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Dear Customer, colleague, supplier, or someone thinking of joining us: read this page before you decide. Most companies will tell you what they do. Here we tell you what we believe, what it has cost us to keep believing it, and exactly what to expect from us once we walk the road together.— Niraj Gemawat, Founder, Chairman of the Board, Gateway Group

Our Belief
System

Values can be written, framed and forgotten. Beliefs are the sentences you fall back on when the decision is hard and there is no procedure for it. For twenty-nine years Gateway has run on the second kind.

There are TEN of them. They are not policies and they were never drafted. They are the lines we actually say to each other, in the words we actually use, and each one below is set out the same way: what we say, what it means, how it is practised, and what it has cost us to keep.

Be good, do good,
and good will happen.

Everything that follows is downstream of that sentence. It was said before there was a company to say it about, and it has not been amended since.

The Ten / in full

  1. IBurn the bridges.
  2. IIEveryone is a founder. Entrepreneurship is celebrated.
  3. IIITen a day, every day.
  4. IVThe customer comes before the margin, and before us.
  5. VWhen times are good, even donkeys can run.
  6. VIA promise made is a promise honoured.
  7. VIITogether, we dream the same dream.
  8. VIIIF = C · P = S
  9. IXOne roof, many households.
  10. XSuccess is rented, never owned.

First Tablet / I – V

How we build.

Five beliefs about the enterprise itself: how it is funded, who runs it, what it optimises for, and why it is built for the years everybody else calls bad.

I

Burn the bridges.

Commitment is only commitment when there is nothing to fall back on. In 1997, 8 weeks after completing MBA, the choice was made by our Founder without a fallback, without investors and without debt. That constraint was never a hardship we endured. It is the reason the group still answers to nobody.

In practice

  • No external investor in 29 years. No debt on the balance sheet.
  • Every new company is funded out of what the group already earns.
  • A venture gets approved with a number and an owner attached, or it does not get approved.

What it costs

Every deal we could have done with somebody else’s money, and did not.

II

Everyone is a founder. Entrepreneurship is celebrated.

We bet that the Entrepreneurial Spark sits in far more people than the world gives credit for, and that training strengthens what is already there. Curiosity sparks the idea. Discipline turns it into something that survives a P&L. We were founded by one entrepreneur. We are run by hundreds of them.

In practice

  • Real responsibility early, with the number attached to it.
  • Businesses are incubated from the inside and handed to people who grew up in them.
  • The org chart is inverted. It exists to serve the people doing the work.
  • We make room for people to grow past us. The team that is right today may not be right for tomorrow.

What it costs

We hand things over before we are comfortable. We hand them over anyway.

III

Ten a day, every day.

We would rather earn 10 every day for a 1000 days than 10000 in a day. Durable beats dramatic, in revenue and in everything else. It is why the finances stay conservative, the growth stays organic and the treasury gets tended rather than spent.

In practice

  • Debt-free by design. Growth funded from earnings, not from capital raised against a story.
  • We plan in three horizons at once: eighteen months, twelve months, six months.
  • Growth is grown, not bought, unless buying is genuinely the more honest route.

What it costs

We have watched louder companies overtake us for a year or two. We are still here.

IV

The customer comes before the margin, and before us.

The order matters, and it is not negotiable: the customer, then the work, then the margin, then us. Zero tolerance on quality follows from it. Any job, any client, every time, regardless of what the account is worth.

In practice

  • We consult before we sell. If the right answer is a smaller engagement, we say so.
  • Quality is not graded on the size of the account.
  • When we get it wrong we fix it at our cost, and we say who.

What it costs

Revenue we have walked away from, and margin we have handed back.

V

When times are good, even donkeys can run.

Anyone grows in a rising market. The hard years tell the donkeys from the horses, and the hard years are the ones we are built for. Debt-free, with no investors to answer to and a treasury tended carefully, a downturn is not something we only survive. It is when we consolidate, grow on our own earnings, and move on openings others are too exposed to take.

