ABOUT FERNANDO

"What I love about the job is how international it is"

​Fernando Sanchez is a strategic shareholdings consultant at a large global investment manager. He works with his firm's Joint Ventures across China, India, and the U.K. He actively works with the JVs boards and executive teams to align strategic objectives and initiatives to deliver value for the firm. Fernando is also the co-Chair of his company's ethnic minority employee network. Fernando has been listed in the Yahoo Finance 2020 Future Ethnic Minority Leaders; the list acknowledges the work individuals across the UK, USA, Canada, and EU to ethnic diversity. Fernando is from Guatemala and has spent the last 12 years in the U.S.A, U.K., Italy, and Sweden.

ABOUT STRATEGIC SHAREHOLDINGS

This role includes but isn't limited to:

- Leading initiatives to maximise the value of firm's strategic investments in joint ventures / partnerships across the world.

- Strategy & business plan development and review for strategic investments.

- Shaping initiatives to deliver jointly with joint ventures JVs.

"I think it's very important that young people get a different view of what different professions are and how to get there"

PODCAST Q&A WITH WILL

"What was I good at? I was really good academically and could exceed in that so I just focused on that"

Q - Is it necessary to go to university to become a strategic shareholdings consultant

​

A - It's a very tricky one because my colleagues all of us have university degrees, and if you would focus only on the consultant piece, most of the consultants will have a university degree or because they have been in the industry for so long that they become experts in a topic. So it could be, I don't know, operational resilience, and then you consult on that specific topic, and maybe for that, you don't need a university degree.

​

Q - What exactly is consulted within strategic shareholdings

A -  A consultant is someone who answers questions. So you have big questions in companies usually related to strategy. So where do we want to go next? Or we have this problem or we have these new market trends? Let's answer a question. What I actually do is when our company believes that to achieve their objectives, they need to partner with another company somewhere else that has that capability to do that, or they're in a market that we cannot be for X or Y reason. So my role as a consultant is to work with those companies to make sure that we're meeting objectives.

​

Q - What skills does a person need to become a strategic shareholdings consultant?

A - You need to be resilient, I would say and why I say that is because you're usually dealing with executives, you're dealing with C suite level people, you know, you're going to propose something thing and they're going to destroy it. That's how it works. And then you're going to have to go back and do it again. So you need to be resilient to not take it personally. It just works and we're all here looking for, you know, the best outcome of everything. And it's really difficult at the start to do that because it's your work. No, no, this is not good or something. So you need to move on and be resilient.

​

​