Telum is looking to highlight the diverse and vibrant agencies in the Southeast Asian PR agency landscape in upcoming editions of our PR Alert. We want to encourage networking, business opportunities, and to celebrate the great initiatives being worked on around the region. If you'd like your agency to feature, get in touch.

What services does August Consulting offer?
August Consulting is a public relations agency offering bespoke communications and investor relations services to companies that are listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange as well as privately-held companies. Through the careful execution of tailored campaigns and tactical messaging and positioning, our objective is to raise the profile of our clients and put them in a favourable light among the media and investment community.

Our role is to provide strategic counsel to our clients and help them achieve their communication goals and top-of-mind recall among their target audience. We actively interact with the media and investors and act as the main point of contact on behalf of our clients. The work that we do supports our clients’ corporate activities, which may include IPOs, M&As, corporate restructuring, financial reporting, fundraising, marketing campaigns as well as other investor and media engagement events.

How large is your team and what kind of clients do you serve?
We are a boutique firm with a small, tightly-knit team that punches above our weight. Our clients hail from diverse industries from commodities to energy to services and F&B providers.

Where does August Consulting have an office?
Our office is at United Square in Thomson Road in Singapore.

Do you have a particular area of focus?
We tend not to pigeonhole ourselves given that our expertise cuts across sectors. Hence, we have a diverse portfolio of clients comprising foreign and local multinationals, listed companies, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups from a wide range of industries. We also work with family-owned businesses and government-linked organisations.

Who is the founder and why did they start August Consulting?
August Consulting was founded by our Managing Partner, Alan Lee, in 2002. Formerly an Executive Editor with the Business Times as well as an Investment Banker, Alan embarked on his PR career in 1992 when he set up the Singapore office with FleishmanHillard - it was known then as Fleishman-Hillard Scotchbrook. Following several corporate exercises over the turn of the millennium, the company became August Consulting in 2002 and continues to be so today.

August Consulting was founded with the aim of providing strategic counsel and quality work to our clients. Through a results-oriented approach, we have established ourselves as one of the leading corporate and financial communications specialists in Singapore today.

Tell us about the leadership team.
August Consulting is led by Alan, who has 30 years of experience as a public relations practitioner. He is supported by a team of directors and consultants. 

What is next for August Consulting? What is the five-year goal?
We want our name to be synonymous with effective investor relations. That means growing and evolving in tandem with stakeholders, including our clients, the financial industry and the investment and media communities.

In a sentence, describe your ideal relationship with a journalist.
Our relationship with our media friends is a symbiotic one that is based on trust and mutual understanding and support of each other’s objectives. While journalists are our industry partners whom we work with to achieve shared goals, many of them have also become friends whom we can bounce ideas off.

Any key PR trends August Consulting is keeping an eye on?
As communications specialists, we have to keep up with how people are consuming content. We keep abreast of new platforms that our clients’ target audiences are hooked on so that we can be specific, creative and strategic in activation.

When we first started more than two decades ago, it was mostly traditional media including print and broadcast and some online content. Today, our interactions have broadened to encompass the social and digital media space and we now engage other content providers such as bloggers, vloggers and influencers to reach a wider and younger audience.

Tell us about a campaign that you are particularly proud of. 
As one of the pioneers in the investor relations arena, we have helped more than 200 companies launch their Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) since 1992, and we continue to be a major player in the IPO communications market today.

Besides the changing media landscape, we also have to keep in touch with trends in the financial world such as cryptocurrency and new ways of fundraising.  We are proud to be the first investor relations agency in Singapore to work on the listing of two Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPAC), the first was listed in 2019 and the second in November 2021, both on Nasdaq.

What skillsets do you look for in new hires?
The main thing is “teach-ability”. We are open to candidates who may not have the skillsets but have good work attitudes and are willing and able to learn quickly.

They must be able to work both independently and as a team and be resourceful with good people engagement skills.