I didn’t see firsthand how the K Street lobbying scene worked until the tail-end of my 30s and a little voice in my head said it was time to become an adult — or at least more of an adult.
I was having the time of my life going through a revolving door I understood and embraced: Capitol Hill communications director/speechwriting jobs and similarly focused Senate and gubernatorial campaign gigs via my own firm. It had never dawned on me that the insane amount of time required to be effective and remain in demand would eventually become unsustainable.
It wasn’t a matter of being physically unsustainable. If you were into this line of work — and had experienced firsthand the high cost of failure (poverty) — you did what was required to stay viable: pretty much jettison the concept of “free time.” Campaign-types know where I’m coming from.
Rather, it was more a matter of mental and psychological unsustainability.
Sitting in a Portland, Oregon senate campaign headquarters one Christmas Eve before catching a red eye back to D.C. for a couple of days — then heading back west New Year’s Day — it dawned on me that my entire professional life had revolved around other people’s’ schedules: those of politicians.
Where was my schedule?
Granted, this was an all-hands-on-deck special election to be decided in just weeks, with significant national implications. There was no place I’d rather be. But I’d spent plenty of holidays over the years in similar soulless strip-mall campaign headquarters. Depressing to most, the long stretch of adrenaline-fueled days and nights — and rush of professional satisfaction from helping shape what voters see and hear from your candidate in media reporting — easily outweighed any downsides.
But flying back east I was unsettled. What was I going to do longer term beyond just chasing the next big set of campaigns to bolster my portfolio?
I’d never looked beyond the next year or two to visualize a five to ten-year time horizon. And I couldn’t help noticing most of my DC political friends were staying inside the Beltway, going through a different revolving door — from Capitol Hill and the White House to K Street lobbying and advocacy work.
The very concept of becoming an anchored downtown fixture never appealed to me. Small talk at D.C. fundraisers and Hill receptions wasn’t in my skillset repertoire. And I had zero patience for the subtle social climbing, performative name dropping and transactional “hey buddy” bonhomie that passes for Beltway relationship-building.
Long story short, it took another four years for me to cycle-out of campaign work. For the sake of brevity, I’ll skip the details of a good friend’s generous financial offer to wave a magic wand transitioning me out of consulting for politicians to consulting for healthcare clients.
My first hurdle in making the leap was adjusting to the idea of there being no all-or-nothing Election Day to determine a clear winner and loser. I embraced the winner-take-all concept and accepted the all-or-nothing mindset: there was clarity, finality, and ultimate accountability.
This was a win — not a loss: Your issue is “Teed-Up” for the Next Congress
With lobbying, I’d noticed over the years that you can fall short in achieving a client’s legislative objective at the end of a congressional session and still position yourself as a winner, having achieved incremental success. The standard bromides: “We moved the ball closer to the goal line,” or, my favorite, “We’ve ‘teed up’ your issue for prioritization in the next Congress.”
Yeah, maybe so, maybe not. Meanwhile, of course, the client keeps paying. And if the client leaves, another is imminent. A bevy of prospective suitors are always waiting in the wings to have their stories told to the right lawmakers, staffers, regulators and media outlets.
My disregard for DC lobbyists who’d fly into a campaign for a fundraiser — then head out the next day while we proletariats remained to slug it out in the trenches — was deeply ingrained. I reserved special enmity for those who’d parachute into headquarters a week before it appeared we’d win a close race and do whatever necessary — maybe a few hours of “door to door” or “advance work” — to enhance access to the soon-to-be Election Night winner.
Yet, like most things in life, you get over it, and I did.
Past biases swept under the rug — and giving up my resistance to change — I became intrigued by the chance to participate in Washington goings-on from a new perspective.
But I wasn’t close to fully appreciating what I was really getting into.
My first big downtown meeting — with my first big healthcare client and a squad of lobbyists from big, name brand firms — was a reality check. It started out great: nice introduction, my bio was detailed, folks knew who I was, a few nods and smiles.
It was all downhill from there.
Within minutes, the discussion moved to a PowerPoint presentation about pending legislation sought by the client — a coalition of national nursing home conglomerates.
I heard words and peculiar phrases that sounded to me like “sniffs,” “urfs,” and “rugs” bandied about. Befuddled, I took unintelligible notes. A technical policy dialogue ensued about what I eventually learned were skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), commonly known as nursing homes; independent rehabilitation facilities (IRFs); and resource utilization groups (RUGs) — patient classification systems SNF’s utilize to determine Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates.
Arcane? Yes. Confusing? Big-time. I remained silent while the discussion consumed the entire hour. More importantly, my cartoonish impression of lobbyists was transformed in just sixty minutes.
These esoteric Medicare, Medicaid and regulatory details were a substantive sea change from the world I’d come from — where interpreting polling data, prepping oppo hits, writing news inserts for campaign speeches, and evaluating TV spot scripts were the coin of the realm.
No, I wasn’t totally helpless. I was conversant enough from Hill press secretary jobs to have gone on the record with reporters on Medicare budget matters. And the gubernatorial campaigns under my belt always involved state-specific healthcare issues like inadequate Medicaid reimbursements.
But possessing real depth on Medicare and Medicaid policy? Not even close. Moving forward, it would take several years to become confident and proficient in discussions like the one in that first meeting.
There’s a reason it’s frequently said lobbyists actually run Washington: They help draft much of the legislation before the Congress and help shape the regulations promulgated by federal agencies. Whether that’s a good thing is another discussion. But the bottom line is that the revolving door between lobbying firms and the legislative and executive branches is far more substantive than the revolving door between the Hill and campaigns to which I was accustomed.
Truth: If you don’t understand policy, you cannot be effective long-term
In political campaigns we create illusions, paint in broad strokes, and repeat slogans and attack lines until they become truths. In this DC corporate advocacy game, it was about objective policy details, hard and fast budget numbers, and employing statistics and language to affect business objectives.
I quickly grasped the reality this notion of “employing statistics and language to affect business objectives” wasn’t just the niche I needed to fill — it was the only one available to suit my skillsets in this new advocacy context. High-volume content creation and marketing would be foundational, and it was imperative to demonstrate value quickly.
Further, as an outside consultant and writer with my own firm — not part of a larger shop already at the table that would be more than happy to supplant my function and collect my fee with their own communications experts — it was equally important to demonstrate my competitive advantage.
If anything, campaigns teach you how to be a survivor: to live off the land and use the tools and skills you have at hand. As former Sec. of Defense Don Rumsfeld famously said, “You go to war with the army you have — not the army you might want.”
If I was slow to marshal my resources, perform, and adapt I’d be out. But that was okay — that’s the way it had always been.
To get my foothold, and eventually thrive in this new world, I had to completely re-engineer how I went about my workday, my time management, the nature of my content, and the strategy behind proving value and relevance.
The biggest shift was structural: transforming from a campaign “night person” who’d catch some sleep after 1 or 2 a.m. into a “day person” who woke up at 4:30 a.m. to get and stay ahead of the curve. You want your own business that remains successful for the long term? Be prepared for radical change to adapt to the marketplace at hand.