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Frequently Asked Questions


What are your primary areas of expertise?

What is your track record with achieving clients’ goals?

If my organization is already actively advocating positions, why hire an outside consultant?

Does it matter to my organization’s advocacy efforts whether Democrats or Republicans control Congress or the White House?

For examples of some of our recent successes,
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Q: What are your primary areas of expertise?

A: Over decades of public service, we have developed a unique level of expertise in public safety, national security, international (and geopolitical) affairs, law enforcement, counternarcotics, and counterterrorism policy issues. Years of service in government and assisting non-profit and private sector clients in these sectors has produced a breadth and depth of knowledge that is hard to find in one place. More broadly, we are experts in both the administrative and legislative processes, parameters which often define outcomes. As result, we have successfully drawn on our deep “process knowledge” to help clients navigate the often hard-to-gauge distance between a hoped-for objective and a final outcome.

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Q: What is your track record with achieving clients’ goals?

A: We have grown consistently since our founding in 1999. In a world often content with drift and indefiniteness, we are more comfortable with creating specific strategies and timelines, achieving goals by working backwards from specific objectives, benchmarks and outcomes. Our growth is a testament to several unique attributes that characterize the firm, including narrow focus on specific areas of our expertise (we do not try to be everything to everyone), objective planning, the merit-based approach to public advocacy, uncommon single-mindedness and a determination to exceed client expectations. While nothing in Washington is guaranteed, our track record is one of offering top-shelf advice and regularly achieving positive policy, budgetary, and business outcomes for clients across a range of frequently complicated issue areas. Our growth has been based almost entirely on referrals from clients – another testament to the confidence our current clients have in our work.

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Q: If my organization is already actively advocating positions, why hire an outside consultant?

A: Carefully selecting a proven, highly respected and tightly focused consulting firm, one comfortable with benchmarks, outcomes and close integration with client hopes and objectives, provides the organization with both an independent viewpoint (often not available internally) and an individualized strategy reinforcing the approach already underway. This group offers a unique opportunity to widen the scope and nature of direct communications and impact on the policy process. Knowing how to coordinate multiple aspects of the process for a solution, policy evolution, management shift or eventual win is often a skill that, brought in temporarily from the outside, elevates the outcome for all. In short, a qualified outside perspective on your issues often provides invaluable insight and improves strategy, getting you closer to – or over – your goal line.

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Q: Does it matter to my organization’s advocacy efforts whether Democrats or Republicans control Congress or the White House?

A: In our view, usually not. We are experts in the process by which policy is made (largely unchanging from administration to administration and Congress to Congress). We are subject matter experts in areas generally viewed as non-partisan, namely national security, law enforcement, international affairs, counternarcotics and counter-terrorism. Accordingly, our efforts to advance clients’ interests do not change, regardless of who holds a majority in either chamber of Congress and which party holds the White House. We maintain bipartisan relationships across Capitol Hill and throughout the executive branch. If your interests are based on the merits of your mission, politics will shape the message but will not change the goal. We are experts in government process – the one constant amid changing political winds. Our ability to connect with the right people at the right time – regardless of their party affiliation – is one of the reasons we have been methodically relied on for merit-based results and sound advice for more than a decade.

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