Associate

About Incandescent

Incandescent is an advisory firm discovering how to create, build, and run enterprises to do the world’s most important work. We focus our work on three primary platforms:

• Corporates & Fortune 500s, including a dedicated focus on Private Equity. We work with leaders with ambitious visions, whose aspirations reach beyond simply optimizing their current operations or applying known best practices. Our work focuses on:

  • Strategy: shaping and redefining strategic direction at the enterprise level

  • Execution: building the organization, culture, and talent necessary to achieve a new vision, a new level of performance, or a new magnitude of scale

  • Innovation: creating new businesses and new capabilities within established organizations

• Systems Change Organizations, including philanthropies, non-profit organizations and mission-driven enterprises. In this platform, we focus on:

  • Shaping strategy for systems change actors

  • Partnering with for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurs as they create and scale new organizations

  • Applying practices in organization, culture and talent to social sector organizations

  • Building partnerships among organizations that see the world differently – across sectors, disciplines, ideological lines and organizational stages

• Ventures, from late seed stage through Series B. We act as partners to founders, growing ideas into businesses that scale and endure, through two main ways:

  • Acting as a co-founder to launch and build a venture

  • Playing a long-term “right-hand” advisor role to founders and their leadership teams

Incandescent was founded in 2013 and we’ve been building a small team, slowly and carefully, since then. To accelerate our capabilities, we recently acquired Minds at Work, which we encourage you to read more about here.

Essence of the Role

We're looking for an Associate who can “hit the ground running”. This team member would focus primarily on our corporate advisory practice, while also having the opportunity to contribute to our work in systems change and venture building. The breadth of our work and our small team structure make this role demanding and fast-paced, with a strong learning and development orientation and significant client exposure.

The Associate serves as an advisor and consultant, working in small teams (generally 2-3 people) and working directly for senior client stakeholders. The small team size gives each team member significant ownership and client-facing responsibility from the beginning. As generalists, we serve clients on a broad range of issues related to strategy execution: advising senior leaders on how organization, culture, and talent can be used as levers for driving change and accelerating growth.

Your day-to-day responsibilities will include:

• Conduct primary and secondary research on client organizations, industries, and business problems, turning ambiguous questions into useful inputs, hypotheses, and working points of view for the team.

• Synthesize what we are learning across interviews, meetings, and background materials, capturing high-quality notes to distill key insights, decisions, tensions, and next steps to move the work forward with clarity.

• Support and lead meetings with clients and other stakeholders, using strong listening, sound judgment, and empathy to gather insight, test hypotheses, and build trust-based working relationships.

• Prepare polished, client-ready materials, including decks, memos, and other working documents, translating complex ideas into clear, compelling communication for senior audiences and helping advance the team’s thinking and recommendations.

Every member of our team – regardless of title – plays an important role in building Incandescent. Whether it’s helping advance our research agenda or developing firm systems and processes, we each hold broader responsibilities beyond client delivery.

Attributes

• You are disciplined, self-driven, and intentional. You consistently follow through, translating intentions and decisions into sustained effort and results. You’re resilient as you face challenges, setbacks, and opportunities to learn. You entrepreneurially seek opportunities to make a difference; you are flexible and comfortable with ambiguity.

• You have a strong developmental orientation. You are committed to honest self-examination and open feedback from others. You are willing to invest in doing whatever it takes to grow into an exceptional performer.

• You are intellectually curious and an eager and creative adopter of AI. You seek a deeper understanding of how organizations in all sectors perform best. You seek ways to connect the dots between practical and theoretical knowledge, and you are genuinely excited by how AI can reshape how small teams operate and how we create impact.

• You are empathetic. You have the capacity to imagine how the world looks to others and to build bonds of trust even in difficult circumstances.

• You have a low ego, and a roll-­up-­your-­sleeves approach to work. You possess humility and grit, willing to take on both “lower level” and “higher level” tasks based on what needs to be done. The phrase “that’s not my job” is not something you would say.

Experience/Background

This role is best suited for someone with 3-5 years of relevant professional experience, a strong commitment to learning and comfort in highly entrepreneurial environments.

Prior work in strategic advisory, corporate, or startup contexts is preferred, but we are open to other experience sets that will rapidly translate into impact in our business setting. We seek candidates who are excited to put their fingerprints on this role, and who see how this role can serve as a springboard to the next chapter in their career.

Exceptional candidates outside the specified salary range or with different professional backgrounds, will be considered.

Salary

Salary for this position is commensurate with experience. For candidates early in their advisory career, Associate total compensation (base salary + yearly bonus) typically ranges between $110,000 and $140,000 of which approximately 15% is variable compensation. For candidates with directly relevant experience further along in their career, total compensation could range up to $160,000 (or potentially higher in exceptional cases). We also offer a strong benefits package, including fully funded medical, dental, and vision coverage, employer 401(k) contributions, and generous PTO.