A campaign is a machine that pretends to be a sentence. On the outside, it says elect me, fund this, stop that. On the inside, it is a nervous collection of press calls, volunteer shifts, graphics, filing dates, websites, text messages, donor lists, lawn signs and one printer who swears the truck left yesterday. The sentence gets remembered. The machine determines whether anybody hears it.
Agave Strategy lives inside that mismatch. Founded in Tempe in 2021 by Dawn Penich, Kate Tice and Charles Siler, the firm offers the sort of list that makes a neat agency category collapse: political consultation, crisis communications, press relations, websites, digital ads, grant writing, canvassing, listening sessions, translation, photography, Indigenous outreach, radio spots and mail programs. It is part communications shop, part field office, part borrowed back room.
The founders call this being a “force multiplier,” a phrase Penich and Siler knew from U.S. Army public affairs. In civilian campaign language, it means a modest organization can borrow capabilities it would never hire separately. A school-advocacy group does not need five new departments. It needs five kinds of work to happen by Friday.
The idea came from watching good ideas run out of Tuesday
Before Agave, Penich and Tice worked in Arizona education organizing, including Save Our Schools Arizona. Tice, once a music teacher, became the person behind websites, phone banks, texting and digital advertising. Penich had worked in strategic communications since an Army posting in 2001 and later became a familiar Arizona political commentator. Siler, also trained in Army public affairs, brought lobbying, fundraising and policy experience.
Their shared observation was less romantic than “change the world.” People attempting to change the world were exhausted. The same organizer was expected to be the idea person, tech support, grant writer, designer and speechwriter. In an early interview, Penich described watching groups fail to launch or fizzle because they lacked time and specialist skills. Agave’s original bet was that infrastructure could be rented.
The early proof was unusually concrete. Launch coverage in February 2022 said the young firm was already working with more than a dozen organizations and individuals. It reported more than $2 million in grants won for two clients and six figures’ worth of earned media for others. Named clients included the Arizona ACES Consortium, Morning Star Leaders and state legislative candidate Mitzi Epstein.
One shop, fewer seams
Most agencies organize themselves by medium. The ad people make ads. The field people knock doors. The publicists call reporters. Agave organizes around the client’s shortage. Its service menu connects the persuasive layer - narrative architecture, speeches, op-eds - to the delivery layer - printing, texting, social posting, event support - and then to the human layer of listening sessions, canvassing and coalition building.
The borrowed campaign department
That breadth is the difference. An Arizona candidate could otherwise assemble freelancers, a mail vendor, a web studio, a field consultant and a press adviser, then become the unpaid project manager connecting them. Agave sells professional services through projects and consulting arrangements. It does not publish a universal rate card. Public campaign-finance reports show what particular political clients paid, but those figures describe scoped engagements, not menu prices.
The customers are candidates and ballot committees, but also nonprofits, community groups, startups, businesses and public figures. The values filter is explicit: the firm describes itself as woman-owned, veteran-owned and queer-owned, and says it prioritizes progressive, anti-racist and pro-social work. Spanish-language and Indigenous community engagement appear on the service list as their own disciplines, not as a footnote marked “diverse audiences.”
The expensive lesson hiding in a mailbox
Then came the kind of failure that turns an abstract operations lecture into a number. In October 2022, the Maricopa County Democratic Party paid Agave $24,480 for roughly 100,000 campaign mailers. Agave used a subcontractor requested by a party official. The mailers did not go out. Documents presented as evidence of delivery were later challenged and reported as forged. The party received a refund the following January.
A separate allegation involved about $2,400 Agave said it paid the same subcontractor for 10,000 school-board campaign mailers that were not sent. The subcontractor was later charged; the case ended in 2025 after he completed a diversion program. His lawyer said he accepted the deal without admitting guilt.
Not the slogan. The handoff.
The useful lesson is painfully ordinary: a vendor said work moved, paperwork appeared to support that claim, and the physical product still did not arrive. The client’s loss was not just money. Political mail has an expiration date.
- Define proof of production before approving the job.
- Verify postal acceptance with the carrier, not only the vendor.
- Use milestone payments when deadlines cannot be recovered.
- Escalate exceptions while a campaign still has time to react.
This episode answers a question campaign biographies often avoid: what did the mistake cost? The disclosed answer is $24,480 on the main job, later refunded, plus the separate payment Agave reported. It also shows the limitation of a force multiplier. Adding outside capacity also adds interfaces. If accountability becomes fuzzy at those interfaces, multiplication works in the wrong direction.
A conversion worth studying
There is another kind of change embedded in Agave’s founding. Siler once worked in conservative and libertarian politics. According to the company’s account, he concluded that those politics no longer matched his values. He now uses what he learned about conservative organizing and policy success to advise groups resisting the erosion of public institutions.
That is a more interesting competitive asset than bipartisan wallpaper. It suggests that tactics are tools, not heirlooms. A message can be value-driven without being operationally sentimental. Agave’s founders came to progressive advocacy with military habits, fundraising metrics, digital dashboards and knowledge of how the other side builds durable power.
The market has noticed. State records show Agave doing communications work for Arizona for Abortion Access during the successful 2024 Proposition 139 effort. In 2026, Arizona Capitol Times credited Agave and HighGround with backing the winning Proposition 409 campaign, a nearly $900 million Maricopa County bond for behavioral health, hospital capacity and community health centers. The publication also nominated Agave for Best PR Firm and Penich for Best PR Person and Best Media Personality.
The part anyone can copy
Agave’s model is useful even if one never hires Agave. Begin by listing the work that must happen, not the titles normally found on an organization chart. Then find the seams: where does a message become a graphic, a graphic become an ad, an ad become a conversation, and a conversation become a vote or donation? Give one person ownership of every handoff. Finally, build verification into the plan before urgency makes trust feel like a substitute for evidence.
The approach suits groups with a clear mission, limited internal capacity and a willingness to let an outside team into the machinery. It is less useful for organizations that want only a commodity deliverable, cannot make decisions quickly, or need a consultant to invent convictions they do not possess. Agave can amplify a mission. The client still has to supply one.
That may be why “force multiplier” survives the trip from the Army to Tempe. The phrase does not promise magic. It assumes there is already force to multiply: people, purpose, local knowledge, a reason to show up. Agave’s work is to keep that force from leaking away through a forgotten grant, a neglected website, a silent press list - or a mailbox that never fills.