Defence Industry Advisory Services

DIAS is a bespoke services business providing a close partnering relationship with clients by seamlessly delivering knowledge and expertise drawn from a range of service providers to meet client needs.

DIAS takes a lead/prime approach to unify the service offering of highly skilled and accredited Defence Industry professionals with a proven track record in providing outcomes for Australian and International Defence Industry SME’s and Defence Primes.

DIAS’ advisors act as mentors, coaches or semi or fully embedded resources offering support to existing middle management, executive or board level team members.

In many respects the DIAS offers a “shared service” where SMEs can access a pool of specialist expertise; “shared” by multiple non-competing businesses. Often these specialisations are required in an ongoing fashion, but not on a full-time basis.

DIAS – The platform to grow your Defence Industry business

The DIAS value proposition ensures that:

• SMEs can realise outcomes equivalent to employing staff full time, while paying the equivalent of a part time senior executive fees.
• Difficult to find, specialist skills are accessible to multiple businesses rather than being locked within individual businesses.
• Key service providers can offer their services in this manner by aggregating demand enough to sustain their specialisation without needing to derive a full-time salary from one individual business.

Our services are constantly evolving in response to the needs of our clients; and through engaging new skill sets through new partnering relationships.

DIAS services include:

• Defence Business Strategy
• Defence Business Process Development
• Stakeholder engagement – A trusted broker
• Political engagement strategy
• Targeted communications
• Business development
• Commercialisation strategy
• Innovation Strategy – matching emerging technology to Defence capability
• Contract negotiations
• Bid no Bid strategy
• Tender writing
• Finance strategy including debtor/equity financing
• Grant writing
• Defence Trade Control compliance
• Defence Industry security advice (physical and cyber)

Our defence industry provenance dates to the 90s and 2000s when many in our team were cutting their teeth working in a growing Australian defence sector or serving in the ADF.

We’ve also served across many industry, government programmes and advisory boards including Defence Industry Innovation Centre (DIIC), the Centre for Defence Industry Capability (CDIC), JSF Industry Capability team, and Ai Group Defence Council Export Forum to name a few.

We are born out of a persistent frustration in Defence Industry of not being able to access the very niche and small pool of professionals, advisors and executives in Australia with a successful track record in this sector. DIAS absolutely complements the efforts of the CDIC. Where the CDIC provides highly regarded advice to industry, their team do not have the capacity to direct resources to actual implementation activities inside each and every business. This often leaves Defence SMEs with a dilemma of knowing what needs to be done, but not possessing the internal capacity or specialist expertise to make the necessary changes.

DIAS is platform, it is a service, it is a network of advisors, which together brings diverse defence industry backgrounds and skills that allows you to grow your Defence business using best of class, trusted advisors. It takes companies from the wonderful services available from the CDIC to a next level of access to trusted partners and collaborators who can work with you from deep inside your business.

DIAS has brought together more than 10 well known services providers. We will be making more information available in the coming months.

In short, you can. Indeed in some cases, you must engage service providers separately 
(e.g. formal legal or finance advice).

However, the DIAS business model has evolved from the fact that our clients are typically finding that assistance on one subject rapidly links to another and another which results in our clients:

• Managing multiple service provider relationships.
• Needing to find service providers they can trust, and not knowing where to start.
• Dealing with services providers that may understand their subject matter exceptionally well, but don’t necessarily understand how to apply this to Defence industry or SMEs.
• Requiring disparate service providers to work together to deliver the overall business objectives.

DIAS simplifies this engagement by focussing on what each business actually needs, sourcing the appropriate capability and capacity and delivering an integrated team focussed on delivering outcomes for our clients.