.png)
Strategy Director - Disability M&A
White Box Enterprises
.png){kind=small}
What if your consulting mindset, deal-making instincts - and the way you build trust - could unlock jobs for hundreds of thousands of Australians living with disability?
Why us?
Help us drive impact in:
The opportunity:
Why you might love this opp:
White Box Enterprises builds, strengthens and backs social enterprises that create jobs for people overlooked by the mainstream market. Now they’re launching a new team to help disability enterprises grow through acquisition; building stronger organisations, greater scale and more jobs for people with disability. It’s a chance to help prove a new model for sector-wide change.
Why you might love this opportunity:
💚 Bold by design: White Box builds what doesn't exist yet - then proves it can scale. They start enterprises from scratch, back them with capital, and invest further in the ones gaining traction. Every bet is grounded in evidence: real data, lived experience and enterprises they've built themselves. When the policy settings aren't working, they push for change there too. Behind all of it is a simple conviction: hundreds of thousands of people with disability - skilled, capable, ready to work - are being turned away by a market not designed with them in mind. White Box is building the alternatives, and backing the sector to get there.
🌏 Impact in action: Four social enterprises already built and in motion: Australian Spatial Analytics, with 150+ employees and 80% neurodiverse workforce; Beacon Laundry, creating 200 jobs across two sites; Civik, targeting 250+ regional jobs; and Witton Barracks, a community hub in Meanjin/Brisbane. Around them, White Box is building the infrastructure that makes the broader sector possible: Australia’s first Social Enterprise Loan Fund, an Australian-first Payment By Outcomes trial, the EVOLVE Program working across orgs representing 730+ employees with disability. In 2022, White Box hosted the Social Enterprise World Forum in Meanjin/Brisbane, bringing the global sector's leading thinkers to their doorstep.
🥜 In a nutshell: The two Directors will work with the Principal to lead a merger and transformation function that hasn't yet been seen within the disability space. Applying your consulting toolkit with social enterprise principles and care, you'll work alongside disability organisations, getting to know their business from the inside out: their portfolio, their growth potential, the gaps an acquisition could fill. From there, you'll build the market pipeline and identify the right targets, actively pursue opportunities, manage the acquisition through to close and support post-acquisition transformation - all while holding trusted senior relationships with partner organisations.
📅 Your week: Monday you're deep in conversation with a disability enterprise CEO - getting under the hood of their business, understanding what they believe is possible and laying the groundwork for a journey they've never been on before. By midweek you've shifted gears: pressure-testing a target's financials, stress-testing the thesis and pulling together the threads for a board that needs to make a decision. Later in the week you're back with an organisation twelve months post-close - helping their leadership team work through what's changed, what isn't landing and what needs to shift. In between, you're working closely with the Principal, other Director and sector partners, finding new angles to a problem when one approach stalls.
🕶️ Your style: You're the kind of person who can hold a sharp financial analysis and a warm, unhurried conversation in the same afternoon. You're curious by default: you lean in, ask good questions and figure it out quickly rather than pretending the learning curve isn't real. You're not just here for the job - you're here because this role is a vehicle for the systems change you want to see within your community. This is reflected in the way you guide your team to bring their best selves to the mission.
💬 Inside White Box: Seven years in, and White Box is still building, testing and backing bold ideas over safe ones. When one approach stalls, they find another. The team is distributed across the East Coast but comes together at least twice a year - and when they do, the competitive streak comes out: trivia, sport and top-notch karaoke. Day to day, the team moves fast, hears each other out and follows through on what they say they'll do.
💡 What you bring: You may have come through strategy consulting, M&A advisory, and/or organisation-wide transformation with a knack for spotting opportunities and originating deals. Either way, you understand the full deal lifecycle - from market scans and target identification due diligence, negotiation and close, through to integration and transformation. Experience across service delivery, manufacturing or production sectors is a bonus. But the real essentials are commercial rigour, sharp relationship instincts and the ability to bring both into social enterprise work that stretches far beyond the usual consulting playbook.
📍 The detail: Full-time, permanent role. Salary competitive for the role’s responsibilities. Remote across the East Coast. Meanjin/Brisbane, Eora/Sydney or Naarm/Melbourne preferred where we have offices for you to visit and be a key part of our team. Occasional travel to support the relational nature of the work. Full permanent work rights in Australia required.
