My former colleague, always a sharp advisor, offers a one-word recommendation: infrastructure.
I got to know Dominic McMullan when I worked at General Electric in New York and he had just joined GE Healthcare in London. I liked him immediately. He was smart, charming and had the kind of natural ease with people that makes for a very good communications adviser.
When I left GE, Dom moved to New York to take on the role I had just vacated. It was a good reason to keep in touch and we have stayed close ever since. When I left Goldman Sachs and joined Brunswick, Dom was a useful foil. I already knew Brunswick and respected the firm, but Dom—having been a client since leaving the firm—helped confirm my impression of it: it attracted thoughtful, polished, highly capable people who were also good company.
When I reached out recently to ask whether he might be interviewed for the Brunswick Review’s Alumni column, it felt like a chance to catch up with someone whose career I had followed with interest. Since leaving Brunswick in 2011, Dom has built a resumé that reflects the range and ambition that shaped his time with the firm. From GE, he went to WeWork, then BlackRock, and now to I Squared Capital, where he leads the firm’s communications and marketing efforts. Along the way, Dom, who holds a business degree from the Bristol UWE, has worked across a variety of geographies and sectors though always in roles that sit close to decision-making and reputation.
When we spoke, I thought I might ask whether there was a single thread running through those experiences. Having worked at firms where the influence of the founder was very present—WeWork, BlackRock, I Squared and Brunswick—that seemed like an obvious place to start. But after a few minutes of catching up, it became clear that Dom is passionate about his new role in the infrastructure industry. His role revolves around making the case for it: why it matters, why it is often overlooked and why communicating its value is harder than it should be.
That was fine with me. Infrastructure is not always treated as the most glamorous corner of finance, but it shapes daily life more directly than most people realize. And in an investment world often drawn to whatever is newest or noisiest, there is something appealing about a business built around assets that are tangible, essential and, when done well, broadly useful.
Do you feel as though your work for I Squared—perhaps like your previous work at BlackRock—seeks to advance a worthy cause?
I wish I could say yes without hesitation, but the honest answer is that I have the usual constellation of real-world obligations, so I can’t pretend that advancing a worthy cause is the single thing that drives me.
Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever taken a job on that premise. My previous role at BlackRock—while we fought the good fight in favor of an energy transition and the accompanying investment philosophy—wasn’t what attracted me to the role. And WeWork’s attempt to “elevate the world’s consciousness” was definitely not what drove me there either.
What I can say with absolute sincerity is that working with great people does drive me. There was no shortage of seriously smart operators at Brunswick, GE, BlackRock or at WeWork, and it was those teams that inspired me to try and create something similar at I Squared.
I should add that the infrastructure I Squared invests in—power grids, digital networks, water systems, transport—touches millions of people’s daily lives in ways that most of them never stop to think about. Therein lies my challenge: to humanize infrastructure investing, make it relatable, and in doing so, make it an obvious place that investors want to put their money. I think that’s a worthy cause and importantly it supports I Squared’s ambitions.
“For us at I Squared, the task is to humanize the infrastructure narrative, to tell stories that reconnect people to the physical systems that underpin their lives.”
Why is America generally opposed to the private funding of infrastructure? How do you, as a communicator, seek to overcome that opposition?
I came into this role knowing very little about infrastructure as an asset class, but I’ve quickly come to understand that it is one of those things everyone experiences and almost no one thinks about. You check a message on your phone, you turn on a tap, you flip a light switch, and none of it registers as infrastructure. It just works. Therein lies the communications challenge. Infrastructure is taken for granted. We need to help make the link between those everyday occurrences and the investments made by firms like I Squared.
I am no student of the history of infrastructure, but luckily my boss—and the Chairman of I Squared—Sadek Wahba published a book on this very topic soon after I arrived at the firm: Build: Investing in America’s Infrastructure. The Brunswick Review even covered it: The Investor with the Plan to Fix America’s Infrastructure.
It turns out that the opposition to private funding has deep roots. The New Deal and the post-war building boom hardwired into the American psyche the idea that infrastructure is something the government builds and the public uses—for free, or close to it. What tends to get forgotten is that before that era, private capital was the dominant source of infrastructure finance in the United States. The highways, the railways, much of the energy network—privately built, privately operated.
