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Willow Partners is a senior-led advisory and recruitment firm working across two specialisms: Internal Audit, Governance, Risk & Controls and Sustainability. Every lead partner spent a career inside these disciplines before building this firm.
Our story
The large consulting firms have spent years shrinking their permanent teams and filling the gap with contractors. The person delivering your project or seconded into your function, increasingly is not employed by the firm whose name is on the invoice.
Those contractors are not exclusive to anyone. They can be found directly or through a business like ours. What changes is the overhead stacked on top of them. We do not carry the estate, the brand or the partner pyramid that a global firm has to recover, so we can frequently put the same person in front of you at a fraction of the cost.
Our point is not that we are the cheap option. It is that we are better value: senior, ex-Big 4 practitioners, priced without the structure they used to sit inside.
Engagements delivered by senior practitioners, scoped and led by the partner you meet. No pyramid and no team assembled after signature.
Our recruitment business is not run by recruiters. It is run on two things a recruitment firm usually cannot offer.
Where the two meet
The consulting practice gives recruitment its technical judgement. The recruitment practice gives consulting reach into a market far wider than any firm's own payroll. Neither is a bolt-on to the other.
It also means the first conversation can be a diagnosis rather than a pitch. A recruiter sells you a person because that is the only thing they have. A consultancy scopes you a project for the same reason. We can do either, so we have no commercial stake in telling you the wrong one. Sometimes the answer is a hire. Sometimes it is six weeks of work and no hire at all.
Our model
Every firm has a model. Most are a consequence of how the firm grew rather than a choice. Ours was a choice and these are the three decisions it rests on.
Our partners deliver the work themselves. Senior attention at every stage, from the first scoping conversation through to handover.
Strategic depth and execution power without the layers of a Big 4 firm. Minimum complexity, maximum relevance.
We source the right expertise for each mandate, not simply whoever is available. Our model is not constrained by internal utilisation targets.
This is not a theory about adjacent markets. It is what our people actually do in a given quarter.
We have had internal auditors deliver limited assurance to sustainability teams and directly to Heads of Sustainability. We have had sustainability professionals deliver sustainability and sustainable finance assurance to internal audit teams and had our subject-matter experts sit in on key sustainability audits alongside a client's own auditors.
The same pattern shows up in recruitment. When a company hires into a sustainability team, particularly for a reporting role, what it very often wants is an accountant or an assurance professional. Not for the subject-matter knowledge, which can be taught, but for the rigour: evidence, review, restatement discipline and the instinct to ask where a number came from before publishing it.
The partners
Our practice runs through a wider partner group, led by four. Between them they have advised boards, run in-house functions and been the person accountable when the number was wrong.
Tom runs the business. Firm strategy, client relationships across both verticals and our recruitment practice. He is usually the first partner a client speaks to and the one who makes the call on whether a brief is a hire, an interim or a piece of work we should deliver ourselves.
His focus is senior appointments: Chief Audit Executives, Heads of Sustainability and the layer immediately below, where most functions actually succeed or fail.
Richard leads sustainability reporting: ESG strategy, net zero transition planning and compliance with ISSB, TCFD and CSRD. He specialises in the point where a sustainability report stops being a narrative document and starts being an auditable one.
Much of his work is assurance readiness, getting a disclosure to the standard where an external auditor will sign it, before the auditor arrives rather than after.
Lee leads climate: GHG measurement and carbon footprint reporting, ESG data governance and assurance readiness. He builds the underlying data infrastructure, meaning boundaries, emission factors, calculation methodology and evidence trails, that everything else in a climate disclosure depends on.
His work covers Scope 1-3 footprints, Carbon Reduction Plans, SECR and ESOS and the unglamorous governance work that determines whether next year's number can be produced without starting again.
Kyle leads Internal Audit and GRC: audit delivery, governance and controls and ECCTA compliance. He runs our outsourced and co-sourced engagements, from a single specialist review to a full annual plan delivered on the client's methodology.
He also leads our work on auditing sustainability data and on data analytics and AI in audit, the ground between our two verticals that very few firms can staff credibly on both sides.
Why Willow Partners
Every lead partner brings twenty years or more from the disciplines we work in: as advisers, as in-house heads of function and as the people who owned the problem. Having someone who has sat in your seat, knows where this usually goes wrong and can say so early is the difference between advice and an invoice.
We are not tied to a corporate structure or a utilisation model, so we can respond at the pace your deadline actually demands. Quick to engage, fast to mobilise and consistently straight with you about what is achievable in the time available.
Our partners have worked across multiple jurisdictions and we operate from London and Dubai, supporting clients wherever they are. Boutique in scale, but with the reach and regulatory range that regulated and listed groups need.
Each of us built a career before building this firm. What sets us apart is the wish to pass that knowledge on rather than hold it. That is why capability building and training sit inside every advisory engagement, not alongside it as an upsell.
Where we are
Two offices, one team. Our UK practice serves listed and regulated groups across Europe. Our UAE practice trades as Middle East Advisory Partners and supports sovereign investors, banks and corporates across the GCC.
Institute of Directors
116 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5ED
+44 204 570 1357 ·
info@willowpartners.co.uk
Office 125, Floor 37, API Trio Office Tower
Al Barsha, Dubai, UAE
+971 504 134 818 ·
businessdevelopment@
Whichever one you pick, the first conversation is with a partner.
Read the engagements and placements behind the model: what the brief was, what we did and what changed.
Case studiesDescribe the role, the gap or the deadline. We will come back with a view on whether it is a hire, an interim or a project.
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