What's involved:
The balance of work will shift over time but to start:
〰️ 60% Strategy, M&A and Transformation
Working with each organisation to understand their strategic position and build the case for what an acquisition could unlock. From there, you're leading the deal end-to-end: scanning the market, building investment theses, assessing target portfolios and managing due diligence through to board-ready business cases. Beyond the close, you're helping integrate operations, align leadership and make sure the acquisition delivers a stronger enterprise with more jobs for people with disability.
〰️ 30% Relationship Management and Stakeholder Engagement
Working directly with CEOs and boards of disability organisations - some encountering acquisition thinking for the first time. Building credibility, earning trust and guiding stakeholders through a change process with no real precedent in this sector takes sustained relational investment: bringing people on a journey, holding their confidence during uncertainty, and knowing when to push and when to let things breathe.
〰️ 10% Leadership, Stewardship and Program Learning
Delegating and assuring the work of managers and juniors, contributing to team rhythms and helping White Box make sense of what they're learning as the program unfolds. You'll help shape what this model can become - and share insights generously.
Key criteria:
🔎 Strategy, M&A & Transformation Fluency: You've led engagements across the full arc - diagnosing strategic position, building the investment thesis, driving origination and due diligence through to close, and leading the transformation work on the other side. Your fingerprints have been on deals and transformation from beginning to end, and you know that the hard work often starts after the ink dries.
📊 Financial Rigour: You're confident in numbers - not just as outputs, but as tools for alignment. You've read financials under pressure, tested the assumptions underneath and translated your findings into a clear picture for senior audiences.
🤝 High-Trust Communicator: You can sit with a CEO who's wary of change and come out of it with a genuine connection. You know that credibility isn't given - it's earned through consistency, warmth and showing up the same way every time.
🧭 Comfortable in Ambiguity: You've worked in environments where the path forward isn't mapped, found the angle, adapted when one approach stalled, and pushed through to a solution without needing it to look like everything you've done before. You balance patience and momentum - you know the difference between letting something breathe and letting it stall.
🗣️ Clear Under Complexity: You've translated the complex into the clear - not because your audience isn't sophisticated, but because clarity is just better for everyone. Whether breaking down a financial model for a board chair or explaining your recommendations to a CEO, you know how to land the message and make it stick.
❤️ Impact Sector Grounded: You've worked with or inside NFPs, social enterprises or mission-led organisations and you understand what makes them distinct - governance structures, funding dynamics, stakeholder complexity and the pace at which trust has to be built before anything moves. You don't need to be taught how to be effective here. You already know that decisions look different when a board is accountable to community.
🌱 Purpose-Driven: Throughout your career, you've gravitated toward work with a bigger point to it - whether social impact was the main agenda or you've spent time volunteering, sitting on a board, or showing up in rooms where it mattered.
How to apply:
If any of the above resonated with you but you don't tick every box:
👒 🧢 🎩 You should throw your hat in the ring, whatever those years of experience look like in your personal impact journey. We'd love to hear from you!
We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis and may close the listing if a perfect match is found, so we encourage you to apply early.
Interested?
1. Create a profile (or complete yours if you already have one) on Ripple Opportunities.
2. Submit an application by clicking on the job listing and 'Apply'. Please submit your resume and a cover letter in PDF that briefly outlines what's motivating you to apply for the role and how your experience could be applied in this context.
Your written application (max 1,000 words) should include:
- What's motivating you to apply for this role?
- A brief overview of your experience and how it aligns with the role.
- A specific experience you've had that's directly related to this role (e.g. a transaction or advisory engagement where you identified the opportunity, built the relationship and managed the process to closure - potentially in an environment where the path forward wasn't clear or mapped in advance). What was the objective, what strategy and tactics did you implement, what results did you achieve and what did you learn from this?
- Let us know your ideal hours, salary expectations, availability (including start date or time away), and anything else that helps us understand your fit.
To apply, please submit your application via Ripple Opportunities (www.rippleopportunities.com). Questions? Please contact hey@rippleopportunities.com.
Oh look! A legend is here reading some fine print! At Ripple our mission is to democratise access to purpose-driven opportunities. As a small team that curates hundreds of opportunities each week we do our best to share all the key information and juicy details. We often link out to the original listing and can't guarantee all details are included on our page, or the full accuracy as application windows and role descriptions may be changed by companies with short notice. If you're unsure of any details or closing dates, it's best to reach out to the organisation directly.