Negotient is two!
Today marks a singular personal and professional milestone – two years ago, on 19 January 2024, the Negotient partnership was registered at Companies House and Negotient was born. Negotient Founding Partner James Dowling reflects on the last couple of years - and looks ahead.
Negotient has five founding partners – Chris, Iain, David, Josh and me. We each inevitably have different (and common) reasons for getting involved with each other. But, like any great relationship, Negotient was a product of a shared interest (or vision) – and the opportunity to try to make it real. In the two years since, I have reflected that five people finding the life opportunity and shared vision to create a new venture might be relatively unusual – I am hugely lucky to be doing this with these talented, interesting, people.
Negotient was formed out of a shared interest in public policy and a conviction that the public and private sectors too often failed to agree deals which maximised the benefit for both sides – and the public at large.
The view that public-private deal making is often dysfunctional is not controversial (as, in the UK, the annual output of the Public Accounts Committee attests). And yet, despite a glut of professional advice of different types for the participants in any public-private negotiation, both sides still get it wrong too often.
My career to date has seen me rotate in and out of Government in different roles, but, immediately before Negotient, I was running a public affairs practice in an agency. My former firm was – and remains – a best-in-class outfit, with brilliant, insightful people doing great work. I loved working with them, but I often thought that lobbying or public affairs didn’t always on its own meet the need I saw. Yet firms too often defaulted to it because nothing else is there, and it’s what they know.
Where my professional experience emphasised lobbying, alternative advisers are available – some firms have historically retained lawyers or, in some cases, investment banks to help them negotiate with Government. But in each case, too often the danger is of confusing a single – very important – service line (law, financial modelling, stakeholder engagement/PR, etc) with the whole strategic context of the negotiation.
We saw an opportunity to bring a new offer to market – a negotiation consultancy specialising in public-private dealmaking. We built an offer focused on the central questions of strategy in any negotiation with a Government. To that end, we integrated negotiation methodology and experience, a very sophisticated understanding of what makes the public sector tick (particularly on matters of Government finance), and a set of analytical skills which allow us to translate that into tangible deal options – which we can then advise how to negotiate across the line.
And this offer, happily, seems to have resonated. We found our first client in April 2024 and things have moved extremely swiftly since. We now advise Governments and firms in the US, Latin America, the UK, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa – and in a very diverse range of sectors.
The challenges we face now are not so much about proving the offer, but applying it in new sectors and resourcing to meet that need. Our first employee, the brilliant Dare, joined us mid-last year – and has swiftly been followed by Miranda, Moira, Vicky and Steffi; we expect more to follow in short order. Looking into our third year, I expect to be recruiting at pace for the foreseeable future. Scaling a business while maintaining a consistently high quality of output and ensuring we remain a fun, interested and intellectually stimulating place to work is a significant challenge which will occupy a lot of my (and others’) time over the next few years.