Most organizations discover they need a government affairs strategy the same way: badly, and too late. The companies that handle government best are the ones who made the investment before anything was on fire.
Most organizations discover they need a government affairs strategy the same way: badly, and too late. A council member introduces a bill that would restructure how they operate. Or, a regulatory change they didn’t see coming suddenly becomes someone’s full-time emergency. And the first question anyone asks in those moments is: why didn’t we know about this?
The answer, almost always, is that they were waiting for a reason to pay attention. Government affairs felt like something for big companies, or industries that had always done it, or problems that hadn’t happened yet. Then “BOOM” — the problem happened.
We have been doing this work for 25 years, and we will tell you plainly: the companies that handle government the best are the ones who made the investment before anything was on fire.
What you actually lose by waiting
When you enter a legislative or regulatory fight late, you are not just behind. You are working against momentum that other people built while you weren’t in the room.
Relationships with decision-makers take time, and they cannot be rushed. A council member or agency official who has known your organization for years, who has seen you show up at hearings and community events and budget meetings: that person takes your call. They may not agree with you, but they will hear you out. Someone who calls for the first time because there is a crisis on the table gets a different kind of meeting, if they get one at all.
By the time most companies engage, other stakeholders have already made their case. The narrative around the issue has started to set. Positions that might have been movable a few months earlier are now commitments. You are not shaping the conversation; you are reacting to one that happened without you.
There is also the cost. Crisis-mode government affairs is expensive and erratic. You are paying premium rates for urgent access. You may get results, but you will pay more for worse outcomes than you would have if the groundwork existed ahead of time. That is not a sales pitch. It is just the math.
What a real government affairs program does
Hiring a lobbyist when you have a problem is not a government affairs strategy. It is a triage call.
A real program starts with knowing what is coming. That means tracking legislation and regulatory activity relevant to your business: not just the headline bills, but the amendments, the budget, the agency guidance documents that rarely make the news but absolutely affect operations. In DC, the legislative calendar, the budget cycle, and the agency process all run on their own timelines and have their own inflection points. If you do not know what those are, you are always catching up.
It also means building relationships before you need them to do any work. That is a longer game than most companies want to play, and we understand that. But a relationship with a council member’s chief of staff, developed over two years of regular engagement, is worth more in a contested moment than any amount of last-minute outreach. People help people they know.
Coalition work matters too, maybe more than most executives expect. A single company’s position reads as self-interest. That same position, when it is also the position of the local business association, two community organizations, and a trade group, reads differently. Building those coalitions before you have a specific fight means they are real by the time you need them, not hastily assembled and obvious.
And then there is how you communicate. What you say to a council committee is not what you say to your shareholders. What lands with a regulatory agency is not what lands in the press. A good government affairs program means knowing how to tell your story to each audience in a way that actually connects.
This applies to more industries than you think
Government affairs has a reputation as something that belongs to utilities, defense contractors, and pharmaceutical companies. That reputation is out of date.
Retailers deal with licensing, labor standards, zoning rules, and commercial regulations that vary block by block in some jurisdictions. Telecom and tech companies operate in a patchwork of data, infrastructure, and consumer protection rules that are actively evolving. Real estate developers live or die by approvals processes and relationships with planning officials. Insurers are one of the most regulated sectors in existence. Schools, including edtech companies, are deeply tied to procurement rules, funding decisions, and accreditation requirements that are made by people in government buildings, not the marketplace.
The honest version of this is: if government has the power to affect how your business operates, and it almost certainly does, then you have a government affairs interest whether you are actively managing it or not.
The timing question
Something we hear fairly often from prospective clients: “We’ve never really had to deal with government relations, so we figured we didn’t need it.”
Usually what they mean is that nothing has gone wrong yet. That is a different thing.
The policy environment does not stop moving because a company is not paying attention to it. Regulations change. Council priorities shift. A new administration comes in with a different set of concerns and relationships. The business that was fine under the old framework finds itself out of step with the new one, not because anything catastrophic happened, but because the ground moved and nobody was tracking it.
We are not going to tell you that every business needs a full-time government affairs operation or a large dedicated budget. That is not true, and it would not be honest advice. What we will say is that every business benefits from some level of deliberate engagement: knowing the landscape, having relationships that give you a window into what is developing, and being positioned to act before you are forced to.
AMC has spent 25 years building the kind of access and institutional knowledge that makes that possible for our clients. If you have been thinking about whether your organization needs this kind of support, or if you have not thought about it yet but have a feeling you probably should, we are worth talking to.
How We Help
American Management Corporation is a Washington, DC-based government relations and strategic advisory firm. We serve clients across retail, information technology, telecommunications, e-commerce, professional sports, real estate, education, and insurance.
To learn how AMC can support your organization’s government affairs needs, visit our website at www.amermgmt.com.