In practice

  • We hold capacity in reserve specifically for the years everybody else calls bad.
  • We hire and invest counter-cyclically.
  • We do not cut the parts of the business that take longest to rebuild.

What it costs

Carrying that reserve through the quiet years. It never looks efficient on a spreadsheet.

Second Tablet / VI – X

How we behave.

Five beliefs about the people. How a promise is treated, how a dream gets shared, how a disagreement ends, what the group owes a family, and why nobody here is allowed to feel safe.

VI

A promise made is a promise honoured.

The work carries your name, so the work is your reputation. A commitment made on a call in one country is a commitment the whole group keeps in another. Of the ten, this is the one we are least willing to discuss.

In practice

  • A date given is a date met, or renegotiated before it is missed rather than after.
  • Whoever made the promise owns it, wherever it lands.
  • Stress reveals character. You find out who people really are under pressure, not in the good times.

What it costs

We have absorbed the full cost of keeping promises we should have priced better.

VII

Together, we dream the same dream.

In the early years we could not afford to hire the best. What we had was a dream worth building and the willingness to share it, and that turned out to matter more. Ambitions are personal. Direction is shared. We put both on the table and argue until the dream belongs to everyone.

In practice

  • Personal ambition gets discussed openly, not managed around.
  • Wins are distributed deliberately, like everything else that matters.
  • The best thing a leader grows here is another leader.

What it costs

It is slower to align than to instruct. We align.

VIII

Frustrated, so you Communicate. And you communicate the Solution, not the Problem. It is the shorthand every team here uses, and it is the fastest culture change we ever made. Nobody arrives with a problem on its own.

In practice

  • Escalations arrive with a proposal attached.
  • We disagree openly, decide once, and walk out as one.
  • Speed over perfection. Momentum teaches faster than perfection ever will.

What it costs

We sometimes move on a good decision instead of waiting for the perfect one. We take that trade knowingly.

IX

One roof, many households.

Gateway runs like a joint family. Success is shared and so is duty. Fifteen countries, one culture: a handshake means the same thing in Zoetermeer as it does in Ahmedabad. And no work here is more important than your family. We cover for each other so those commitments get kept.

In practice

  • One culture, not fifteen local interpretations of one.
  • Decades in, colleagues become family friends. That is not a perk. It is the point.
  • Family commitments are covered for, not worked around.

What it costs

This is the one belief that has never cost us anything, and the one we would pay the most to keep.

X

Success is rented, never owned.

The rent falls due every morning. Twenty-nine years and forty companies do not carry us — what we built last year has to be earned again this year. So alertness here is a discipline rather than a mood: opportunity knocks quietly, and rarely twice. And a year in which every bet paid is a year we played too safe.

In practice

  • We assume the current model has a shelf life and go looking for its replacement.
  • Losses get examined in the open, and the person who took the risk is not the person who pays for it.
  • Eyes and ears open. Nobody here coasts on last year.

What it costs

A permanent, deliberate refusal to feel secure.

The proof

Beliefs are not proven in the good years.

This page would be dishonest without this part. We were tested, often by things we did not cause and could not have stopped. We took losses. Some of the tests had names. There were months when meeting salaries took everything we had, and the doubt came from inside as often as outside.

A belief is proven when honouring it costs you, and you honour it anyway. We know ours are real because they were tested, and they held.

  1. 01The dot-com winter
  2. 02An earthquake
  3. 03Floods
  4. 04Recession, and then recession again
  5. 05A pandemic
  6. 06The months salaries were met on pennies
  7. 07Doubt from every direction, inside and out

There is no eleventh

“A Rich Person is not the one who has the most.
It is the one who Needs the Least.”

Twenty-nine years in we are older and, we hope, wiser. The priorities have moved outward, from our desks to our families, our teams and the society around us. The numbers still matter. The people the numbers are for matter more.

So the last belief is the shortest. Spend time with people who matter. Play harder. Stay human. In the end it is our humanity, and all the potential inside us, that makes us beautiful.

Be happy.

If these read like your own sentences, you already belong here.

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