The permit was not the whole problem. Before a European consumer-goods company could put products on shelves in Indonesia, it needed a new business entity, import approval and product registration. Customs rules mattered. Tariffs mattered. So did the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency, the Directorate-General of Customs and the company’s standing with both. Asia Group Advisors worked the entire knot: regulatory analysis, business advice and government engagement. The products were approved. More interestingly, the client gained enough credibility to offer policy recommendations of its own.
This is the peculiar product AGA sells. It is not access in the crude sense of knowing a person with a stamp. It is the conversion of a commercial objective into a case that makes sense inside another country’s institutions. The firm calls itself a strategic advisory business. In practice, it is often a translator between two perfectly rational systems that do not yet understand each other.
A map of humans, not just rules
Foreign-market advice often arrives as a thick document with a thin verb section. AGA’s public case studies are full of verbs. It maps officials. It tests perceptions. It develops messages for particular stakeholders, brings in third parties, seeks licenses, finds partners and stays through implementation. Its menu runs from geopolitical intelligence and market entry to government relations, M&A support and crisis management. But the method underneath is consistent: find the decision, then find the people and incentives around it.
- Diagnose the actual bottleneck
- Map the decision and its stakeholders
- Build a locally credible case
- Execute, listen and adapt
Consider a technology company preparing to launch several platforms in Vietnam. AGA did not stop at cataloguing the legal requirements. It mapped government officials and business risks, introduced the model to officials, and adjusted the explanation for the local setting. The launch went ahead with senior government figures in attendance. The service was part policy analysis, part communications and part operating support.
The customers are usually organizations for which misunderstanding is expensive: global companies entering a country, regional businesses expanding, industry groups confronting a rule, foundations pursuing policy change and public bodies that need market expertise. AGA’s named sectors include finance, technology, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics, media, tourism and real estate. Most clients remain anonymous in its public material. That discretion is part of the business model; the obstacle and result are visible even when the logo is not.
“Our teams are agile and forward looking. They don’t just respond to clients’ needs, but anticipate them.”Adam Schwarz, founder and CEO
What fails first
Usually, the first failure is an assumption. A home-sharing platform assumes its global model explains itself to Thai officials. An e-commerce company assumes a media allegation will remain a media problem in Indonesia. A nutrition business assumes a registration timetable can be read from the rules. Then the assumption collides with a ministry, a competition authority or an unwritten sequence of consultations.
What changes minds is rarely a clever sentence alone. In Myanmar, AGA supported an industry association arguing against restrictions on certain food and beverage imports. The campaign combined evidence about consumer prices and quality with position papers, regular official engagement and support from local associations. In Indonesia, a more unusual coalition joined AGA, a Jakarta think tank called Transformasi and global philanthropies. They identified a gap in fisheries financing, convened roundtables and developed lending-policy recommendations with government support. Sustainable fisheries became an explicit target in Indonesia’s 2015-2019 Financial Services Master Plan.
That campaign won AGA the 2016 Gold Standard Award for New Consultancy of the Year. The revealing detail is not the trophy. It is the mechanism: a broad environmental ambition was narrowed to a specific financial rule, then carried by a coalition that could credibly argue for it. The firm’s difference from a conventional research shop is the insistence on implementation. Its difference from a conventional communications agency is that the message sits inside a regulatory and commercial strategy.
A journalist’s appetite for context
Adam Schwarz had been studying Southeast Asia long before AGA existed. He worked in the region from 1987, serving as a correspondent and bureau chief for the Far Eastern Economic Review in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia and Vietnam. He wrote A Nation in Waiting, a history of modern Indonesia, then spent 12 years with McKinsey advising public- and private-sector clients. AGA, founded in 2013, carries traces of both careers: the journalist’s suspicion of tidy explanations and the consultant’s obligation to recommend an action.
Schwarz founds Asia Group Advisors.
The fisheries-finance coalition moves from a regulatory gap to national policy.
AGA is named New Consultancy of the Year.
Government engagement helps clients respond to Malaysia’s movement controls.
Access Partnership acquires AGA and its team of more than 40 regional policy experts.
The acquisition solved AGA’s own market-access problem. Its clients were no longer neatly regional. They wanted help beyond Asia, while Access Partnership wanted deeper teams in the region. The combination linked AGA’s specialists in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam to Access Partnership’s work in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. AGA continued under its own name as an Access Partnership company. The announced logic was reach, not reinvention.
“Many of our clients operate beyond Asia’s borders; with Access Partnership’s strong presence in Europe and the U.S., we can now offer strategic global access.”Adam Schwarz, April 2025
The part worth copying
A company does not need AGA’s network to borrow its discipline. Start by replacing the country brief with a decision map. Write down the exact approval, policy shift or perception change required. Name who decides, who influences the decider, who can validate the argument and who may lose if it succeeds. Then translate the benefit into local terms: consumer choice, investment, resilience, safety, public efficiency or jobs. Finally, treat the first meeting as research. The plan should change when the room teaches you something.
A field note for the next market
- Define the blocked decision, not the vague “regulatory environment.”
- Separate legal authority from practical influence.
- Recruit credible local voices before launching a campaign.
- Give officials a public-interest reason to understand the business model.
- Measure an operating result - approval, registration, capacity or rule change.
The method has limits. It works best when the client has a legitimate case, room to adapt and patience for real engagement. It is much less useful when leaders want a ceremonial introduction, refuse to change the product, or mistake relationships for immunity from law. Local knowledge cannot rescue a proposition that harms the people whose support it needs. Nor can stakeholder mapping make a political decision apolitical.
That is why the last mile of permission is so revealing. It forces a company to discover whether its grand strategy can survive contact with a particular place. AGA’s business is to arrange that contact carefully - and then help both sides understand what, exactly, they are being asked to permit.