Business Development Manager — Founding Hire

Business Development Manager — Founding Hire

Fortrose Consulting | Lagos or Abuja, Nigeria (with national remit)

About Us

Fortrose Consulting is a Nigerian policy and advisory firm operating across four practice areas:

• Fiscal Policy Consulting
— taxation, financial structuring, and fiscal strategy.

• Public Policy Advisory
— policy design, stakeholder engagement, and government relations.

• ESG Advisory
— ESG strategy, reporting, and integration for responsible business.

• Energy Policy Advisory
— navigating energy markets, regulation, and industry strategy.

Cutting across these practices is our strategic focus on Carbon Management — helping Nigerian businesses profitably decarbonize their operations. We believe companies can cut emissions without cutting profits, and we intend to become the leading carbon advisory firm in Africa, starting here in Nigeria.

The Opportunity

This is our first full-time hire, and it's a genuinely unusual one.

You will effectively run the commercial engine of Fortrose Consulting on the ground in Nigeria. Our founders bring deep technical and sector credibility, but both are engaged with other business interests and cannot give Fortrose day-to-day attention. That is where you come in.

You will be the person who turns a well-positioned brand and a strong founding team into a thriving book of business. You will own pipeline generation, client pitches, proposal development, and — with founder support — early project delivery across all four practice areas, with a particular lean into carbon management as our fastest-growing priority. As the firm grows, you will be first in line to build and lead the team under you.

If you want a ground-floor role at a mission-driven firm where your fingerprints will be all over the business, this is it.

What You'll Own

• Business development across all four verticals.
Build and work a pipeline of Nigerian clients for our fiscal, public policy, ESG, and energy advisory services. Prospects will span corporates (oil & gas, power, manufacturing, FMCG, financial services, listed companies), government ministries and regulators, multilateral and development finance institutions (AfDB, World Bank Group, UNDP, DFIs), and industry associations.

• Carbon management as a strategic focus.
Lead the market-building effort for our carbon management offering — footprint measurement, science-based targets, carbon credit origination, climate literacy training, and carbon pricing advisory. This is where we see the biggest long-term opportunity and where your hunger will matter most.

• Client acquisition.
Prospect, qualify, pitch, and close. Land our first paying clients. Then land the next ten.

• Proposal and pricing.
Scope engagements, draft proposals, and negotiate commercial terms in collaboration with the founders.

• Delivery coordination.
Project-manage client engagements from kickoff to completion, drawing on the founders' technical expertise and managing any external associates we bring in on a project basis.

• Brand and market presence.
Represent Fortrose at industry events, write thought leadership, grow our LinkedIn and web presence, and build relationships with sustainability leads, CFOs, policy advisors, and regulatory affairs leaders across Nigeria.

• Partnerships.
Develop relationships with complementary players — law firms, audit firms, industry associations, carbon registries, development finance institutions, and the Nigerian regulatory ecosystem (NCCC, NESREA, FIRS, NUPRC, SEC Nigeria, Ministry of Finance, and others).

• Operations.
Stand up the basic systems a growing advisory firm needs — CRM, proposal templates, engagement letters, invoicing, client reporting cadences. You will build the playbook we will scale.

The Special Challenges (Read This Carefully)

We want you to go in clear-eyed. This role is not for everyone.

• We are pre-revenue.
You are being hired to change that. You will not inherit a client base or a warm pipeline. You will build them.

• You will sell across four practice areas.
You do not need to be the technical expert in all of them — that is what the founders and associate network are for — but you must be conversant enough to hold credible first meetings on fiscal policy, public policy, ESG, energy policy, and carbon management. Intellectual range matters.

• Carbon management is still a nascent discipline in Nigeria.
You will spend significant energy educating prospects before you can sell to them. Some will not be ready. You need patience to play a long game and judgment to know when to wa