A state capitol can look rather different when your father works there. Andrew Blunt remembered visiting Missouri’s after hours and bouncing tennis balls off the rotunda. Before the legislative fights, campaign budgets and national office network, there was a boy discovering that a grand public building had recreational possibilities. The architecture may have deserved a more reverent audience. It got Andy.
His family had moved to Jefferson City after Roy Blunt became Missouri’s secretary of state. Andy ran track and cross country, became an Eagle Scout, and cared about his school friends. Traveling with his father’s congressional campaign while in college helped turn politics into his own interest. He later put the attraction plainly: “I like having the ball during crunch time.”
That appetite helps explain the career that followed. Blunt became a lobbyist, campaign strategist and company founder. But his recent reflections introduce a second ambition. Getting through the decisive moment is one satisfying task. Building a business that keeps functioning after the people who founded it leave is a longer assignment, with considerably fewer election-night balloons.
Five offices, then a bigger map
In 2018, Blunt and Gregg Hartley launched the firm originally called Husch Blackwell Strategies. Its ingredients were already working practices: the law firm’s government affairs operation, Statehouse Strategies and Cloakroom Advisors. Bringing them together joined statehouse work with a Washington practice. The founding idea gave the partners room to build across jurisdictions, rather than make every client assemble those pieces separately.
Blunt served as chief operating officer before becoming chief executive in January 2024, while remaining executive chairman. Hartley became COO. The appointments also gave Rochelle Mallett responsibility for state government affairs and Stacy McBride responsibility for federal government affairs. More offices required more people entrusted with decisions. A founder could enjoy the action without personally occupying every doorway.
By the time the partners announced independence from Husch Blackwell in 2025, they described a business that had grown from five offices in 2018 to thirteen, serving more than 400 clients. It became HB Strategies. The name shortened; the map had expanded. Blunt’s announcement thanked staff, clients, friends and family. A business built around relationships had reached a moment that could be measured in addresses.
The unglamorous work behind the introductions
Ask a lobbying executive about growth and you might expect a discussion of elections, committee assignments or an especially useful lunch. Blunt’s own account spends time on invoices, insurance, IT, contracts and proposals. He says the firm handles those administrative demands so its practitioners can concentrate on clients and relationships. Even a business devoted to government has to deal with its own paperwork.
His shorthand is “people, platform, and product.” Experienced colleagues come first. A national operation needs people who understand the particular places where they work. The platform supplies the organization around them. The product combines state and federal representation, public affairs and executive advice. These are ordinary management words applied to a profession often discussed as though its entire operating system were a telephone directory.
The interesting choice is what he gives his attention to. Removing administrative friction makes room for the work he hires people to do. It also suggests an answer to a founder’s familiar dilemma: how to grow without becoming the bottleneck. A busy executive can collect responsibilities with impressive speed. Passing some of them on, and making the handoff useful, requires another sort of discipline.
“people, platform, and product”
Andrew Blunt, on the firm’s approach to growth
Fifty states do not share one conversation
HBS 50 State, launched in June 2024, made the geographic logic explicit. Blunt, Mallett and managing principal Dusty Brighton were named as leaders of the service. It coordinates nationwide objectives through work with state lawmakers, regulators, governors and attorneys general. The pitch rests on combining a national view with people who can respond where an issue actually develops.
A national client may want a consistent result. Getting there can involve very different institutions, calendars and political priorities. That is the practical problem the service is designed to address. A map can make fifty states look like a tidy collection of adjacent shapes. Government affairs gives those shapes schedules, procedures and opinions. The map is the easy part.
For Blunt, this continues the state-focused work he did as COO. The unit puts coordination alongside local representation, with attention to both emerging problems and opportunities. Its launch also helps explain why the firm’s growth is about more than adding an office count. A broader network has to become usable for the client. Otherwise, expansion produces an impressive list of places to make another phone call.
When the family joins the firm
The Blunt name had a public life long before HB Strategies. Andy is the son of former U.S. Senator Roy Blunt and the brother of former Missouri Governor Matt Blunt. He earned his law degree at the University of Missouri in Columbia and undergraduate degrees at Southwest Baptist University. Family connections and professional training both belong in his story.
In April 2023, Roy joined HBS to chair its new Leadership Strategies Advisory Services group. Stacy McBride and Richard Eddings, veterans of his Senate operation, joined that advisory effort. The service was designed to help organizations understand government risk and opportunities across Washington, with advice shaped to the organization rather than a single narrow policy question.
The arrangement brought a familiar relationship into a formal business structure. Father and son now had different roles in the same firm: Roy leading an advisory practice, Andy subsequently becoming CEO. In this part of the story, the family connection is visible on the organization chart.
Back on the Capitol steps
On January 13, 2025, Blunt had another reason to be at Missouri’s Capitol. As chairman of Mike Kehoe’s inaugural committee, he delivered the welcome at the ceremony on the South Lawn. The public schedule placed that welcome at 11:30 a.m. Government’s ceremonial side comes with deadlines too, and occasionally a much more exact running order.
He had chaired the inauguration of his brother Matt in 2005. Two decades separated the assignments. His national business had grown in the intervening years, while the work of helping mark a Missouri governor’s arrival remained part of his public life. The photographs of Kehoe’s ceremony put him at the microphone, surrounded by dignitaries bundled against January.
There is a useful continuity here. Blunt’s career travels between corporate advice, political strategy and the rituals by which elected officials take office. The inaugural chairman’s task belongs to that last category: turning a change in administration into an event people can attend, follow and remember.
Still watching the next contest
The CEO’s desk has not ended his interest in elections. In March 2026, he released The Lines That Could Decide 2026, examining congressional redistricting activity in sixteen states. The report considered completed redraws and possible changes, with attention to the Supreme Court’s role. It captured a particular moment in a moving election cycle, rather than a permanent political map.
In July, HBS published another column from Blunt on campaign finance and the approaching midterms. The subjects fit the strategist’s task: examine the rules under which a contest will happen, then consider what they mean for the people trying to win it. Electoral politics has both a scoreboard and an instruction manual. The manual has a habit of receiving revisions.
Meanwhile, he continued building the team. Katie Boyd joined the public affairs practice in May 2026; Andrew Fisher joined the federal practice in June. Blunt’s comments emphasized Boyd’s ability to explain complex issues and Fisher’s experience with agricultural programs. The two appointments illustrate the range of work inside the firm: communicating a policy argument and understanding how a program operates.
A company with a life beyond Andy
Recognition has followed that work. Blunt appeared on The Hill’s 2025 Top Lobbyists list alongside HB Strategies colleagues Stacy McBride, Eric Lausten and Rocky Fox. The shared billing is fitting for an executive whose public account of the business keeps returning to the people doing it. Individual reputation matters in this profession; the firm has several reputations to put to work.
His own stated ambition now reaches past his tenure. In a reflection prompted by graduation season, he described the goal as to “build an enduring company.” He says he still gets to know every person who joins, whatever their role. He also describes spending more of his time recruiting, developing colleagues and creating opportunities for the next generation of leaders.
That is a demanding extension of his earlier taste for decisive moments. A campaign offers a date when the votes are counted. An enduring company offers no such convenient verdict. Its test continues in the next hire, the next leadership handoff and the next client relationship. Blunt still wants the ball when the pressure rises. He is also thinking about who will be ready to take it after him.