Felicity Edwards transfers to Australian office of AlixPartners

Global management consultancy AlixPartners has brought in its first local recruit since launching in Australia last month, with expat Felicity Edwards transferring from the firm’s London branch.

Felicity Edwards returns to Australia as a director in the Sydney office of AlixPartners, after spending the best past of two decades abroad, bringing expertise in the automotive, manufacturing, industrials, utilities, and consumer sectors.

Meanwhile, Australia country lead Peter Saville has spoken on his return to the partnership after a brief retirement and the firm’s official launch downunder, which was described as deliberately modest as he was still the one fetching the office supplies.

Saville will now at least have some support from “employee number 2”, with Edwards having first joined AlixPartners from Nissan as a vice president in London in 2020, two years prior to Saville’s departure to Australia. Edwards has also spent time with the firm working out of the US, and previously with Nissan in Germany, after initially leaving the country for Japan back in 2007.

According to Edwards, the original overseas working stint was intended as a much shorter one. An aerospace engineering graduate of RMIT (since complemented with an MBA from Oxford’s Saïd Business School), Edwards started out gaining experience with Toyota in Melbourne before quickly jetting off to Japan as an aircraft structural stress engineer at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

That brief stint was followed by a decade at Nissan, first in Cologne and then the UK, where ahead of joining AlixPartners she was responsible for the strategic development & program management of the automaker’s connected & autonomous vehicle technologies segment. It’s unclear if Edwards will now take over responsibility for office supplies from Saville.

However, her company bio describes Edwards client-side work as spanning strategy development, cost optimisation, performance improvement, and organisational turnarounds, including large-scale operational, procurement and supply chain transformations. She also serves as ESG lead for AlixPartners’ global automotive & industrials practice with a keen focus on sustainability.

“In February 2007, I left Melbourne for Japan, with the plan to be overseas for just a few years,” Edwards said in a post to LinkedIn. “19 years and four countries later, I have finally returned to Australia, as ‘employee number 2” in the opening of our new office in Sydney. It is great to be back in my ‘sunburnt country”, and I’m excited about the opportunities ahead.”

Australia expansion

Meanwhile, in an in-house interview, Saville has shed some further light on the consultancy’s decision to finally expand downunder 45 years after its founding in Detroit, along with his own path back to the partnership. Albeit ‘retired’ after nearly three decades with AlixPartners and Zolfo Cooper, Saville continued to do work for the firm as a senior advisor after migrating in 2022.

At the same time, the firm was beginning to win work in Australia and by 2024 seriously considering whether establishing a permanent presence in the country made sense, with Saville saying the final conclusion was obvious: “Once we’d assessed the market, spoken to clients, and tested whether this was genuinely a place we should be, the answer was an unequivocal yes.”

As to why such a move hadn’t then been made by the firm before, Saville adds; “Australia is a long way away, and we’re rightly protective of our culture. You can’t just open an outpost. It has to look, feel, and perform like every other office in our network. What we’re doing here matters, and it matters that we get it right. But now that we’re here, the focus is on delivering.”