What We Do
The Gatehouse Client's Journey To Value
Exposure: What are the business sensitivities that if disrupted would most affect performance?
Dynamics: What critical geopolitical developments may drive that disruption – on their own or in aggregate?
Assumptions: How does this change the assumptions underpinning your strategy?
Strategy: What actions could you take to address the risk and capitalise on the opportunity?
Track: What do you track and how do you stay ahead of the relevant developments?
Why Geostrategy?
Gatehouse was founded to solve a frustrating flaw: despite increasingly vast troves of geopolitical data, very little is provided in a format suitable for senior decision-makers.
Gatehouse Approach
Gatehouse adds value by building geostrategic capability across leadership teams, operationalising geostrategy as a regular activity that protects and creates value.
Our clients want to understand quickly how geopolitical developments will affect business outcomes (the ‘so what’?). They want to cut through the noise to the signal that will impact their success, with sufficient foresight to act in time to capitalise on opportunity and mitigate risk. Geostrategy is what enables this.
Gatehouse works directly with its clients to develop carefully defined briefs that identify the critical questions a specific business needs to answer to address geopolitical challenges that will affect their business. Only then do we build the specialist-led advisory teams to support our clients’ specific needs.
Gatehouse’s support remains stubbornly focused on identifying the changes (both positive and negative) that will shape outcomes for our clients. And then our teams help develop the solutions. In the end it is about improving performance through intelligent geopolitical management.
Our clients have varying levels of geostrategic experience: Gatehouse meets them where they are and moves them up the curve. Regardless of embedded capability Gatehouse services add value by being business-relevant and actionable. There are three core components to this:
- Tying geopolitical dynamics and developments to a company’s specific exposures to identify likely impacts on the business bottom line.
- Testing existing assumptions within the business about these impacts and, in turn, testing the strategies that rest on them.
- Providing sufficient insight and foresight to enable effective and timely mitigation of any risks (or capture of opportunity) identified through these exposures.
A unique combination of in-house geostrategic advisors and a best-in-class global expert network
Gatehouse support is firmly anchored in our expert network, which provides a unique vantage point on critical geopolitical dynamics and impacts. What is unique about our approach is how we marry in-house expertise with this network to identify the critical dynamics that will ripple through global systems and create impacts for our clients. Our core team draw on deep expertise in geopolitical risk to identify the right questions to ask of our network, who to ask, and how to assess the answers, to help our clients make informed decisions.
Solutions
What exactly do we deliver for our clients?
Our model is flexible, to fit with our clients’ internal processes and teams – to super charge existing capability, fill gaps and provide external challenge. Where we provide up-front calibration of our client’s geostrategic requirements, we can deliver the precise insight and decision-support they need.
Whilst our engagement style is designed to be customised to our client’s needs, we have a core set of building blocks that align to the overall journey to value:
We help clients understand and map their existing geostrategic capability as a starting point for calibrating the types of support that they need and will be able to absorb well.
We look at their footprint and engage with their own assessment of exposures and pinch points as an anchor for looking at the geopolitical dynamics that will impact those vulnerabilities.
We work closely with key stakeholders within our client’s business to map the overarching geostrategic dynamics and issues they need to understand and track to get ahead of impacts – either to mitigate risk or capture opportunity: the ‘Meta Questions’ they need to be asking and answering.
On a regular basis we revisit these key dynamics and issues in ‘Horizon Scans’, to track geopolitical developments and their impact on the business, and to inform any required strategic course correction.
On a quarterly basis we convene all critical stakeholders within a client account to go deep on a key geostrategic issue for the business, bringing in experts from the network who can provide insight and perspectives to inform strategy.
As required, we reach into our expert network to help clients answer specific questions, test assumptions and scenarios, or provide additional perspectives ahead of, or as part of, client events.
Case Studies
Major Strategic Decision Support
Operationalise Geostrategy
Client: FTSE20 Company
Challenge: In January 2022 the client turned to Gatehouse to consider the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
How Gatehouse Helped: Delivered a Geostrategy Board session to the client’s Government Affairs Chief, consulting four Network experts, including former Russian Military Intelligence officials, former Polish and Ukrainian Cabinet Ministers and a former White House Lead Sanctions Coordinator.
Outcome: The client paid out a £250m dividend from its Russian business two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – avoiding the risk of its in-country assets being seized or frozen.
Location Screening
Operationalise Geostrategy
Client: US-based Automotive Supplier
Challenge: The client needed to diversify their manufacturing operations, and turned to Gatehouse to screen potential locations for their expansion.
How Gatehouse Helped: Gatehouse delivered Geopolitical Screening Reports for eight potential expansion locations to cover 1) political outlook, 2) governance factors and 3) security outlook to the client COO, drawing on input from five Network experts including a former Mexican Ambassador to the United States.
Outcome: Client identified the two ideal manufacturing locations, removed three of five options due to geopolitical cost and disruption.
Exposure Review
Maintain Insight and Advantage
Client: Development Finance Multilateral
Challenge: The client turned to Gatehouse to analyse the risk of coup contagion in current and future investment locations in the Sahel and West Africa, focused on Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone.
How Gatehouse Helped: We consulted sixteen Gatehouse Network members including former Foreign and Energy Ministers of West African states and former US Intelligence Africa Lead.
Delivered strategic recommendations to the client’s Chief Risk Officer assessing each focus market’s coup vulnerability, security outlook and implications for business.
Outcome: CRO directed in-country teams for Gatehouse-identified ‘at risk’ markets to do a full exposure review.
Competence Review
Build Competence
Client: FTSE100 financial services
Challenge: The client turned to Gatehouse to enhance its internal capacity to assess geopolitical risk.
How Gatehouse Helped: We designed a framework for monitoring and public reporting of emerging risks, drawing on our internally developed tools and the Gatehouse team’s decades of public and private sector experience. Delivered to the client’s Board and Chief Risk Officer.
Outcome: Geopolitical input is now embedded in the client’s internal decision-making framework.