So part of the communications challenge is historical: reminding people that public ownership of infrastructure is a relatively recent convention, not an eternal truth.
The other part is more practical: helping people understand that high-quality infrastructure has a cost, and that cost has to come from somewhere. Whether it’s a toll, a utility bill or a water rate, private capital needs a return—and the alternative, in many cases, is crumbling public infrastructure.
For us at I Squared, the task is to humanize the infrastructure narrative, to tell stories that reconnect people to the physical systems that underpin their lives. That’s as much a brand challenge as it is a policy debate.
Is infrastructure generally a safe or risky investment? Are its returns competitive?
On a risk spectrum of alternative investments, infrastructure sits comfortably at the lower-risk end—long-duration assets, often regulated, with cash flows that tend to be relatively predictable. Within the asset class, though, there’s a wide range.
I Squared is probably towards the more opportunistic end of the infrastructure spectrum. We look at value-add and higher-growth situations, and we have a genuine orientation toward growth markets—which reflects, I think, the instincts and backgrounds of our founders.
What I can say, without straying into territory that would make our compliance team wince, is that the return profile is genuinely compelling for the right investor. You get an income component alongside capital growth potential, which is an unusual combination. For investors with long-term capital to deploy, that combination of yield and compounding equity return is very attractive.
Has geopolitical conflict and uncertainty affected the ability to win approval for infrastructure projects, or even start the conversation?
Undeniably. The current situation in the Middle East has injected a level of uncertainty into large capital commitments that simply wasn’t there before. Timelines have shifted, conversations have become more complex, and some processes have required more patience than we’d anticipated.
But deal flow and fundraising have not stopped. The fundamental need for infrastructure—especially in that part of the world—doesn’t disappear because the geopolitical environment is difficult. If anything, it intensifies. The disruption to Hormuz shipping lanes, for example, has crystallized for every government in the region how exposed their supply chains remain. Energy security, data sovereignty, food independence—these were already structural investment themes. The current environment has simply put them in sharper focus.
Some of the most interesting infrastructure opportunities right now exist precisely because of geopolitical complexity. The reset in supply chain thinking, the drive for economic sovereignty across GCC economies, the acceleration of renewable energy mandates—all of this is intensifying demand for exactly the kinds of projects in which we invest.
Geopolitical turbulence rarely kills conversations. It delays them, changes the terms, and requires more patience and creativity. For us, the response has been to double down on our presence in the region. We have an office in Abu Dhabi, and we’re opening one in Riyadh, a decision made not because of any news cycle, but because the structural opportunity in KSA is among the most compelling we see anywhere in the world. Our job right now is to be a reliable, patient partner as our counterparts navigate genuine complexity in their daily lives—and to be ready when conditions allow us to move.
Do people take pride in infrastructure that is privately funded and operated?
Not often enough—and I think that’s a communications failure as much as anything else. There’s an assumption that pride in public works requires public ownership. But I’m not sure that holds when you look at how people actually experience infrastructure. What people care about is whether it works, whether it’s reliable, whether it improves their lives.
We recently acquired a company called Entek, a battery manufacturer building a gigafactory in Terre Haute, Indiana. I Squared committed close to a billion dollars. The Department of Energy matched that with a billion of its own.
What it adds up to is a domestically sourced, strategically critical piece of the energy storage supply chain—jobs in Indiana, reduced dependence on foreign suppliers and a cutting-edge factory of which the community can be proud.
Nobody in Terre Haute cares who supplied the capital. What they care about is that the factory exists. I think that’s the model, public-private partnerships where the government provides the legitimacy and the private sector provides the speed, discipline and capital.
Notably, this deal started under the Biden administration and closed under Trump. Infrastructure is one of the rare places where that partnership can genuinely be bipartisan. In this day and age, these bipartisan success stories are few and far between and should be celebrated. That’s definitely a worthy cause.
Meet the authors
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Partner
New York
Andrew brings extensive financial situations, regulatory and media relations expertise from his career across both government and the banking sector.
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