There is a particular sort of meeting that makes Washington seem simple. A company has a problem. A lawmaker has a calendar. A well-connected person puts the two together. The door closes, the pitch begins, and influence appears to have been reduced to real estate: who got into which room. FTP - the firm known until 2026 as Forbes Tate Partners - has a more interesting view. “A lot of folks can get you the meeting,” its own description of government relations says. “Knowing what to do with it is another story.”
That second story is FTP's business. The Washington, D.C. consultancy works for corporations, trade associations, coalitions, and nonprofits whose fortunes can turn on legislation, regulation, reputation, or all three at once. It fields lobbyists on Capitol Hill and before federal agencies. But it also writes messages, manages crises, recruits local validators, buys digital media, studies online conversation, organizes coalitions, tracks state politics, and builds dashboards meant to turn the daily policy torrent into something a client can act on.
The important word is together. A traditional lobbyist may know the committee staff. A communications shop may know the reporter. A digital agency may know the audience segment. FTP's wager is that a policy fight is usually lost in the gaps between them.
01 / The operating ideaOne decision, six routes into the room
Jeffrey Forbes and Dan Tate Jr. founded the firm in 2012 as a bipartisan government-relations practice. By 2013 and 2014 it had begun adding public affairs, research, digital strategy, and coalition work. That sequence matters. FTP did not discover a new industry and leave lobbying behind. It found that lobbying alone was too narrow for the way decisions were actually being made.
One objective
Imagine a manufacturer facing a regulation. The government-relations team maps the decision-makers and the procedural route. Researchers test how the issue is discussed. Communications people translate the technical case into language a journalist, employee, or mayor might repeat. Digital specialists find the relevant audiences. The field network recruits voices with local standing. The campaign then watches the reaction and adjusts. The product is not any single memo, ad, meeting, or coalition. It is the choreography.
“The goal isn't more information. It's better decisions.”FTP's description of its Signals research practice
02 / The first weak linkThe handoff was the thing to fix
The first failure in an integrated campaign is often mundane: the handoff. The lobbyist learns something that reaches the creative team late. The digital team sees an audience move but cannot quickly change the field plan. A supplier has the skill, yet sits outside the room where priorities are set. FTP's most revealing transaction was designed around precisely that problem.
For years, the firm worked with Engage, a Washington digital-media agency that supplied strategy, social expertise, media planning, and placement. Familiarity changed the risk calculation. In November 2022, FTP brought Engage and its 17 staff inside. Public filings value the deal at roughly $2.75 million: $1.925 million in cash and shares then valued at $825,000. It was less a blind acquisition than a marriage after a long courtship. The firm said the deal would capture the revenue and profit it had been sharing with a supplier, but the more operational benefit was speed - fewer seams between deciding on a strategy and putting it into market.
This also answers what changed their minds. FTP did not need a theory about whether integrated digital work could fit its culture; it had years of joint projects as evidence. The supplier relationship was the pilot. Acquisition was the decision to stop treating a proven capability as an attachment.
03 / Who pays, and for whatNo rate card for changing Washington
FTP does not publish prices. Its model is professional services: retained or project fees for lobbying, strategic counsel, communications, research, advertising, coalition work, and field programs. Federal lobbying reports expose one slice of that economics. Bloomberg Government calculated $26.3 million in federal lobbying revenue for 2024, compared with $8.6 million in 2014. Individual filings show recurring quarterly fees that vary by client and scope. They do not necessarily include the broader communications or campaign bill.
The customers are organizations for which public policy is not an abstract civics lesson. Public disclosures name businesses across pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, telecom, transportation, technology, and consumer goods. The problem might be a bill, an agency rule, a funding decision, a crisis, or a public argument hardening before a vote. That range puts FTP between several markets: K Street lobbying firms, law-firm policy practices, PR agencies, pollsters, grassroots organizers, and digital media shops.
Its competitive claim is not that those specialists are unnecessary. It is that managing them separately is expensive in time and coherence. The integrated model works when the issues are genuinely linked and the firm has enough authority to coordinate them. It is less useful when a client needs only a narrow legal opinion, a single media buy, or an independent poll whose credibility depends on distance from the campaign. Integration can also become groupthink if every signal is interpreted by the same team. The virtue of one table disappears when dissent never reaches it.
04 / The next instrumentAI enters as a dashboard, not an oracle
FTP's newer products make the same argument in software. Beltway Social follows more than 20,000 X accounts connected to Congress, the executive branch, NGOs, and other Washington players. Its 2026 Election Dashboard gathers polling, prediction markets, and candidate fundraising for major House and Senate races. A custom product called AIDE organizes bills, hearings, news, and market-moving events by issue. SCORE uses synthetic audiences to pressure-test messages and crisis scenarios.
There is a sensible restraint in how the company frames the tools. They are “force multipliers” for strategic judgment, not substitutes for it. That distinction is easy to dismiss as consultant language, but it is the whole point. A dashboard can reveal that a conversation is moving. It cannot decide which senator will regard the movement as permission, threat, or noise. The human work remains interpretation.
The same is true of FTP's 2026 rebrand. Forbes Tate Partners became FTP as Robert Mathias stepped into the managing-partner role and Jeffrey Forbes moved to Founding Partner and Chairman. The shorter name signaled breadth without pretending the company had been reborn. By then, the old founders' label described the origin better than the operating system.
05 / The portable lessonCopy the loop, not the Rolodex
Most readers cannot copy FTP's bipartisan relationships, and pretending otherwise would be motivational wallpaper. They can copy the design of the work. Start with the decision that must change. Identify every audience with power over it. Put research, message, distribution, credible messengers, and measurement on the same clock. Then create a feedback loop short enough to change the plan while it still matters.
None of this guarantees a policy win. Politics contains opponents, surprises, and fixed convictions. A coordinated campaign cannot create public support where there is none, and local voices borrowed at the last minute tend to sound borrowed. The model needs time, real evidence, permission to adjust, and a client willing to let its experts share information. Remove those conditions and the six-part machine becomes six invoices.
But when the conditions are right, the meeting really is the easy part. The difficult work begins before anyone walks in: deciding what the room should hear, building proof beyond the room, and noticing quickly when neither is working. FTP's evolution is the story of a lobbying firm arranging more and more of that work around one table. The door still matters. It just no longer explains the business.