A year on since we’ve fully joined ranks with Steer, we’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on our journey together thus far and celebrate the key milestones of the past twelve months. It’s been an exciting time in Amberside Advisors’ history with lots of changes, but also multiple successful projects and, more significantly, many new faces joining our team.
Warm welcome
Looking back at the beginning of our joint adventure, we truly appreciate the warm welcome Amberside staff received from all Steer employees. After this past year, we truly feel part of the team and we enjoy taking on projects with more global reach, which we can now efficiently deliver thanks to having additional resources, support from business delivery group (Marketing, HR, IT, Finance) and access to 26 offices across four continents.
We have also been proven right about assessing cultural fit for both companies – the seamless teamwork that we’ve seen across joint mandates and shared projects is exactly what we expected and we feel that shared values across Steer and Amberside underpin that successful collaboration.
At Amberside, we recognise that the biggest strength of our business are the people, and so it was with sadness that we said our farewells to Richard Turner, former Amberside Director, who decided to move on to help the Infrastructure & Projects Authority, earlier in the year.
However, we have also had many positive celebrations for well-deserved promotions within the team, as well as many new hires at both senior and graduate level, to expand our capability but also our delivery capacity. We’ve grown exponentially over the past few months and we are definitely not stopping there – we are actively recruiting for a number of different positions.
Successful projects and big wins
The main ambition for the upcoming months, will be to consolidate our position as a leading energy transition financial and commercial advisors, providing sector-specific expert support to all our new and existing clients.
Our Commercial Advisory team has seen some great successes in the last year, onboarding new clients and delivering exciting projects in the energy transition sectors. We’ve continued to support GHNF applicants, as part of our role in the Triple Point Heat Networks Investment Management consortium, and in addition to that, we’ve worked on a growing number of interesting mandates, supporting private investors, major energy services companies, as well as local authorities and public sector bodies with their heat network and decentralised energy projects.
Some of the highlights of the past year certainly included advising Cranfield University on their Smart Local Energy Systems strategy, supporting Get Living with procurement of an ESCO partner for its Lewisham Gateway development, providing strategic commercial advice to North East LEP on their £500m heat network pipeline, as well as working with a major London NHS Trust on their district energy network project – just to name a few potential investment projects that we were involved in.
We’ve also been very proud about being appointed to advise on the commercial feasibility of, and financing needed to fund, the retrofit of carbon capture technology to the energy recovery facility at Edmonton Ecopark in Enfield. Since 2018, Amberside Advisors have been acting as corporate finance advisors to the North London Waste Authority and we are regularly gaining new engagements as part of this 10-year mandate.
And in the last quarter we’ve also had our first shared big win with Steer, where we were jointly appointed as the Department for Transport’s (DfT) Financial Advisors to the Intercity Express Programme (IEP) and Thameslink rolling stock programme, proving the strength of our joint competence. The powerful combination of Amberside’s financial expertise and Steer’s extensive credentials in providing commercial advice to the rail industry, helped secure the DfT contract with the winning proposal.
Final reflections
Summarising the last twelve months, we have nothing but positive reflections – joining ranks with Steer has certainly given us a further boost to our already successful operations and we are very excited about what the future holds for Amberside Advisors.
Despite the initial uncertainty and the time invested into the integration over the first few months following the acquisition, we managed to achieve all our financial targets to date. We are well placed to have another record year at Amberside Advisors and we are looking forward to many more years of working alongside our Steer colleagues, and taking on even more exciting opportunities together.
