About us
ROAR Advisory is a senior independent advisory practice led by Davide Bolgé and based in the Italian-Swiss corridor. The practice provides Strategic Brand Intelligence at decision moments — sell-side mandates, acquisitions, portfolio performance reviews, exits, post-acquisition integration, fundraising preparation, investment committee submissions, and growth credibility assessments — for M&A advisors, private equity, family offices, founders, and corporate development teams across Switzerland and Northern Italy. Engagements are personally led, with the support of a curated network of specialist collaborators where the work requires it.
Two decades of operator experience in brand and marketing leadership, formalised in this current form as senior advisory work for decision moments where intangible value drivers carry material weight.
THE OPERATOR-INVESTOR TRAJECTORY
Twenty years of executive leadership across brand, marketing, and institutional strategy — in organisations where the decisions that mattered most were taken at the intersection of strategy, execution, and capital. Founders, investors, shareholders, cross-functional leadership teams: the recurring counterparties of work that touched market entry, expansion, positioning, and investment readiness.
What this trajectory makes visible is the gap that most decision-stage analysis encounters but rarely isolates: the layer between what a business does and what the markets it depends on make of it. Financial models measure performance. Operational reviews measure execution. The layer in between — perception, positioning, narrative coherence, transferability of advantage — is the one that determines whether decisions hold under scrutiny.
The Advisory practice exists because this layer is consistently the one carrying the largest unmeasured risk. Operator experience produces a particular kind of attention here: the instinct for what holds in real conditions, the recognition of which growth stories compound and which compensate, the ability to distinguish positioning that produces durable advantage from positioning that produces temporary momentum.
Strategic interpretation grounded in real-world constraints. Challenging assumptions, stress-testing narratives, strengthening decision quality before execution begins.
BACKGROUND
The operator background underpinning the practice spans more than two decades of senior brand and marketing leadership across regulated and consumer-facing industries — with responsibilities at the strategic interface between brand leadership, commercial decision-making, and senior governance. Engagement contexts have included Novartis, Merck, Actelion Pharmaceuticals, Pratt& Whitney, RUAG, GF Georg Fischer, BPS Swiss Kantonal Bank, Zegna, Emmi, Adidas, AO Foundation, and other national and international industry leaders across pharmaceuticals and healthcare, aerospace and defence, industrial manufacturing, banking and financial services, fashion and apparel, FMCG, sport, and education.
Academic engagement extends this perspective: adjunct teaching positions at USI (Università della Svizzera italiana) and Franklin University Switzerland, where the working dialogue with current MBA cohorts and graduate students provides ongoing exposure to the questions that successive generations of leaders are learning to ask.
Prior to the Advisory practice in its current form, related consulting work was conducted under the ROAR Consulting name — strategic and brand-execution engagements that, while complementary to the present practice, address different decision contexts and operate under different governance. That work continues separately, with a clear boundary maintained between the two.
GEOGRAPHIC AND OPERATING CONTEXT
The practice operates from the Italian-Swiss corridor: the segment of Europe where Milan, Lugano, and Zürich form a single working geography, together with the industrial Mittelstand of Northern Italy and the senior corporate and financial centres of German-speaking Switzerland. This is one of the densest concentrations of family-owned mid-market businesses and senior industrial leadership in continental Europe — manufacturers, brand-owners, specialty industrials, financial sponsors, pharmaceutical and aerospace primes, and the advisors who serve them — and the trench in which the practice's depth is built.
Engagements are conducted in English as the working language, with Italian available for client interaction where the engagement geography calls for it. The practice operates in person where decisions warrant the proximity and remotely where the engagement permits — reflecting the reality that senior advisory work alternates between rooms where pricing and positioning are being decided and the focused interpretation that follows them.
For introductions, partnership conversations, or specific decision moments where the question warrants senior independent assessment, the practice is reachable at contact@roaradvisory.ch or through the channels listed on the Contact page.