, and emerging technology to deliver faster, sharper, more cost-effective. Scale what works. Kill what doesn’t.
- Drive Commercial Growth: Own the revenue targets, pipeline, and forecasting for a substantial, established portfolio — and grow it materially. Shift the model from pure advisory toward digitally enabled managed services, transformation programmes, and recurring revenue. Innovate on pricing — value-based, outcome-linked. Strengthen the value story. Improve margins.
- Connect across the organization. Work across Anthesis business lines, geographies, and sector teams to unlock client value that wouldn’t exist in silos. Spot the adjacencies: when a client conversation reveals a supply chain challenge, a resource recovery need, or a data gap, connect it to the right capability — including your counterpart’s portfolio. Partner with the other Growth Portfolio Leads and senior leadership on cross-cutting innovation, AI, and go-to-market.
- Build and lead a high-performing team. Lead a diverse group of senior technical experts — deep expertise, strong opinions, different working styles — and unify them around a shared direction without relying on hierarchy. Build on the team’s deep technical strength by adding commercial, strategy and emerging-tech depth as the practice grows, so every addition raises the bar. Lead through change with directness, empathy, and respect — making the hard calls when they’re needed, and bringing people with you.
- Represent Anthesis at the highest level. Be the senior external face of Anthesis’s products and packaging capability — at industry forums, in regulatory discussions, in client boardrooms. Build the kind of trusted relationships where you’re the first call when the big strategic decisions get made. Elevate conversations beyond the immediate brief, and help clients think bigger than they would alone.
Key Requirements: Skills, Knowledge & Expertise:
- 10+ years in sustainability consulting or industry, with significant time in the relevant domain.
- Background in professional services/consulting (understanding utilization, margins, and practice growth).
- Established industry network bringing immediate credibility and access to doors.
- Technical or engineering degree preferred. Master’s degree or MBA highly valued.
- Languages: Fluent English required.
- Global Flexibility: Willingness to travel for client and leadership engagements.
This role requires genuine technical fluency to engage alongside packaging engineers, regulatory experts, brand sustainability directors, and CFOs, while connecting dots to broader Anthesis capabilities.
