Regional Managing Director — Australia · Automotive

Position overview

Gladwin International Leadership Advisors is representing a confidential organisation in Automotive & Transportation on a senior CMO leadership mandate anchored in Australia. The remit explicitly spans China, Malaysia, Canada.

This is a country CEO / MD-class mandate with board- and headquarters-facing accountability for strategy execution, regulatory relationships, and brand in-market.

The organisation is looking for pattern recognition: someone who has seen similar complexity before and knows which levers matter first.

Context you will inherit

• Market & sector: New mobility business models — subscription-based mobility, fleet electrification, and B2B mobility services require commercial leaders with non-traditional backgrounds
• Geographic spine: Primary hub Australia with explicit corridor responsibility across China, Malaysia, Canada.
• Organisation stage: Recent leadership turnover created ambiguity on priorities; you will need to re-establish a crisp enterprise storyline.
• Stakeholders: Key interfaces include headquarters strategy, regional risk and legal, local regulators (where material), and anchor channel partners.
• Secondary lens: Speed of product development — reducing time-to-market from 48 months (traditional) to 18-24 months (EV-era expectation) requires new product leadership paradigms

The mandate (12–24 month arc)

1. Win/loss intelligence: Systematise why deals are won or lost; feed insights to product and pricing weekly.
2. Channel conflict: Clarify rules of engagement where direct and indirect routes overlap.
3. Localization at scale: Templates and playbooks that local markets can adapt without fragmenting the brand.
4. Analyst & influencer relations: Where sector norms apply, strengthen third-party validation without over-promising.
5. Marketing operations: SLAs between marketing, sales ops, and RevOps — fewer dropped leads, faster follow-up.
6. Budget agility: Shift spend quarterly toward working channels — kill sacred cows with weak CAC/LTV.

Responsibilities (representative)

• Build product marketing capability tied to roadmap and revenue plays.
• Improve marketing ROI measurement — acceptable proxies where full attribution is impossible.
• Develop partner and channel marketing where indirect routes dominate.
• Instil crisis communications readiness with legal and corporate affairs.
• Coach the organisation on narrative discipline — one story, many channels.

Leadership profile

• Judgment: High signal-to-noise under pressure; ethical clarity; willingness to halt initiatives that break risk appetite.
• Communication: Executive presence in English; additional languages valued where market-relevant.
• Education: Strong undergraduate grounding; MBA / advanced degree / professional qualification common at this level.
• Modern marketing: Fluency with data, segmentation, and accountable spend — not only creative excellence.
• Geographic muscle: Comfort operating from Australia with regular engagement across China, Malaysia.

Team & culture

Inclusion and psychological safety are not separate programmes — they are prerequisites for honest debate on strategy and risk. Model curiosity, direct feedback, and consequences for conduct lapses.

Success measures (examples)

• Financial: Revenue and margin vs. plan; cash conversion; capital efficiency.
• Strategic: Share in priority segments; customer retention in anchor accounts; milestone delivery on transformation.
• People: Engagement trends; regrettable attrition in critical roles; diversity of succession slate.
• Risk: Audit and regulatory outcomes; conduct events; operational resilience metrics.

First 90 days (orientation arc)

• Days 1–30: Shadow key customer journeys or operations — paper over slides where reality diverges.
• Days 30–60: Cut or pause low-value projects freeing capacity for strategic work.
• Days 60–90: Publish first integrated forecast or plan under your ownership — even if directional.
• Build trust with risk, legal, and audit through transparency — surprises erode licence to move fast.
• Pick one cultural signal (e.g. meeting hygiene, promotion criteria) and model it relentlessly.

Stakeholder map (illustrative)

• Internal: Matrix of global product houses and local P&L; tension is normal — your role is to broker trade-offs with data.
• External: Customers who influence reference deals; government or industry bodies in regulated sectors.
• Capital providers: Banks, sponsors, or minority investors — each needs a slightly different narrative on risk.

Travel & mobility

Multi-hub rhythm — plan for weekly or bi-weekly cross-border travel during integration or transformation peaks.

Compensation

Competitive CMO compensation for Automotive & Transportation leadership: cash, incentive, benefits, and potential equity or carry (case-dependent). Discussed with finalists only.

Application status

This mandate is no longer accepting new applications. The search progressed through Q4 2025 and closed for submissions in February 2026. We retain this posting for transparency on the type of leadership work we carry in Automotive & Transportation and Australia. For similar active mandates, browse open roles or submit a general profile through executive search inquiry.

Reference: automotive-transportation · CMO · Australia · Gladwin International Leadership Advisors